INVOKE AND SURVIVE

Continuing the theme of the role of literature, if it has one, in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe:

A work of imagination shares with a living creature or the ecosystem itself the characteristic of not being reducible to its parts, or explicable in terms of the technique of its manufacture. It cannot be exhausted by analysis. It is a system of interrelationships which, since it extends far beyond the words on the page, engages with everything else in the reader's conscious and unconscious experience, and is therefore virtually infinite.

The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes by Keith Sagar

This seems to me a rather hopeful prescription, rather than a description of an art-form, however sympathetic I am towards it. When it comes to literature, so much depends on how you read, or listen. How have you been trained? What prejudices, expectations, paradigms, what baggage do you bring to the work? How open are you to being shaped by it? Can you see the intention behind the words? It assumes that one does not read for entertainment, for a vicarious thrill which ends as soon as you put the book away. Instead one exposes oneself to it - there is an element of risk.

One other point - I'm not alone in having had times when I've been ill or depressed, and it's been story which has helped to carry me. Story as a means of healing, of restoration. That too is a use of literacy. There's a line of Sam Neill's to that effect in Until the End of the World, but it took me years to appreciate it. Hughes, of course, drew extensively on myth forms and saw his own role as shamanistic.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

I didn't enjoy the second volume of Anthony Burgess's memoirs, You've Had Your Time, as much as the first, but there are many memorable stories, and these lines, right at the end, made an impact:

Milan Kundera defines a European as one who is nostalgic for Europe, and he is probably right. Evelyn Waugh's words about the dismemberment of Christendom refer, proleptically, to that nostalgia. If, living out of Great Britain for more than twenty years, I have become a paying guest of Europe rather than a European, it is the better to indulge the soft-centred dream of belonging to a culture that I do not wish to believe is dead...

That identification of nostalgia may well be right - I know I look back more than forwards, and read very little modern fiction, though my defence is that it simply hasn't yet proved itself. By which I don't mean that not enough people have come to the opinion that a given work is a classic over a long enough period of time, though I admit to being as easily-led as the next fella. More that the contribution that any particular work has to give to the dream-life of the nation, the continent, the culture, has to be given time to work.

Literature is, for want of a better phrase, a big conversation, and by reading, writing and thinking, we take part in it. I was very pleased indeed to read recently that Borges thought of it in the same way - a conversation going back and forth in time.

However, when seen in the context of the whole of human history, that conversation is terribly young, even assuming a starting point with the ancient Greeks, and it is now under a greater threat than that of mass philistinism. There are any number of books at the moment telling us that we are in deep, deep trouble, and from previous examples of civilization-collapse it seems that we are virtually programmed to create progress traps and then walk into them. I can't recommend too highly Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress for an account of this, though Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World covered this ground first, and Jared Diamond's Collapse does the same at greater length.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books Susan Sontag was said to have wanted to spend more time trying to write a novel, because she believed the novel to be more relevant, more immediate and more necessary than politics or history. Well, from a certain perspective. The meme survives where an individual human will not, but it won't survive species extinction.

It's not that the conversation of our European civilization is not important, or not beautiful, or not great, but it is just far smaller than those of us who still partake think it is. I'm not optimistic.

TOCSIN

I hope that [Other Men's Flowers] may continue to give some pleasure and afford some help in these difficult days. I have a great belief in the inspiration of poetry towards courage and vision and in its driving power. And we want all the courage and vision at our command, in days of crisis when our future prosperity and greatness hangs in the balance.

- A. P. Wavell, April 1947 introduction to Other Men's Flowers, originally published March 1944.

I've been wondering what the uses of literacy will be, in the coming global environmental catastrophe, and I suspect we will see a return to poetry, song, the story, the fable, myth - those creations which are portable, condensed, and above all, can be transmitted orally. I've always said that when it comes to books you need to be ready to burn them for fuel if you have to, and indeed, we may have to.