LAMENT FOR A LOST WORLD

It struck me a few months ago, and I have been struggling with the idea of putting it into words ever since. I did not want to admit that this was true. But the signs are everywhere. There are these phrases that seem to jar and clang when I hear them “The New Normal”, “Fuck 2020”, and “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”, many other things like that. A friend reported a dream she had : she was horrified to find herself in a job interview, forgetting herself to the point of committing the grave faux pas of shaking hands. The sequel of her dream had her checking under her car for car-bombs, but because she, a brave and wonderful woman, has literally done this in real life, it was less disturbing. I said to someone the other day : “My children will not remember anything else … Their earliest years will have a world where they weren’t allowed to hug their grandparents, where they hadn’t seen their little cousins grow up, except on screens … We’ll tell them, once upon a time, there was easy travel between countries, there were cinemas, there were restaurants.” These things will come back, yes, surely they will come back. We may return to some shape or form of normal. But then I read something else today, about snow, and about how those of us who remember it, from our childhoods, will have to explain to our children about seasons, and what they used to be like; my son is just learning seasons, he said “so Winter is when there’s snow?” and I had to say to him, “Well, not really. Not anymore. Maybe far up in the mountains. But not where we live. Not anymore.” All’s changed, changed utterly. So many of us, who have the words of “The Second Coming” running in our heads, all this last year. We think back to a year ago, and what concerned us then, what was going on then. And we think : little did we know. A year of solitary confinement.

I am lucky, I keep telling myself, so lucky. I have my wife and kids. Even when it’s just the four of us, there are people here. The schools are still open, for now. But my six year old son has to wear a mask all day. When I first met his new teacher, his first year of big-school, I saw a woman in a mask, and I filled in the rest of her face with my imagination. At a meeting, a few months in, she briefly showed us her whole face, and it was a shock, because not what I had imagined. How did this become the reality that we live in, where a new acquaintance has a face you could not imagine, though you had met them? And it brought me back to that thing that I’ve been thinking about:

I cannot read fiction anymore; I can hardly read any book.

I can hardly sit through a film. I can hardly sit down and think for a few minutes, without a terrible unrest and distraction.

Someone else said it: are you having that thing where you’re watching a film and you’re shocked by the fact that people are hugging, or going into a crowded bar? How no one is wearing a mask?

The Plague Year has had many many repercussions, and all of them have been discussed at length, everywhere, constantly, forever. There have never been more thinkpieces. There has never been more profound questioning of everything we took for granted. And we were already on the cusp of such self-questioning: climate strikes. Remember them? The gilets jaunes in France, the popular uprisings on the streets around the world, in Hong Kong, in Haiti, the Unite the Right and Antifa clashes. And then suddenly, confinement. In America, at the same time, the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter suddenly, finally, reaching the forefront of the public consciousness. What is this world? What on Earth has happened? We have been plunged into turmoil, and as soon as we start to pick apart the threads, we realise that all of this has been inevitable for twenty, thirty, forty years. All the signs were always there, and we were spinning like a gyroscope on the edge of the Abyss, forever. How did we get here?

But this is the thing I do not see discussed : all of contemporary realist fiction has been consigned to the dustbin of history. From now on, every piece of “literary fiction” that doesn’t mention COVID has become historical fiction, or alternate reality fiction. And every piece that does becomes a sort of single issue social commentary, obsessed with that ONE thing …

Don’t they realise that people continue to struggle, be born, and die, of other causes? That there is still heartbreak and loss, and triumph, and agony, for so many many other reasons? Of course; but the Plague is the Elephant in the Room, and the Emperor’s New Clothes. If you do not mention it, you are not part of reality. If you do, you are not part of Reality, because not everything is about that, is it? How do you write a novel now? How can you even care to read a novel? I have no appetite for literary fiction. How could anything written about by an author that’s “made up” compete with actual events, for compelling, gripping drama? How could any study of loss, drama, despair, hope, triumph, how could any of it compete with what people are going through in real life, all the time it seems? Who needs to read about invented struggles? Who does not have their own: urgent, dramatic, bizarre, unprecedented?

Whose life has not been turned upside down?

Who can read fiction, now?

Suddenly, all of the literary fiction written forever has become a historical curiosity. Suddenly, we’ll be able to date it immediately : “ah, that must be from before 2016. You remember, the year when suddenly it seemed we’d slipped sideways into an edgy political satire written in the 90s by, oh, I don’t know, Chuck Palahniuk or someone.” Trump is part of the same thing. Brexit. Johnson. These vulgar puppets. Part of when reality went from a fragile, infinitely nuanced thing of shades of grey to a gross caricature of what we used to know. Ah, reality. It ain’t what it used to be. Oh Brave New World.

I remember as a teenager in the 90s, having that sort of strange blank relativism common to my generation. We’re not called Generation X for nothing. Remember that? It seemed there was no truth, no real right or wrong, only a vague, blankly staring detachment, a refuge in irony, a harsh cry of pain in our music, and a hip pose of ennui. Remember that? It seemed our Generation, devoid of great conflicts, devoid of great drama, would live forever in the shadow of Real Life, which had happened in another place (but by our time had all been used up).

In the 90s, people dressed in shades of grey and unobtrusive plaids and woolly hats, and stared out windows smoking cigarettes, and then made films in which Winona Ryder and Matt Dillon did the same. The soundtrack was good though. I remember, the very very last gasp of that Lost World, when we thought it was all over bar the shouting. Remember? The End of History? Silly silly people. Lulled into that state of vague and directionless anxiety, when we wondered what it must have felt like to have any meaning, urgency, true conflict in our lives. Where was the drama, we wondered? Why had history already ended, and Postmodernism come and gone, and where did that leave us, now, with nothing left to do but watch infinite Progress, Democracy, and the American Way solve all of our problems, and those of us disaffected and strange, not wanting money or success or to buy houses, we would be left forever on the margin, an odd little rump of very late Romantics? We had lived on after our time, and History had left us behind. We were remnants, of a time when things happened, to care about, to strive for, to struggle for, to surmount. What was left but to rake in ever finer detail over the coals of history, in footnotes and commentary, and to wonder what it must have been to live through War, or Plague, or Terror. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens round here. I spent the year of 1999–2000 in Berkeley, in California, attending the university there. I remember the hordes of socially aware, politically active youths, desperately searching for causes. Sure, there was still injustice, there were still problems, but didn’t the arc of History bend towards Justice? No wait, that was later. I remember trumped up outrages at minor articles of bills in California. Proposition 20. What was that again? Was there corruption in student government? Had the editorial team of the Heuristic Squelch gone too far this time?

Then it was 2001. And all changed then. As we know. I became addicted to the news, to the thinkpieces, to journalism, to world events. Suddenly, urgently, things were happening. But it all seemed so contrived and false. What was the real story? What were they hiding from us? Planes crashing into Towers. History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to Awake. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and they have all been lying to us all along. And just like that, we lost all faith in Reality. Reality Bites. Indeed. And Fiction has no Teeth.

Prophets of Doom had been ranting about all of it, on the Berkeley Campus, on each corner, “God Hates Fags”, and the Naked Guy (I never saw him), and that guy called Stoney who looked like a standup comedian from the late 60s. He used to rant. We gathered, and watched, bemused, before buying a latte at the Free-Speech Movement Café (opened that year). Commodification, Reification, False-Consciousness. Poetry is impossible after the Holocaust. We thought: Never Again. How little did we know. Reading Baudrillard in the 90s. What fun; it seemed so eccentric and wonderful. And then it happened, and the Gulf War Did Not Take Place. It was a video-game on a screen. Simulacra. Simulation. Everything. Virtual Reality. Fiction does not function the way it once did.

And it may be just the paroxysm of a wider movement. Because our generation, those born between the sixties and the late seventies, Generation X, we were the last ones born in an analogue world, who then grew up and saw everything go digital. We remember what it used to be like. We could read fiction written in the 1950s, or the 1970s, or even the 1930s and recognise the commonalities with our own childhoods. We remember having to memorise telephone numbers, and if you wanted to phone your girlfriend, you had to dare to dial the number and possibly be interrogated by her parents first. We remember those things. We remember Summers, and Winters, and everything in between. Remember that? In Europe, these things are of the past. In America, it seems that every year brings further devastating climate events. Every year now is the hottest year on record. Every year, parts of the Old World disappear. The Lost World. Everything will soon be lost. And then, as the juggernaut of Everything seems unstoppably doomed to plunge us into the Abyss, suddenly, Life calls a Halt. And we grind to a shuddering stop. And all is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Trump, Brexit, COVID. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didn’t Advent, and Christmas, feel so desperately poignant this year? Each time like it’s the last. Didn’t we wonder what the end of the world would look like? Didn’t we read our TS Eliot, and think, with a whimper, not a bang. And here we are, whimpering our way into the Dark. This seems like the Long Extinction. The Lights are Going Out All Over Europe. America has ended. Democracy has ended. Do I seem to be overdramatic? It’s the tail-end of a very long year, a terribly long decade, which has been hyperspeed and crept like a murderer towards our door.

The Revolution never came either. The War never came. The high drama, where we got to test our mettle, and see what we were really made of ; would we be Resistants, would we refuse to give the names of our Comrades? Would we face torture and worse, and keep our courage burning deep within? Or would we Collaborate? Would we sell our Comrades up the river for a mess of pottage? And we did. We sat and watched Netflix True Crime, because the greatest crime, the most awful con, the terrible fraud, had already been perpetrated, and we had sat back with our vague grasp on security and we had taken it lying down.

And fiction could not deal with this. How to care about the love lives and dead grandmas of the kid in our Creative Writing class? How to read that twee and precious literary fiction that was de rigeur at the end of that tired century, where a middle class person has a vague and troubled epiphany because a lot of not very much kind of almost happens to them?

There is no answer. We cannot teach our children that literature resides in small moments, in tiny triumphs, in the adversities of love and loss among lattes and Social Media profiles in gentrified neighourhoods; none of that makes for anything to write about any more, and all of my generation, poor Brand X Generation, who once wondered what on earth would be our story to tell, well we have received the greatest gift, the most Poisoned Chalice. Interesting Times. The Tribulation, the Revelation. The End of the World as We Know It. And it IS NOT FINE.

But never again will we read academic poetry in little magazines, where privileged little college kids meditate on the vicissitudes, and drop reference after reference to obscure figures from Mythology, the Spear Carriers, the ones slightly to the left of centre. No. We are all tragic heroes now, though we are certain that even now, even with this, we do not know real suffering. We cannot tell our children that it matters to read stories of self discovery by gap year kids in exotic locales. They will be Burning, those Places. They will be underwater. And we will keep going to our middle management “creative” jobs. We will bake bread, and rediscover gardening. For a while.

But then one day, we will say to ourselves : Greta Thunberg just turned eighteen. What had you done at that age? Discovered you liked hazelnut coffee in hipster cafés? Fallen in love with your oblivious best friend? Started that band, that too self conscious novel. NO. IT IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE. The only Fiction that we can possibly read or write now has nothing to do with the “Real World”. The Real World is no more. It has nothing to do with “Realism”, or “suspension of disbelief”; everything now beggars belief; everything is more grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre, un-real.

The only answer is to read and write our way into the Mythic Time we’re in. We must all take on Quests and Battle the Eternal Foe. Because finally, there are Good Guy and Bad Guys once again. The bogeymen of our earliest childhood came out from under the bed and turned out to have been waiting in the wings all along. There are Nazis, again. There is corruption and hate and deadening dross everywhere. We must teach our children not the literature of the commonplace, but of the Common Dream. We must dream our way into Eternal Stories untethered from an out-of-date reality effect. Nothing now says “out of touch” like a slice of life. Let us devour the whole cake. Literary fiction is over. The Real World is over. Only Myth and Poetry and things that shake our souls now matter.

There is a War in Heaven, and we must choose our sides. No one is coming to save us, in this Last Battle : we are the Ones we have been waiting for. We must, finally, blessedly, take up our swords and go and save the World. It is not naive to believe in things anymore, nor to fight for them. It is no longer unhip to be earnest, and to seek out the things that make us weep with fierce joy and loss. It’s the End of the World; who can ever read “Fiction” ever again? Raise your banners. Hoist the Black Ensign, or the White Flag of the Great Surrender to the fragile and breakable beauty of it all. The Children’s Crusade is now. The fight for survival is now. The Plague Year is upon us. Could the Famine Year, the War Year, the Death Year, be far behind? The Horsemen are saddled up and drinking one last stirrup cup. They are coming to take away everything you ever knew and held dear. We held the wrong things dear.

I cannot read a book. I cannot write a line. I cannot pretend to live another life, more various and more textured, that someone else wrote in a book. My own is now as urgent and as vivid as I always feared it never ever would be. My heart fails me, but I would go on.

There are no more small epiphanies and wry observations ; there is only heroism, or despair. The world needs this now ; not escape into the tiny struggles of Anguished Men with existential indigestion : no. It needs us all to plan an Escape Route, together. If one falls, we all fall. We are tied together, and there are no handholds, no outcrops or ledges, within our grasp. Pull yourself up the cliff by force of bloody minded will. Don’t let go. Don’t look down.

Re-enchant the World. Rewild it. Resist the Nothing. Remember. We finally finally have our chance. We will not read about tiny struggles in the lives of nobodies. We will write epic tragedies of an unwinnable battle against insurmountable odds, of desperate rescues and daring feats. And none of it will be winning prestigious literary awards or gaining us entry to a well-respected MFA. It will be saving people’s lives, and saving our own souls.

You have your battle now, be thankful. You have your meaning now, be grateful. You have your torch to pass on, finally. Little matter that you only lit it now. The hour is very late. It’s not too late.

It’s time, now. Go to Work.