World’s End
Literature At The Edge of Armageddon
What’s the point of literature at the end of the world? It’s a fair question. We’re all writing and reading books (and criticism) against a backdrop of climate death, stochastic terrorism, societal decay, and medical, scientific, and political collapse. Life is a fucking inferno.
So, can books prevent or reverse or explain these cataclysms? We need to tackle this question as writers and readers. Why are you reading while the world burns?
There are no easy answers.
David Kirby once wrote that literature “does not reflect American life so much as it refracts it, concentrating the diffuse light of daily existence into the concentrated radiance of art.” He was talking about the American novel (What Is a Book?), but that’s a good definition for all forms of literature from around the world—memoir, poetry, journalism, biographies, histories, short stories, faerie tales, whatever. This definition imposes no limits on form or style; it keeps freedom, choice, and creativity as a priority, and it doesn’t straightjacket by genre. It allows flexibility. Subjectivity. Readers’ experiences are so personal. Writers’ too. Any definition of literature needs to respect that.
So, books are a prism and the world is the light. What does that mean when the world’s on fire?
This could mean literal Ragnarök, but again I like a broader definition for the End of the World. Worlds are always ending. Lapsarianism is a fallacy. The world’s not ending just once; the world ends every day, thousands of times a day. Every human death is a tiny apocalypse. Relationships break apart and reform. At times the Apocalypse is society-wide, and at others it’s intimate. I love to read but I don’t think books have much power over this cycle of creative destruction and rebirth. Literature is not a physical force like that. Also, it doesn’t need a reason to exist—that’s reducing literature to a tool or a fulcrum. Sure, a book is a physical object. Books are a souvenir of the journey they took you on; they’re also an exchange between writer and reader (“a kind of midair transfer of strength,” wrote Michael Chabon). But literature owes you nothing. No need has it to awaken in your heart some lost empathy; it needn’t educate you, entice you, change you, reshape you, calm you. We know books can do these things, but we shouldn’t conflate effect with purpose.
Maybe a particular book could translate into a political force that reshapes or reverses calamity and stops the fall of humankind—but I doubt it. Literature wears out fast when it’s a Trojan horse for didactic politics—see the have-not saints in The Grapes of Wrath or the meatpacking workers in The Jungle. Ditto Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The moral dilemma in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is so simple it’s hilarious. That doesn’t make it a bad book; these books, and many more like them, are great. Those titles exploded hearts during their day and age. They changed minds. Ignited debate. Woke people up. Yet you can’t predict what political books will catch fire in the public consciousness; at the same time, the heat of all culture is diminished because there’s so much of it. And once those ideas get into the culture, and become accepted by the mainstream, the literature that carried them feels dead. Literature focusing only on didactic politics—as opposed to exploring inclusive humanity and human relationships—risks becoming a childish morality play.
Books are quiet. They can be transgressive, wild, yes. But I’m not sure we can ask them to do anything about these world-shattering problems—these catastrophes—we’re facing in the twenty-first century. Humanity must find its way toward solutions on its own. Maybe literature can illuminate the problems, though. It can change the way we see the world we’re living in. That’s why I read. Even in the darkest times. I want to see the light of the world’s end refracted into the concentrated radiance of art. I want to see that light broken apart into colors and painted into surprising and meaningful shapes. Through that experience, I’m transformed when I read. An artistic expression of concentrated radiance gives me a way to understand things. I am more clear-eyed about myself, the world, and our perceptions, and the people I trust, fear, hate, and love.
Literature is personal. You can hand someone a book that changed your life and have them discard it entirely. Maybe they’ll feel nothing. That’s what I mean when I say books can’t change the world. The experience of reading is too idiosyncratic. And some books we read and cast away ourselves because they don’t affect us. But some books do. That’s the answer for me. Maybe we shouldn’t conflate effect with purpose, and we shouldn’t expect vast and far-reaching changes in society from a single work of literature, even if that has happened and will happen again. Yet we can’t deny some books do change us. They reshape our hearts in an unexpected and individual way.
You might have a better answer, but for me this is enough: Once we accept its limitations, we can look for hope in literature’s ability to transform us.
