Jane Rawson

This is an edited version of a presentation I gave in early 2020 at Wild Island in Hobart, where Ben Walter and I both attempted to answer the question above.

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Is this a question bakers ever ask themselves: why make bread when the world is ending? Do used-car salesfolk, or banking business analysts, or tour managers? Writers are singularly obsessed with portraying their art and work as a waste of time and a moral failing, even though its negatives, environment-wise, are almost non-existent. The footprint of writing a book is approximately equivalent to sitting around doing absolutely nothing, which is largely what writing a book involves. Considering most books written are never published and never consume or waste resources, it should be a completely guilt-free undertaking. But we still convince ourselves we should be doing more, that somehow our talents if we have them should be used elsewhere or, if we have no talent, that we should chuck in the writing and instead chain ourselves to a tree. When a baker opens the oven door and sees her bagels are less than perfect, does she ask herself why she didn’t join the Stop Adani Convoy instead? No: she starts another batch of bagels and vows to bake better.

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As far as I’m concerned, the fact that the vast majority of books have no negative effect – have, in fact, no effect at all – should be enough to justify writing. But let’s assume you don’t accept that, and that you demand writing books has a positive effect on the state of the world if it’s to continue at all. What evidence can we find that books make the world a better place? Is there anything that can justify Ben and I frittering our hours away on writing? Can books make a difference?

You might have heard that science has shown that people who read literature have more empathy, are better people, kinder, than those who read thrillers, romance or sci-fi, or those who read no fiction at all. That is surely a good reason to write books, even when the world is ending: if reading them makes the world a kinder place.

Let’s look a little closer.

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This claim is based on two studies, both of which use the ‘Reading the mind in the eyes’ test. In this test, people look at photographs of actors’ eyes and say what the actor is thinking – they get four states of mind to choose from. The test asks how well you can guess another’s state of mind.

So to literature. The first of the ‘empathy and literature’ studies showed that people given a literary short story to read fared better on the ‘Reading the mind in the eyes’ test than those who read a ‘genre’ short story. The second study asked people to choose, from a list, the names of any authors they recognised – those who recognised more literary authors were better at the test than those who recognised a genre author’s name.

In summary, people who have heard of John Updike at some point are better at guessing whether an actor is angry than people who recognise Ursula le Guin’s name on a list. It’s compelling stuff, made even more compelling by the fact that no subsequent research team has been able to replicate the findings.

Let’s accept then that there is no evidence books do anything to increase readers’ empathy – and certainly no evidence to suggest books make readers better people. So what are they good for?

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I believe that books are a source of comfort in terrible times. One of the worst aspects of the climate catastrophe and ecocide – at least for people like me who aren’t yet directly affected – is the feeling of being a screaming lunatic in a world of calm and reasonable people. Talking about the deaths of gorillas when people just want to buy a nice new Samsung Note tablet, or leaving a rich and rewarding life in Melbourne to escape the coming catastrophic heat island effect can really lose you friends. Reading books where other people are aware of the situation the world is in can help a reader like me feel like they’re not alone. Writing about these issues is a mental health service for others.

In her recent Goldsmith’s lecture, ‘Why the novel matters’, Eimear McBride said

“[The novel’s] importance lies in its ability to understand and communicate the infinite loneliness of the individual experiencing their world change in an instant and realising that it will never change back …  It speaks to my anxieties about the direction the world is taking, my feelings of powerlessness within it and to my only surviving hope which, ironically, is exactly the same as my fear: that eventually and inevitably, everything must change.”

Books are also a record of a time and place – an elegy – an insight into what people were thinking and doing. Novels are a historical document because they don’t just tell about the physical aspects of a society, but its emotional and ideological aspects as well. When I write, I’m leaving a record for the future of who we are and why we behaved this way.

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But even if my writing doesn’t get published, or my published writing doesn’t survive, writing is still the best way I have of working through my own thoughts, ideas and feelings about my role in climate change and ecocide, about what I might do, about what I want all of us to do. Writing untangles my brain and makes me functional and available for other activism. It helps me figure out where I want to direct my energy.

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As far as I can tell, novels that set out to change people’s behaviour rarely succeed. Novels aren’t like campaign emails, with a clear threat, solution and call to action; they’re unlikely to make people donate money or glue themselves to a road. But I do think novels can broaden and shift readers’ conception of the world and their place (and responsibilities) in it. The picture above here shows some books that I think have changed me as a person [Slaughterhouse V; Middlemarch; Gilead; Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; the Swan Book; Infinite jest]. They’ve skewed my view of the world, opened cracks in what I thought I knew, shown me how weird things can be and how open they are to change, and educated me on the work necessary to be a moral, ethical person, and on some ways to go about it.

As Barry Lopez, the nature writer, says in his recent memoir ‘Horizon’,

‘What act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate? One can choose … to step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world, accepting its requirement for death but working still to lessen the degree of cruelty and to increase the reach of justice in every quarter.’

When I set about writing a novel, this is what I set out to do.

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These are three of my books – two novels and a non-fiction guide to surviving climate change.

A wrong turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is set in Melbourne in 2030. It’s hot too often. The rivers flood, a lot. Transport infrastructure is flaky; so is power and water. There are a lot more poor people than now, and more arriving or becoming poor all the time. I wanted to help people imagine a possible future. But I also created a world where imagined things have begun seeping into the real world – I wanted to talk about how powerful our minds can be in creating a future or getting fruitlessly lost in the past.

In From the Wreck, a shipwreck survivor meets an alien shape shifter in 1860s Port Adelaide, and everyone gets hurt and confused. It’s a book about how humans refuse to recognise the personhood of other species, about how we make aliens out of our closest relatives and punish them for their strangeness, it’s about how we only ever consider ourselves. It suggests that more openness and acceptance might take a huge weight off our shoulders and help us make a world we will love to live in.

And this is The Handbook, a non-fiction guide to surviving climate change. Which of them has done more good in a world that is ending? There’s no way to know, though the novels have certainly sold more copies…

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Eimear McBride again

“The novel matters not because it is a comfort – although perhaps sometimes it is. Not because it assures us that we are not alone – although we may sometimes find that welcome knowledge there too. Not because it inspires us to be better versions of ourselves – although I can think of a few people I wish would crack open their George Eliot a little more regularly. It matters because in a world ever increasingly bounded by imperatives handed down by others about acceptable ways to think and speak and live and be, the novel, and the journey we take with it between its covers, allows us to be free.” 

When the world is ending, perhaps the most important thing we can do is try to imagine new worlds, different worlds. Or as great Tasmanian musician Costume once tweeted, ‘In a culture that actively works to alienate you through fear and desire, the best response is to create your own world to belong in’.