This last question has been a never-ending loop of self-inquisition for me, not just for the last six years I've been seriously writing, but for the twenty years since I first picked English as a major in undergrad. There are so many problems in the world that need addressing, and my life is passing by. I've had a small impact on a few things that maybe made the world better, but all in all, I don't know if I can really justify the resources the world put into making me who am I now when measured against what I've given it back. I believe stories have value and that they can make the world better. But how much better? And is it likely I personally will make the world better through stories?
As I was pondering whether a long-odds attempt for literary relevance is a good use of my remaining time on Earth, Literary Hub just posted an article about the role of fiction in addressing climate change. I think it was meant to be inspirational or enlightening, but it had the opposite effect on me. Climate change is obviously a massive threat to our species, and there aren't really many more critical issues in the world. So if fiction had a role to play for the better, you'd think it ought to have something to do with climate change.
The article is basically a couple of paragraphs of introduction followed by one or two paragraph statements from a number of writers who've recently created literary fiction with climate change as a major element. Here are the five main moments of this article for me:
1) "...smart policy is needed as much as great art" -from the introduction:
In reality, one drop of good policy is worth an ocean of great art, and an ocean of great art is worthless without good policy. They're not equals.
2) Two writers noted that the main thing fiction does well is create empathy, and this might be a way to engage people to do something about climate change. First, empathy might move those who aren't immediately affected to care about those who are. Secondly, empathy might motivate everyone to care more about the world that stands to be lost.
That's true; creating empathy might be what fiction does best, its most redeeming characteristic. But if I'm being honest, I feel a lot more empathy for the species being wiped out when I watch a nature documentary than I do reading a story. Only the best of the genre, like Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence," can create that level of feeling for another species in me.
3) But even if I do feel empathy, so what? One writer wrote rather anemically that "The fact that we can’t put out the fires and lower the seas with words or pictures or music doesn’t mean we’re off the hook for trying." But how is trying to create empathy really trying to save the world? As fate had it, I also just read an article from the Atlantic about Just, a company trying to master lab-grown meat (or, as they would have it, "cultured meat"). If successful, it would eliminate the suffering of millions of mass-grown animals. But the CEO of Just understands that the company's future isn't in satisfying people like me, the guilty carnivores who fail through on-again, off-again vegetarian periods. As CEO Josh Tetrick aptly put it:
“I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, so imagine one of my friends who doesn’t care about any of the shit that I’m doing now,” he said, while perched on a bar stool in front of Just’s test kitchen. This hypothetical friend goes to a Piggly Wiggly to buy burgers. Except—oh wait!—next to the animal-based patties wrapped in clear plastic, he sees a Just burger patty for less money. “That, to me, is what it’s gonna take in order to break the dam of a habit,” Tetrick said.
In other words, without giving a damn about the welfare of animals at all but by just applying good science and business principles to a problem, Just and companies like it might do more for animal welfare than all the activism in the world has ever done.
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| The article said this company also makes plant-based eggs, which are available at the Silver Diner, a restaurant in my area. I intend to try them soon. |
4) "One hard lesson I’ve learned from my fifteen years as a community organizer is that changing the minds of our enemies is less important than giving hope and power to our friends. I’m not writing for the people who are against us. I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to convince people with great art—other writers might legitimately feel like the role of fiction in the climate change fight is to convince the skeptical—but that’s not my priority." -Sam Miller
What did I draw from that? It merely reinforced for the millionth time how similar the literary community is to the evangelical Christian churches I once attended. "Do I focus on evangelism or on discipleship?" is the Christian version of this issue Miller is addressing. And right now, "if they don't get it, then let God deal with them" is a pretty ubiquitous stance among literary folks. This has made literary gatherings feel fairly insular to me, and even the attempts at whatever the liberal political and literary version of evangelism is seem rather lame.
5) "I doubt that many people in power are poring over speculative literary fiction for inspiration to enact climate change policy. But they should be." -Helen Phillips
Yeah, but the thing is, they don't. Maybe they should be, but they don't. And I have to think that if people have to be shamed to read literary fiction, the fault can't entirely be with the people who don't want to read it.
Yes, fiction can be powerful. In the mosaic of intellectual tiles that have made up who I am, a couple of stories are among the most important pieces. But if fewer and fewer people are going to read what I would call serious fiction, fiction that has the power to be transformative, then the possible space to find a wide enough audience to make fiction matter is shrinking. The odds that fiction will be a useful endeavor--by which I mean an endeavor that makes life better for others--is small. It might be small enough that it just doesn't make sense to keep doing.
Or maybe I'll keep going. But this article wasn't the help it meant to be.
one of the toughest things about growing up is coming to terms with merely being ordinary.
ReplyDeleteI used to think that was a reassuring truth. It's how The Hobbit ends. "You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!" Gandalf tells Bilbo. Bilbo's response, "Thank Goodness!"was how I felt about it for a long time. It was enough to do my little bit. But the longer I'm around, the sadder it seems to me to just have a bit role in a much bigger play. That's almost certainly just ego getting the better of me, but it's a feeling I have more and more these days.
Deletethe sad thing is to be observant enough to know this, but insufficiently skilled to do anything about it: one ends up envying those who lack all self-awareness.
DeleteI came to the conclusion a long time ago that climate change isn't one of the problems that novelists can play a big part in solving. A non-fiction book on climate change is much more persuasive. Some problems are like that. Which novelists played a big role in stopping Nazism? That was for politicians and generals to solve. Other problems are more amenable to a literary approach, if social change that's what a writer is after. There are many great novels that helped changed attitudes about Antisemitism, for example.
ReplyDeleteGood points Scott .
DeleteWhen I was first dealing with "is writing really a worthwhile enterprise in a world full of problems" type questions, I voiced those thoughts in a workshop in grad school. One of the poets in there got very angry with me. She pointed to a campaign that people around the world had been a part of, where millions of people wrote letters objecting to a woman who was about to be stoned in Saudi Arabia for adultery. As I recall, the stoning did not happen. I asked her whether any of the people who had changed their minds had done so because they'd read a poem. I got no answer, but of course the answer was no. People bowed to political pressure. As you say, literature isn't the right answer to every problem.
DeleteThat's not to say it's not an answer at all or that it doesn't have an important role to play in the ecology of our species, but it probably isn't as powerful as writers sometimes like to say it is.
We are the world.
DeleteJacob, don't give up, yet. I coined the clifi term for you. Write that novel. I will read it. See cli-fi.net
ReplyDeleteSadly, I doubt you will read it. I can't get the novel published that I wrote about a subject millions of people care about that I know better than any novelist in Western history. So I doubt I can get a cli-fi novel published when I'm not a scientist.
DeleteWe are already in the Sixth Great Extinction Event, which will kill us all before too much longer; no books, no readers! I've shifted my focus to more personally important endeavors, like preparing for how to minimize suffering, my own and my loved ones, during these imminent times. On Facebook, you can find near-term-human-extinction closed groups, where folks, including artists and writers, are grappling with how to spend the rest of our lives. Cheers.
ReplyDeleteI'm unable to embrace that level of despair. We haven't lost until it's actually gone. All gone. Until then, I think art has to at least concern itself somewhat with how we save the world, not just how to eulogize what we've lost.
DeleteThat being said, about half of my top ten favorite novels are Vonnegut books that mostly end with eulogizing the end of the world, humanity, or both.