The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way the world parties. The Zoom party may have replaced the house party, but recently, the immunologist, Paul Lehner, proposed “coronavirus parties” — similar to pox parties of the 1970s and 1980s — for young people to be infected with Covid-19 so as to gain immunity from the virus.

We usually think of the festive as a means of celebration and of strengthening social life. But a party can just as easily turn us against one another — the pandemic has introduced many new character species, including ‘the selfish partygoer’ who ignores advice to socially distance, thus risking himself and others.

Writers — not all of them are sociophobes — have used parties to introduce conflict to their plots, illustrate character, and pose questions throughout literary history. From the Satyricon to The Great Gatsby, fiction shows how parties can be incubators of social, ethical as well as biological pathogens.

For example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, an unexpected contagion at a masquerade taps into 19th-century anxieties linking medical and social pathogens. Poe’s use of the masquerade — a symbol of irrationality, foolishness and corruption — connects contagion with vacuous pleasure. The parties in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies are as insubstantial and hardly pleasurable — they waste time, effort, money and, occasionally, lead to loss of life. Waugh thought the “succession and repetition” of parties show that what should be special occasions are instead routine, banal and “sick-making”.

More recently, Ling Ma’s Severance portrays the outbreak of a global pandemic. The narrator, Candace Chen, attends an impromptu party at her colleague’s apartment. Candace uses the symptoms of the outbreak as the basis for striking up conversations with strangers, explicitly linking the social with the pathological. She ends up coming in contact with someone who is indeed infected. The idea of the party as disease shapes Poe, Waugh, and Ma’s narratives, pointing to anxieties about social life itself being potentially pathological.