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Of Doubt & Wonder : Literary non-fiction and the ways of change

Thank you and welcome all. The talk I'm giving tonight is called Of Doubt & Wonder and in the course of it I will be throwing out a few ideas rather than trying to construct a water tight argument for any particular modus operandi of writing non-fiction or, for that matter, fiction. The title derives ultimately from Charles Darwin and echoes the occasion two years ago when Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and I-a shearer and a taxi driver, someone quipped at the time-received generous awards from Copyright Licensing Limited to enable us to write the books we wanted to write. The address on that occasion was given by Lloyd Spencer Davis and his book, Looking for Darwin, was launched on the night. If any book can be said to have changed the world it was The Origin of Species, published in 1859; but I always think of Alfred Wallace, whose fever vision on the island of Halmahera in the Moluccas, and his sending of the resulting paper to Darwin, was the actual catalyst for the writing of that book.
My book, Zone of the Marvellous, two years later, is now written and published and its introduction begins with a remark, from his Voyage of the Beagle, by the young Charles Darwin. It's 19 December, 1835, and the Beagle is on its way south and west from Tahiti towards New Zealand when the ship crosses that part of the globe which forms the antipodes of Darwin's English home. He writes: These antipodes call to one's mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point on our voyage homewards; but now I find it, and all such resting places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch. If I might now quote myself, I go on to say: These shadows that cannot be caught, resting places where there is no rest and no place, are my subject in the book that follows . . . And, equally, tonight.
Doubt and wonder each exist in an ambiguous relation to simple truth. We say of something fanciful that someone might tell us: I doubt that's so. Or we say: I wonder if that's true? Doubt retreats towards nay-saying, wonder wants to say yes but can't quite do so; neither really commits itself. Thus we can doubt and wonder at the same time and often we do. These speculative states of mind are those in which we carry out exploratory activities of all kinds, including something as elementary as looking for the street number of a house we have not been to before, or something as complex as exploring for the first time the city of Montevideo in Uruguay; and also when we read a book. We doubt and we wonder and in those provisional states of mind open ourselves up to the possibility of being changed by whatever experience we are about to have.
One of the curiosities of recent publishing in the West has been the proliferation of what might be called Change the World books. There are many examples, for instance Simon Winchester's 2001 book The Map that Changed the World. Often the advice about world-changing is contained in a subtitle, as in Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg (1999), subtitled How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History. I'm always skeptical of such grandiloquent claims, I don't believe the world changes in any simple way, nor that the so-called course of history is altered by individual interventions, however significant they might be. I think that it is not the world that changes but ourselves. In other words the world changes when mentalities change, and herein lies the revolutionary potential of books.
For instance we are most likely now living through a revolution that has had at least two precursors. One is that moment in time when written words began to replace human memory as the primary repository of knowledge of all kinds. This happened at different times in different places, and some of these transitions were observed and commented on by contemporaries. Socrates, in Plato's Phaedra, deplored the change that has, ironically, preserved his condemnation. He said that inflexibility of thought, decline of memory skills and loss of control over language would follow the shift from oral to written tradition that was then occurring. Two thousand years later the invention of the printing press signaled another radical shift, this time towards the mass production of books that had, until then, been laboriously copied by hand-if they hadn't been chipped out of stone, recorded as knots on string, or written on the wind. The third revolution, occurring now, is that the things we used to carry around in our minds, then in books of various kinds, will now be stored in the strange ether of cyberspace. Or rather, in Google's giant memory banks in California.
But the advent of writing did not destroy human memory and nor did the printing of books; nor will the proliferation of digital means of storage of information. Because human memory is in fact the other term, without which technical procedures like writing, printing or digitizing have no meaning; and memory is resilient beyond all of these and constitutes a parallel tradition to the more literary one that is collected in libraries and elsewhere. It's simply true that, however vast the forgetting may have been, all of us here now in this room have a lineage that goes back many thousands of years and constitutes a oral tradition that is, by the very fact of our existence, unbroken. We all repeat the words our fathers and mothers spoke, and they in turn repeated the speech of their parents; and so on back through the generations to the beginning of language.
In illustration of this insight, there was a kind of office holder among the ancient Greeks in the days before things were regularly written down: they were called Mnemones, Rememberers or, if their role was a priestly one, Heiromnemones or Sacred Rememberers. The job of the Rememberers was to assist in trials at law, by recognizing faces, recalling names and also quoting precedents so that, when a king sat in judgment, the right people were there and also present were examples of what had been done in similar circumstances before. Sacred Rememberers fulfilled the same role when the question concerned the proper rites in worship or propitiation of a god; and they could utter solemn curses upon those who transgressed against the rites. Writers are themselves Rememberers, with a lineage as ancient, or older, than the office of the Mnemone: custodians of the tale of the tribe with a function that is threefold, to observe, to remember and to pass on. That is the story-telling function and it applies both to what is called non-fiction and what is called fiction.
Not so long ago I read, in the preface of a book whose name I have forgotten, a distinction between types of story-tellers and therefore types of story. There are two main kinds of storyteller, this author said. The first are those who stay at home; the second, those who go away. Those who stay home tell stories of the hearth. These tend to be vertical in shape, in that they go back through the generations of men and women and preserve what are essentially family sagas. The second kind of stories are told about the beyond by those who have been away and seen wonders, or by those who are itinerant, who have no hearth and go from place to place telling tales of things they have seen, places they have been. These travellers' tales are horizontal rather than vertical, they are about the wide extension of the world, not the depth of time that has elapsed since the generations began.
There is a further distinction: stories of the hearth tend towards the paranoid, both with respect to their own subject matter, which often involves blood feuds, disputes over property of various kinds, family curses and so on; and also paranoid with respect to what lies beyond the borders of home. Whereas the traveller's tale partakes of metanoia, paranoia's opposite, which tries to put things together rather than split them apart. Travellers' tales are trying to reach a comprehension of the diversity and strangeness of the world, while tales of the hearth are intrinsically and often fatally embroiled in the defence and ultimate disposition of what is, relatively speaking, only a tiny patch of the earth. It's from this tendency to defend a patch that the theory arises that human warfare only began in earnest at the time of the first agricultural settlements; before that, this theory goes, the pattern of conflict was basically one of skirmish. In this connection it is worth recalling the proposition, advanced by Bruce Chatwin, that nomadism is the natural state of human society.
There's an exemplification, ironic as it is, of this opposition between hearth and beyond in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. In Act 2, scene 2, Benedick, a young lord of Padua, is refusing to speak to the lady Beatrice, his witty antagonist in a war of words that conceals the love they have for each other; he says to Don Pedro, Lord of Arragon: Will your grace command me any service to the world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on. I will fetch you a tooth-picker from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of Prester John's foot, fetch you a hair off the Great Cham's beard, do you any embassage to the pigmies, rather than hold three words conference with this harpy . . . in other words, he will go to the ends of the earth before entering into the hearth drama of marriage, the house-bondage of husband-hood.
You could perhaps extend this distinction to address the vexed question of how we might finally draw the contested boundary between fiction and non-fiction writing. To my mind, for example, much of Shakespeare's writing is hearth drama, in that he is mostly concerned with English affairs and, within that, with London itself, where he located that wooden O, the world, that was the Globe Theatre. Jane Austin, and after her the 19th century Victorian novel, is hearth drama; you could probably make a case for saying that there is an intrinsic connection between the English novel, marriage and the hearth. Whereas, before and since Shakespeare's time, there is a rich parallel tradition of writing in English that is the result of the rapid expansion of Europeans of all kinds who went, as Benedick wanted to do, on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on.
Unfortunately the distinction doesn't really hold up because, to take only one example, speculative fiction, including science fiction, attempts to depart the hearth for places unknown and as such is both fictional and a kind of traveller's tale; but this leads on to mental travelling, a much older tradition in writing and one which may show us a way out of the fiction / non-fiction conundrum. Mental travelling occurs in both fiction and non-fiction but frequently finds its most appropriate expression in the genres of non-fiction: the essay, the memoir, history, biography and autobiography, the writing of geographies and of what used to be called philosophical inquiries; and of course in poetry. Herodotus, father of history, father of lies, was at least some part mental traveller, as well as an indefatigable land loper and sea rover and he did not ever let doubt or wonder prevent him from recording the things he had seen and the tales he had been told, no matter how outlandish they might have been and often were.
This is not to disparage fiction. How many stories begin with the words Once upon a time in a land far away? What we hear then might be a beautifully turned fiction; or it might be an account of a real visit someone made to some far country. Both dress in the same clothes but would have to give different answers to the child-like question: Is it true? Nevertheless, my feeling is that the traveller's tale is the older form and that hearth drama is younger, and probably arose when human communities, about ten thousand years ago, began to settle on the fields they were just then learning to cultivate; and that the form is declining now that so many communities are no longer attached to any particular place on the earth. It may be that the incessant mobility that characterized most of the first two hundred millennia of our sojourn on the planet as homo sapiens is returning. I'm not suggesting that we will all become nomads. The new mobility could be virtual as much as spatial or geographical, recalling the global village that Marshall McCluhan anticipated, figured as the vast realm of cyberspace where we can wander endlessly everywhere for what seems like forever.
This brings me back to doubt and wonder. And their always ambiguous relationship to simple truth-I wonder? I doubt? They are binary, clearly one expresses a possibility, the other its obverse, its impossibility; but both are provisional. She loves me, she loves me not . . . is another example of these twinned im/possibilities and they are also the engine of narrative writing of all kinds, both fictional and non-fictional. In the contained and consciously artificial world of the conventional novel you most often keep reading in order to find out if . . . or not . . . such and such will happen. In fiction of this kind we are always involved with a future but that future is determined, we know it has an end; and also, we believe, an end that will be comprehensible to us on some level. Because the author, like God, has had that foreknowledge.
But if we turn this kind of query to bear onto the so-called real world, or to an examination of the past, or of whatever the future might be, immediately the inquiry will turn into a quest that cannot have any sure end to it. We ask did such and such happen? Or not? Or will it? And we pursue the question to the limits of knowledge without ever being sure that we have the answer. These kind of inquiries actually obtain their power from the fact that they are quests that cannot yield definitive answers. The important thing is to activate the reader's own experiences of doubt and wonder; to bring them to believe and to disbelieve at the same time; to persuade them to inhabit, however briefly, Darwin's resting places for the imagination, like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch . . .
Furthermore, when we rewrite the past, as we constantly do, that is also a rewriting of both the present and the future. There's a name for this, it's called retrospective prophecy and it means that when we unearth something we didn't know about before, that changes everything that comes after the discovery. These discoveries might be intimate and personal, as when a person finds out that he or she is adopted; or they might be global, for example the announcement of the discovery of tiny humans on Flores in 2004, which threw the carefully constructed family tree of our kind into a disarray that it has not yet recovered from. The latest view on the small people of Flores, arrived at from an examination of their wrist bones, is that they represent the first migration of humankind out of Africa, of an Australopithecine type species earlier in time than ourselves and also earlier than our predecessors, Home erectus. That is, we are the third not the second species to set out from Africa for the ends of the earth; and before us there were first the little people, then the giants.
I'll finish with an idea from a book called On Deep History & the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail. Smail is a historian from California who believes we have somehow forgotten most of our history on this planet. He points out that although we no longer believe in the chronology of the Book of Genesis, our histories still begin in a Garden of Eden which, while not actually biblical, still partakes of biblical time scales. In other words, our belief that civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt and perhaps one or two other places where agriculture was practiced, cities were built and writing began, continues to promote the myth of Eden, while ignoring the one hundred and ninety thousand years of human history previous to that. It is often assumed that during that huge period of time our forebears were grunting around doing nothing much at all; but this is the period when language was invented, when art began to be made, when the first observations of the heavens were recorded, when we colonized the globe. It is also when our immemorial bonds of love and fealty to the earth and to each other were first forged.
Smail proposes a different model, one in which there is an always dynamic relationship between mind, body and environment; rather than a species with a caveman mentality shackled to a space age technology, he suggests we own a mind and body that have been evolving over those last two hundred thousand years and will continue to do so. Some of this evolution-which he calls neurohistory-can be recovered in ways I can't go into now; but the gist of it is the exciting idea that this dynamic process, this evolution of our neurohistory, is continuing as we speak. He points to specific examples and alleges that one of the engines of change is our human propensity to use mind and body altering chemicals for pleasure or recreation: To acknowledge the role of psychotropic mechanisms in the development of human societies is to see that what passes for progress in human civilization is often nothing more than new developments in the art of changing body chemistry. As such we are the agents of our own changing nature and so must take responsibility for the ways in which we are changing ourselves.
This is a stimulating way to look at the past, a retrospective prophecy that allows us to read our own history as an account of how we have changed ourselves in the pursuit of various goals, which might include getting a tattoo or buying some jewellery as much as drinking coffee or taking cocaine; shopping as much as exercising until the endorphins start to flow; theatre as much as blood sports like rugby or rugby league; going out dancing as much as the making of art. On an individual level we might call this process entertainment but we might also call it soul making; at the species level it is something that we've hardly started thinking about yet. McCluhan's work is one place where that kind of thought unfolds and so, earlier, is that of the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, almost forgotten now but very influential in the 1930s and 40s. My parents had a falling apart paperback copy of Last and First Men that I read as a teenager and have never forgotten. It recounts the history of our evolution through seventeen distinct species of human subsequent to ourselves, and ends up many millions of years into the future with the eighteenth men on Neptune.
To reiterate, our evolution has not stopped, it continues in the interaction of our minds and bodies with the natural world, with the artificial environments we build, the multifarious activities we pursue, the substances we take, the stories we tell . . . and among those substances and activities, those artificial environments, we must include what may be the most mind-changing artefact of all, the book. In books the primary means of change is not physical but mental; books attempt to find a way of changing consciousness. And especially those books, both fiction and non-fiction, that have the open-endedness which is the defining quality of a good read. We are all mental travellers and one of the ways in which we travel is through the medium of books; in that travel we doubt and wonder in equal degrees; and when we return home, if we ever do, we will find ourselves changed.