POWER

I was lucky enough to be directed this week to an interview with novelist Ann Pancake in The Georgia Review that let me build upon the thoughts I discussed in my post from October, entitled POLITICS. That post centered around the political decisions we all make on a daily basis and around questions about writers and their responsibilities as public figures. I read Pancake's novel, Strange as This Weather Has Been, shortly after it was published some years ago and it remains one of the most important books I have ever read. It is far and away one of the better books of and about the Appalachian region. It is also a singularly important exploration through fiction of the devastating impacts of mountaintop-removal mining, not only on the landscape and natural habitat, but on the human beings who live directly in its shadow and on the communities they have built. I have also read no other author who so perfectly captures in her work the Appalachian dialect. It is a difficult thing to write, a way of speaking that is hard to authenticate in printed form. It must be heard and felt and Ann Pancake gets it right.

Take a few minutes to read the interview here and also her essay published in the same issue of The Georgia Review here.

There are a couple of things in Pancake's essay that especially struck me and that also hit upon issues that we have spent much time discussing here before. One, the unique and powerful way that fiction can create empathy. This was an important factor in her decision to approach the issue of mountaintop-removal mining in the form of a novel and not as a work of nonfiction. 

"I started to perceive the unique abilities literature, including fiction, has to educate, move, and transform audiences that are possessed by no other medium, including reportage and documentary . . . It's not easy to actually feel, with our hearts, with our guts, overwhelming abstract problems that don't directly affect us, especially now, with so many catastrophes unfolding around us, and it's tough to sustain compassion for the nameless souls struggling with those catastrophes. But we do have great capacity to empathize with the personal stories of individuals."

It is one thing to say the practices used to extract a resource like coal are simply part of the cost of having the luxury and convenience of electricity, to see the issue in stark black and white or purely pragmatic terms. It is quite another to see and understand the people in those places where it is happening as individuals and as human beings with the same needs and fears that we ourselves carry. Fiction provides a space in which we can be fully immersed in the sufferings of others in a way that lets us imagine clearly our own suffering.

 "Pushing a little deeper into the relationship between literature and the imagination, I want to point out, too, the way literature -- both the reading of it and the writing of it -- can reunite an individual's conscious and unconscious . . . our very business as artists is trafficking between the conscious and the unconscious . . . "

And here is where she really gets me.

" . . . I'll propose that artists are also translators between the visible and invisible worlds, intermediaries between the profane and the sacred. How is this pertinent to the case I'm making for art's ability to create change in the world? Only by desacralizing the world, over centuries, have we given ourselves permission to destroy it. Conversely, to protect and preserve life we must re-recognize its sacredness, and art helps us do that. Literature re-sacralizes by illuminating the profound within the apparently mundane, by restoring reverence and wonder for the everyday, and by heightening our attentiveness and enlarging our compassion." 

I underline that last statement because it encapsulates for me the truth of why all art, but most especially literature, is so important. Later in the piece she refers to writers as the mythmakers of human history. It is and has been the writers among us who tell our stories, the most important ones, the stories that define us and give meaning to our being, the stories that bridge that ghostly gap between our profane physical world and the unknown sacred one.What a way to talk about the work a writer does. And, what a way to make us think of the sheer power of telling stories.