The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities/Princeton University Press Lectures in European Culture

Martin Puchner

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691230429
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming. In Literature for a Changing Planet, Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it's too late.From the Epic of Gilgamesh and the West African Epic of Sunjata to the Communist Manifesto, Puchner reveals world literature in a new light—as an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change. Literature depends on millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the silicon of e-readers. Yet literature also offers powerful ways to change attitudes toward the environment. Puchner uncovers the ecological thinking behind the idea of world literature since the early nineteenth century, proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling.If we are to avoid environmental disaster, we must learn to tell the story of humans as a species responsible for global warming. Filled with important insights about the fundamental relationship between storytelling and the environment, Literature for a Changing Planet is a clarion call for readers and writers who care about the fate of life on the planet.

CHAPTER ONE

READING IN A WARMING WORLD

HOW SHOULD WE HUMANS narrate our self-made climate disaster? In a sense, we have been doing it all along. All great works of literature concern themselves with a world reshaped by human hands and are therefore potential sources for understanding the process by which humans have changed their environment. The only challenge is to learn how to read these works with a sustained attention to climate change. They don’t always yield to this kind of reading easily because they were not made for this purpose. Sometimes, they hide or sideline the traces of human-made climate change by defending the way of life that caused that change and by being unaware of climate change itself. Yet works of world literature can be made to yield their significance if we ask the right questions, focus on the right details, and embed those details in the larger societal processes that put us on our current, disastrous path.

To exemplify the kind of reading I have in mind, one inspired by ecocriticism, I want to begin with a source text of literature, arguably the first great work of world literature: the Epic of Gilgamesh. Its earliest form dates back more than four thousand years, but the work took on canonical form seven hundred years later, when it came to dominate an entire region for over a millennium. But then, some time before the Common Era, it disappeared, along with the cuneiform writing system in which it was written. By chance, the text was unearthed again two thousand years later, in the 1840s, by the restless adventurer Austen Henry Layard while he was digging for Nineveh, the biblical city once located on the Euphrates River.¹ Through luck and perseverance—and the reading of the Hebrew Bible—Layard hit upon the burnt-down library of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king who had collected the clay tablets that contained this ancient epic. (When Ashurbanipal’s library went up in flames, the clay tablets had hardened, inadvertently preserving this masterpiece for millennia underground.)

Finding the epic was one thing; reading it, another. It took another couple of decades to decode the forgotten cuneiform script, a feat that was achieved at the British Library, whither Layard had transported the tablets.² The deciphering of this text was headline news because this oldest surviving masterpiece contained shocking information for Victorian England: a text older than the Old Testament included an identical story of Noah and the Flood. What were Christian believers to make of this remarkable coincidence? What were the implications for the status of the Old Testament as holy scripture?

Today, the provocative potential of the story of the flood is undiminished, though for different reasons: I regard it as a key text when it comes to climate change.³

Despite the striking similarities, the two flood stories, in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the Hebrew Bible, are also quite different. In the Hebrew Bible, we read:

And the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth and that every scheme of his heart’s devising was only perpetually evil. And the Lord regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. And the Lord said, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth, from human to cattle to crawling thing to the fowl of the heavens, for I regret that I have made them.”⁴

As translated by Robert Alter, the flood is clearly presented as punishment: humans have been violating God’s commands, leading God to regret that he ever made them. He comes to view the creation of humans as a mistake that has to be undone. The mistake encompasses not just humans; all living creatures are apparently guilty by association and must be wiped out as well. It is only thanks to Noah, the one good man, that humans, along with all the other animals, survive.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the details of survival are similar: the Noah-like Utnapishtim builds a large boat, saves his family as well as the family of animals, sends out birds to see whether the waters are receding, and rejoices when one of them returns with a twig in its beak—these were the details so strikingly similar to the Bible that disturbed Victorian England.

Yet even if the details are similar, the moral of the story is different. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is not part of the main story but merely an interpolated tale told by Utnapishtim to Gilgamesh toward the end of the epic. Instead of framing the story as one of divine retribution, Utnapishtim begins his tale simply by saying that the gods had resolved to send a deluge, giving no reason as to why they had done so. One of the gods reveals the gods’ secret plan of destruction and instructs Utnapishtim to build a boat and safeguard samples of the world’s fauna. When the ordeal is over, a goddess accuses the great god Enlil of having brought on the deluge “irrationally.”⁵ To be sure, she concedes, in a purely hypothetical manner: “punish the wrongdoer for his wrongdoing, / and punish the transgressor for his transgressions / But be lenient.”⁶ However, she then suggests less extreme measures that would have been more appropriate: “Let the lion rise up to diminish the human race”; “Let the wolf rise up to diminish the human race”; “let famine rise up to wreak havoc in the land”; “let pestilence rise up to wreak havoc in the land.”⁷ The point here is not sin and punishment, but something closer to population control. The human race has grown too populous and needs to be culled. There are better ways of doing so than by destroying everything through a flood, the goddess is saying, and the epic confirms her point of view.

Despite the fact that we have now, once again, this second, earlier version of the Flood at our disposal, the biblical version continues to dominate. One reason may be that the debate about climate change tends to be charged morally with ideas of sin and punishment, transgression and retribution; another is, of course, that the Hebrew Bible is more influential than the Epic of Gilgamesh. Or are these the same reason? Biblical morality is shaping current thinking about the climate more than it should. True, one might argue that seeing climate change through a moral lens makes sense to the extent that human-made climate change is our fault. Perhaps we must even follow Noah and save ourselves by building a new ark (is this what Elon Musk is doing with his mission to Mars?). The question of agency and responsibility is everywhere, and the Old Testament seems to offer a powerful warning in the form of a morality tale as well as a solution.

Today, however, it is becoming clear that the religious fable of righteousness and sin is not effective in pinpointing cause and effect for human-induced climate change, nor in mitigating it. The righteous recycler who unplugs from the grid and lives a virtuous zero-emissions life will not save humans. If a story of the Flood is useful at all—and it may be better to jettison it entirely—the one from the Epic of Gilgamesh, less concerned with sin and punishment, and more with population control and the relation between humans and their environment, is probably better.

Mesopotamians, unlike inhabitants of arid Jerusalem, where the idea of a flood must have come as a surprise, experienced floods on a regular basis. Living between two large rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, they had been able to invent intensive agriculture because of the regular flooding that brought new soil and nutrients to their fields (the word Mesopotamia, in Greek, means “land between the rivers”). The problem was how to control these periodic floods. For this purpose, Mesopotamians created an elaborate system of canals, something that is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was the first attempt to control the environment by means of a large engineering project. The canals worked astonishingly well, until they didn’t, leading to inevitable flooding, which reminded humans, or should have reminded humans, that environmental engineering, then as now, had its limits and its risks. As more people settled in the fertile floodplains, more people were exposed to violent floods, beginning a high-stakes cycle that has continued to this day. Among many other things, the Epic of Gilgamesh is a warning against this form of hubris.

While the flood got all the original headlines, there are other, more trenchant parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh that speak to how settled humans construct their relationship to the environment. The epic begins with a crisis: a wild creature has been interfering with the natural order of things. It has destroyed human traps; it has filled in pits that are meant to catch wildlife; it has helped other animals escape from humans. One hunter has spotted the creature: it has fur all over its body, including a long mane on its head; it feeds on grass alongside gazelles and joins other animals at the watering hole.

The epic’s account of this wild creature is at least as significant, from an environmental perspective, as the flood. For this creature is actually some sort of a human, named Enkidu. We know this because he has been created by the gods specifically to rein in Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who doesn’t know what to do with his strength. Gilgamesh creates chaos by doing whatever he wants, which is mostly doing battle with men and raping women. Something has to change, so the gods have taken clay and molded Enkidu out of it. But for the time being, Enkidu lives with the animals and shuns human company. He is not quite human yet.

And so, the drama of how Enkidu can be brought into human society begins. He has to shave off his beard; he has to start wearing clothes; he has to start eating cooked foods; and he has to shun the company of other animals. This is accomplished by sending out a woman who seduces him. After the seduction, the other animals reject Enkidu, and he has no choice but to throw in his lot with humans. Once he is in human society, he befriends Gilgamesh (well, first they fight, then they make up) and learns how to eat bread and drink beer. Only then has Enkidu become fully human, and the epic can turn its attention to other topics, essentially becoming an adventure story of two friends going out into the world. It’s possible that they even become lovers.

What the Epic of Gilgamesh does here is draw a line between humans and nonhumans. Even if you are biologically a human being, you are not human as long as you live in the wilderness, as long as you graze, as long as you don’t reject the wilderness and settle down, as long as you don’t eat and drink the products of intensive agriculture, such as bread and beer, that have made settled life possible.

More specifically, what the epic draws between humans and humanlike wildlings isn’t a line: it’s a wall. Gilgamesh is famous for having rebuilt the wall around Uruk, the city over which he rules. The wall and the physical plant of the city are also what the Epic of Gilgamesh is visibly proud of. Before the main action begins, the Epic gives its readers a tour of the city:

He [Gilgamesh] built the walls of ramparted Uruk,

The lustrous treasury of hallowed Eanna!

See its upper wall, whose facing gleams like copper,

Gaze at the lower course, which nothing will equal,

Mount the stone stairway, there from days of old,

Approach Eanna, the dwelling of Ishtar,

Which no future king, no human being will equal.

Go up, pace out the walls of Uruk,

Study the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork.

Is not its masonry of kiln-fired brick?

And did not seven masters lay its foundations?

One square mile of city, one square mile of gardens,

One square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Ishtar’s dwelling,

Three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk!⁸

The passage reads like the script of an excited tour guide telling us where to look, explaining all the sights, praising what we see. It is a miracle, we are to understand, this ramparted city, a miracle made of clay. Clay is the material from which this city wall is made, kiln-fired bricks, and clay bricks are what the houses and temples are made of as well. Clay is such an important building material that the tour guide even mentions the clay pits from which this material is harvested.

This city, ramparted by clay bricks, is the world into which Enkidu has to be brought. It is here where wheat, harvested by clay sickles or flint, baked in clay pots, and stored in clay containers, is consumed, and where beer, stored in clay vessels, is brewed from barley. The wall that separates humans from animals separates the city from the country. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a text that celebrates urban living and dismisses the wilderness as unfit for human habitation.

There are lots of reasons to celebrate Uruk. The city was one of the first large urban centers in the world, concentrating as many as fifty thousand inhabitants into one small space. But to my ears, the celebration of urbanism undertaken in the epic also has a tinge of defensiveness about it—a tour guide’s exaggeration. One recent scholar has suggested that Gilgamesh’s impressive city wall was built as much to keep the good people of Uruk in as to keep wildlings such as Enkidu out.⁹ It is true that sedentary life reduced the diversity of foods, exposed inhabitants to droughts and floods, and le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preamble: Literature for a Changing Planet
• Chapter One: Reading in a Warming World
• Chapter Two: A Revolution in Accounting
• Chapter Three: The Two Faces of World Literature
• Chapter Four: How to Anthologize the World
• Chapter Five: Stories for the Future
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Notes
• Index