Writing about disasters – the fall of the World Trade Centres, tsunamis, holocausts – seems logical. Surely the impulse to write about such events (‘event’ seems so meagre, inappropriate), the desire to set a narrative in and around one, is strong. But it is scary, so fixed in time, as though with a pin.
Is it approached with fear? Being so set in a time, so a part of something. Surely there is a fear of being overshadowed by the reality, cast off, spat out. Because others will write too. Others will write grander narratives. Not grand in Lyotard’s defintion. Grand as in big, as big as the disaster. They will write the event’s story, real stories. What of the WTC attacks will be left in 50 years time? 100 years? What literature – and whose – will inform us?
Perhaps it is to understand, to dismantle and study and understand. Perhaps. But I know a few writers. I imagine a circle of them standing shoulder to shoulder around the debris, all thinking the same thing. All the same neural synapses sparking, the stories whipping up in their brains and all feeling the same mix of fear and excitment.
The fear gets most. It will get me. I’m not big enough. I will run from a tsunami. When the levees break, I will run like fuck and, I’m sorry, not look back. Not for that. I won’t return and use my foot to turn over rocks. But some, more than a few, less than a lot, will listen to the excitement and tell the story of disaster. Or, more correctly, use disaster to tell one of theirs.
LI
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I can’t speak for you in Australia, but over in the UK no one wants to consider any big ideas in literature (unlike say the French or the Russians who have a rather good and proud tradition). Nor do we like to broach politics within our novels as perhaps being bad form (the Americans have a whole slew of interesting political novels). And finally and maybe most dispiritingly over here, such are people’s wiredrawn sensitivities, that they would rather read escapist literature than books which try and engage the reader with the world and get to see it in a new light.
America has produced several meritorious books facing up to 9/11. Britain has not mentioned 7/7, admittedly a far smaller event, but a landmark one all the same for being homegrown suicide bombers and all that entails. I have written a book on it, but predictably enough no takers. An agent said he really liked it, but couldn’t imagine for one minute how he would sell it…
The disasters you mention are all about ruination. There is a poetics to be had from decay and destruction. A human scale apocalypse, but one replete with images for writers to construct. For example, whenever a house is destroyed by air attack, I am always struck by the electric cabling no longer immured behind the plater of a wall. Instead it splays out, like jungle vines, suggestive of the way jungles reclaimed the Inca cities and Angkhor Wat in Cambodia. There is plenty of material here. It is just a case of balancing the human scale with the ineffably larger one of ruination.
I think you miss one of the main emotional impediments to this sort of writing and that is guilt – I look at these things these events and the stories form in my mind and I feel sick.
I feel like I am using them – using the situation – even writing about my own experiences of the UK bombings made me feel bad.
The other thing is – I started off trying to write stuff like this either correct in History or take the concept and put it in some social scifi setting but everyone I showed it to complained – its so depressing etc…
I feel personally that it is important that the dark bits make it into stories or are even the focus – if they are hidden away then the patterns that perpetrated the events will not be recognised in future.
However I have met alot of writers who think that you should only aim to ‘heel’ or make people feel better with your writing – writing groups are often horrified that I don’t always have happy ending or that I leave things ambiguous but the would is not set in boxes like this so why should the stories that represent various aspects of it be any different?
Marc – Spot on and informative as usual. Australian literature has very English sensibilities. Australian literature also has to be distinctly Australian – as though we still don’t have our own identity. Either way, big ideas are rarely a part of this.
I have no doubt that poetics can be found, and a lot can be said about ‘the human condition’ through disaster. After all, it is a disaster – screaming, suffering humans whose humanity has been stripped away. There is huge power in that.
That is, to me, hugely overwhelming.
Sarah – For me, I’d say guilt is part of a larger feeling of being too small, of the event being too large and, frankly, too hard.
In my work, I have mentioned world events as sign posts of time and era and world attitudes. But they offer nothing beyond giving a context. Even so, just mentioning them felt incredibly powerful.
I wouldn’t be put off by a handful of readers thinking your writing is depressing – disasters usually are, unfortunately. It links back to what Marc said, “Such are people’s wiredrawn sensitivities, that they would rather read escapist literature.” But there are those who don’t – write for them.