Telling it Slant

By Jay Griffiths

(image) Image by Drriss and Marrionn via Flickr

“Tell the truth but tell it slant” – Emily Dickinson.

The slanted mind. The enigmatic phrase. The allusive, elusive subject. Literature lives in these worlds, it flourishes in metaphoric thinking, in shaded meanings.

And yet, and yet, and yet… many writers also feel a sense of profound responsibility to write directly about issues, to confront, to face, to speak straight. Writers with a public conscience can feel that they have an unshirkable duty to tell truths unslanted, to look head-on at the situation the world faces, with climate change above all.  I respect that wish; I feel it myself.  But it just doesn’t work. Sorry, but there it is. Dogmatizing the data, slapping the facts out like cold dough, preaching to the unconverted or the converted alike, whining with worthiness, plucking the strings of plangent reproach, keening over a manufactured grief; none of this works. It does nothing politically and it does nothing artistically.

At the same time, in my view, the best artists have always had a political hinterland to their work; there is always a sense of a wider world beyond their direct and immediate subject.  To be a writer in this age seems almost to necessitate that at some level writers engage with climate change.

What are the ways these tensions can be explored? How do writers look at climate change and write successfully about it? It’s an almost uniquely tough problem, in terms of time, place and scale.

If climate change were more directly a present-centred drama, it would be easier. But no. Climate change has an enormous future-bias, which, pace science fiction, has never been a particularly popular place for literature.  The past, yes, the present, yes, because they are engraved worlds, deepened in experiences, variegated in tones, textured and text-enamored. The future, though, can have the sheen of plastic, the veneer of formica leading to text as textureless as an IKEA catalogue.

If climate change were more specific in its reach, it would be easier to write about. But no. Climate change is global, and that very word ‘global’ seems to make literature stutter, a kind of glottal stop on the cherished especialness of place.

If climate change were less vast an issue, it would also be easier to write about, if its threads and channels were small, its lacey tributaries finding their liquid signatures. But no. Climate change is as massive as, well, as massive as the oceans themselves. At this scale of event, language can feel blunted. Blunted and dumb to speak of the enormity of what we know.

As the debate around communicating the issue of climate science rages, and the imperative of alerting the world to the impact of our changing climate becomes even more urgent, Chris Rapley, Professor of Climate Science at UCL, reminds us, “The whole point about climate change is that it is not really about the science. It is about the sort of world we want to live in and what kind of future we want to create.”

Assessing the current political temperature and social climate, Weather Stations is an international project that places literature and storytelling at the heart of these conversations about climate change.

But how best to do this? How do writers look at climate change and write successfully about it?

Jay Griffiths explores these issues – and more – with panel members Mirko Bonné, Weather Stations Writer in Residence at internationalesliteraturfestival Berlin, Tony White, former Writer in Residence at the Science Museum, and Chris Rapley. Listen to a podcast of the event below. 

 

Jay Griffiths is a British writer living in Wales.  With her first book (Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time) she won the Discover award for the best new non-fiction writer to be published in the USA.  Her second book (Wild: An Elemental Journey) was shortlisted for both the Orwell prize and for the World Book Day award and won the inaugural 2007 Orion Book Award in the USA.