Can beauty save the world? The question shines in my head after a symposium organized this week by the University of East Anglia and New Writing Worlds, during which an extremely diverse bunch of writers from around the world, including JM Coetzee, Adam Thorpe, Gwyneth Lewis and Gretel Erhlich, pondered literature in an age of environmental doom.
Given the catastrophic scenarios outlined by scientists, it's tempting to think that writing doesn't matter at all: worrying about literature can seem rather like a desire to round up the chairs on the Titanic and paint them in pretty colours before we sink. But for all that, there was a palpable sense among the very various writers assembled in Norwich this week that writing and art have, in some important way, a role to play.
Perhaps nobody is quite sure what that role is; certainly, no one seemed to be under the illusion that writing can, of itself, change the world. The issue of climate change certainly resulted in a number of fascinating conversations, around all sorts of issues. But perhaps the most startling profession of faith came from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, CK Williams.
Beauty, Williams suggested, can save us from the "enervating despair" that otherwise afflicts us with paralysis when we consider the implications of environmental catastrophe. He considered the "annihilating cosmic and aesthetic panic" of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and suggested that we need something else - rather, "beauty of art, beauty of spirit and, most fugitive of all, the beauty of hope".
This is the kind of thing that makes my heart soar. There is indeed a fugitive hope that emerges from art and which makes courage possible, a seductive allure in the acts of futile defiance which assert the continuing existence of possibility against the grim realities that seek to disclaim it. It's an allure I find irresistible and perhaps, in the end, not entirely futile: to do nothing seems, in any case, to lead to a certain defeat, and I would rather gamble.
However, I don't think Williams was implying that his vision of beauty was futile, and was rather hinting at a strength that can be found in resisting despair, and that can result - at a remove - in dynamic action. The inspiring human rights activist and poet Muriel Rukeyser suggests something very similar.
All the same, I found myself at odds with Williams' criticisms of The Road, which for all its portrayal of post-apocalyptic doom, seems to me a work that sparks precisely that fugitive beauty and hope that he was calling for. His objection to McCarthy's novel was that he thought it entertained a kind of sadism in its portrayal of intolerable imagined realities, in the sheer relentlessness of the bleak future delineated in those ash-grey landscapes.
There's a paradox in the middle of this conception of the power of literature and art, which was articulated by a comment from Vietnamese writer Linh Dinh: that perhaps the first task of writing is "to see clearly", even if what is perceived is something of astonishing ugliness.
Writing, it has often been said over the past five days, cannot change anything; but by the end of the symposium, it seemed an activity deeply allied with hope. I found myself thinking of John Berger. "The naming of the intolerable," he said, "is itself the hope."
