U.S. prizewinners do not dominate this list (as they do the Nobel categories of Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine), especially since the 1950s. It's not for lack of great writers, but perhaps because we've learned to limit our own access to serious content. The fear of being perceived as ideologues runs so deep in writers of my generation it undoubtedly steers us away from certain subjects without our knowing it. The fear is that if you fall short of perfect execution, you'll be called "preachy." But falling short of perfection when you've plunged in to say what needs to be said--is that so much worse, really, than falling short when you've plunged in to say what didn't need to be said?
And if you should by chance succeed--oh, then. Art has the power not only to soothe a savage breast, but to change a savage mind. A novel can make us weep over the same events that might hardly give us pause if we read them in a newspaper. Even though the tragedy in the newspaper happened to real people, while the one in the novel happened in an author's imagination.
A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.
The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else's point of view. It differs drastically from a newspaper, which imparts information while allowing you to remain rooted in your own perspective. A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, "How very sad," then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter's cheek. You would taste that person's breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.
At the height of the Gulf War, I found in the New York Times this quote from Loren Thompson, director of the national security program at Georgetown University, explaining why the Pentagon wasn't releasing information about deaths in Iraq. When bomb damage is listed only in technical terms, he said, "you avoid talking about lives lost, and that serves both an esthetic and a practical purpose."
The esthetic and practical purpose, of course, is the loss of empathy. We seem to be living in the age of anesthesia, and it's no wonder. Confronted with knowledge of dozens of apparently random disasters each day, what can a human heart do but slam its doors? No mortal can grieve that much. We didn't evolve to cope with tragedy on a global scale. Our defense is to pretend there's no thread of event that connects us, and that those lives are somehow not precious and real like our own. It's a practical strategy, to some ends, but the loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that's no small tradeoff.
Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. By virtue of that power, it is political, regardless of content. If Jane Eyre is a great romance, it has also given thousands of men a female experience, and a chance to feel the constraints that weighed upon women of Jane's time. Through art, a woman can give a male reader the unparalleled athletic accomplishment of childbirth, or the annihilation of being raped; if every man knew both those things, I would expect the world to change tomorrow. We have all heard plenty about each other's troubles, but evidently it's not enough to be told, it has to be lived. And art is so very nearly the same as life.
I know, for example, that slavery was heinous, but the fate of sixty million slaves is too big a thing for a heart to understand. So it was not until I read Toni Morrison's Beloved that I honestly felt that truth. When Sethe killed her children rather than have them grow up in slavery, I was so far from my sheltered self I knew the horror that could make infanticide an act of love. Morrison carved the tragedy of those sixty million, to whom the book is dedicated, into something small and dense and real enough to fit through the door, get in my heart, and explode. This is how a novel can be more true than a newspaper.
One of my favorite writings about writing is this excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to her science-fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she discusses fiction's role in what we call the truth:
Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.
...Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
...In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little...crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
This baffling manifesto is a command that rules my writing life. I believe it means there are truths we all know, but can't make ourselves feel: Slavery was horrible. Love thy neighbor as thyself, or we'll all go to hell in a handbasket. These are things that cannot be said in words because they're too familiar to move us, too big and bald and flat to penetrate our souls. The artist must craft missiles to deliver these truths so unerringly to the right place inside of us we are left panting, with no possibility of doubting they are true. The novelist must do this in story, image, and character. And make the reader believe.
To speak of this process as something that must fall either into the camp of "political" or "pure" is frankly absurd. Good art is political, whether it means to be or not, insofar as it provides the chance to understand points of view alien to our own. Its nature is the opposite of spiritual meanness, bigotry, and warfare. If it is disturbing at times, or unpalatable, it may be a good idea to buy it anyway.
In time, I came back from political exile. Not with my tail between my legs, having discovered the U.S.A. was after all the greatest place in the world. On the contrary, I loved the new experience of safety, the freedom to walk anywhere I pleased at any time of day, and the connected moral comfort of a society that cares for all its children, provides universal health care, and allows no one to be destitute. All these foreign things, and more, I loved: the sound of the ocean in my window, and the towering poinsettia trees that blossomed along the roadsides from Christmas till Easter. I missed a few things: Mexican food, certain familiar music on the radio, the blush of a Tucson sunset running hot and sweet up the face of the Santa Catalina Mountains. And I missed the sound of my mother tongue. By accident, it turns out, I've been apprenticed as a writer to my own language and culture. In the m
idst of a deeply American novel, high and dry in the Canary Isles, I had to beg friends back home for mundanities I couldn't recall--figures of speech, car makes, even commercial jingles.
More than anything, though, I missed people, the beloved relatives and friends I left behind. I had new friends, but it was finally on account of the old ones that I prepared to give up the expatriate's life.
As the time drew near, my feet balked. I dreaded leaving my kind new place to return to the land of the free (free to live behind locks at all times; free to walk in the evenings from library to parked car with sheer terror in my heart) and the home of the brave (well, yes, brave). The land where 7 percent of the world's souls guzzle the lion's share of the world's goods, pitch out a yearly average of sixteen hundred pounds of garbage apiece, and still can drive past homeless neighbors with little awareness of wrongdoing or alternatives. The place I was told to love or leave.
I found I could do neither. Not wholeheartedly. But like the boy who fought the Jabberwock in Through the Looking Glass, I took my vorpal sword in hand. For the sake of people who love me and the sight of mountains that move my soul, I would come galumphing back, to face the tyranny of words without meaning and monsters beyond my ken.
I came back because leaving was selfish. A country can be flawed as a marriage or a family or a person is flawed, but "Love it or leave it" is a coward's slogan. There's more honor in "Love it and get it right." Love it, love it. Love it and never shut up.
THE FOREST IN THE SEEDS
In the springtime of my twenty-fifth year, and my first as a graduate student in ecology, I was seriously introduced to biological field research. The project to which I was assigned involved sitting in a mesquite thicket in the southern Arizona sun, watching a species of territorial lizard do, quite frankly, almost nothing. For hours and hours, day after day. It was stultifying. When I'd signed on as a rookie animal behaviorist, I suppose I was thinking of Konrad Lorenz's curiously malimprinted geese, who thought he was Mama Goose and followed him around; or of legendary Iwo, the genius macaque, who invented grain winnowing and introduced it to her tribe. Visions of sandhill cranes danced in my head. And here I had washed up instead in the land of torpid lizards. I could only be grateful that my subjects at least had heartbeats, and pity my botanically inclined colleagues who were counting pollen grains under a microscope, or literally watching the grass grow.
Nature does not move in mysterious ways, really. She just moves so slowly we're inclined to lose patience and stop watching before she gets around to the revelations. The natural historians of the nineteenth century knew this, or at any rate they had no reason to expect bells and whistles, and they had the luxury of writing for an audience with an attention span. Charles Darwin charmingly suggests as much in his introduction to On the Origin of Species: "It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out of this question [of the origin of species] by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it." Twenty-two years later he'd reflected on everything from slave-making ants to the Greenland whale and set it all down on paper, and for any reader willing to spend a portion of a lifetime with it, it remains a thorough masterpiece.
Henry David Thoreau, Darwin's contemporary, shared the penchant for accumulation and reflection, and while he did not shake the scientific paradigm so profoundly, he brought to his work an expansive poetic sensibility. Like other modern fans of his who had long since finished all the Thoreau in print, I rejoiced when Bradley P. Dean compiled from the massive notebooks of Thoreau's last two years a collection of previously unpublished writings, Faith in a Seed. The book contains fragmentary treatises on wild fruits, weeds and grasses, and the succession of forest trees. But the centerpiece is Thoreau's last important manuscript, The Dispersion of Seeds, in which he meticulously noted methods of seed ripening and dispersal, germination, and growth of a great many species: pines, willows, cherries, milkweeds, eight kinds of tick clover, and virtually every other plant known to the neighborhood of Concord, Massachusetts. With a categorical thoroughness akin to Darwin's, Thoreau intended to prove his conviction--which was still in dispute at the time--that new plants do not spontaneously generate but, rather, grow always and only from seeds.
It's hard to imagine grown men of science being uncertain of a thing that our first-graders now might snub as a science-fair project. ("A bean in a Dixie cup? That's kid stuff," mine once hooted.) So the energy Thoreau brings to this argument may seem quaint for its obsolescence. But there is something wonderful to be gained from a two-hundred-page walk through the woods with a scientist from a century and a quarter ago. Thoreau had just read On the Origin of Species, and was clearly moving away from the travelogue format of his "excursion" writings, toward an articulation of unifying principles; he was attempting to see the forest among his trees. In his observations of plant communities he touched on succession, allelopathy, and other concepts that would not have names until the birth of the science of ecology in the next century.
His gifts as a writer, though, transcended his contributions to natural science. Thoreau dismissed the notion that poetry and science are incompatible, and captured for his readers the simple wonder we hastily leave behind in the age of reason. "How impatient, how rampant, how precocious these osiers," he wrote of the willows along his pond. "Some derive their Latin name Salix from salire, 'to leap,' they spring up so rapidly--they are so salient. They have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out along them, and anon golden blossoms and downy seeds, spreading their race with incredible rapidity."
He admired the trees for their ingenuity, and praised the wind that catches their seeds for its unfailing providence. He carefully watched the ways and means of the seed-scattering creatures: squirrels, foxes, birds (including, nostalgically, the now extinct ivory-billed woodpecker), a wading moose or cow, or "a wading pickerel fisher of the old school, who does not mind if his clothes be wet," and even little boys who blow the seeds off dandelion heads to find out whether their mothers want them. ("If they blow off all the seeds at one puff, which they rarely do, then they are not wanted.")
As I made my leisurely way through Thoreau's final book I found myself turning down the corner of nearly every other page to note an arresting moment of prose; eventually I realized I was admiring not specific bits of information but the man himself. As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau understood that the scientist and the science are inseparable, and he insinuated himself into his observations in a way that modern science writers, we virtuosos of the passive voice, have been trained carefully to forsake.
"I went forth on the afternoon of October 17th," one section begins, "expressly to ascertain how chestnuts are propagated." American chestnuts are now as dead as the ivory-billed woodpeckers, but still a reader can watch this bearded, wide-eyed man--who would within two years of that journal entry be dead himself--inhaling an autumn day and focusing his powers not only on the chestnuts but also on his own heart and the folkloric tenor of his village. "A squirrel goes a-chestnutting perhaps as far as the boys do, and when he gets there he does not have to shake or club the tree, or wait for frost to open the burrs, but he walks up to the burrs and cuts them off and strews the ground with them before they have opened....The jays scream and the red squirrels scold while you are clubbing and shaking the chestnut trees, for they are there on the same errand, and two of a trade never agree."
Another passage exclaims, "Consider what a vast work these forest planters are doing! So far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors.
"But what is the character of our gratitude to these squirrels?...Are they on our pension list? Have we in any way recognized their services?...We should be more civilized as well as humane if we recognized once a year by some symbolical ceremony the part which the squirrel plays in the economy of Nature."
Faith in a See
d is infused with Thoreau's delight, his meticulous curiosity and his inspiring patience. Across the silence of 125 years, during which an unforeseeable glut of hurry has descended, he exhorts us to slow down and take notice, to learn how to watch seeds become trees. This is the kind of book that should be forced on students, probably against their will. When I recall my lizard-watching days I can sympathize with their restlessness, but I also long for all of us to rescue ourselves from the tyranny of impatience. Like cartoon characters, we seem to be running full tilt through the air beyond the edge of the cliff with our minds on something else. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore poignantly discusses this detached relationship between humans and our earth. He reports that in a 1991 poll that asked the American people for their views about the role we should play in the world, an incredible 93 percent supported a proposal for "the U.S. using its position to get other countries to join together to take action against world environmental problems." And yet at the same time, he writes, "Almost every poll shows Americans decisively rejecting higher taxes on fossil fuels, even though that proposal is one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with a more responsible approach to the environment." Is it possible we just couldn't sit still long enough to make the connection?
Recently, as I gave a lecture to a college class on writing and environmental activism, a student asked me, "Why can't we just teach people about this stuff in TV commercials?" The question was both naive and astute. As a nation we will never defer to the endangered spotted owl (let alone declare a National Squirrel Holiday, as Thoreau suggested) until we are much more widely educated. But the things we will have to know--concepts of food chain, habitat, selection pressure and adaptation, and the ways all species depend on others--are complex ideas that just won't fit into a thirty-second spot. Evolution can't be explained in a sound bite.