‘The cosmos and climate change; body and soul’
Megan Hunter at Greenwich Maritime Museum’s literary festival discusses the, ‘constant peril of climate change’, and explains, ‘I am concerned about it and I think about it and I am interested in writing about it’.
Hunter’s novella, ‘The End We Start From’ captures the zeitgeist of modern day parenting within the kernel of an environmental disaster. Childbirth in the advent of a post apocalyptical flood reconstructs a cosmos of body, mind, and two souls.
Climate change is cross-fertilised with theological myths about creation and an apocalyptic flood. Traditional myths are interwoven with modern issues, like two strands of a double helix, running through out the novel.
This tension forms the underlying conflict that drives the development of the protagonist’s feelings and emotions. The narrator is displaced in terms of soul, body, and country.
The narrator’s world is one where the English are refugees in Scotland; a scenario that addresses the present day refugee crises and the burning issue of climate change.
Displacement is key when decoding Hunter’s use of symbolism. The construction of her literary troupes and the narrator’s sardonic tone, is a self conscious critique of a learned narrator.
The novella’s strength is the narrator’s slim discern of postmodern theory with a reservation towards relying on classical thoughts and processes.
The narrator’s tone creates a level of complexity prevents a reader from reductive conclusions, without using post-modern literary techniques. Instead universal stages of life create the conflict and tension in this novella. Childbirth and motherhood are the inner conflicts.
‘I lay him next to me, and fall asleep with my nose pressed against his pulsing temple’
The displacement of a child leaving the mother’s womb and attachment formation is summarised through the material barrier of flesh and skin. However the spirit of attachment continues to paradoxically increase as a result of growth and separation.
Intimate moments between the narrator and Z create a cosmos within their own right. Like the double helix structure in the novella’s underlying conflict the external conflict (of being made a refugee) reduces as the narrator’s internal conflict, of adjusting to motherhood, subsides. Inherently, the external and internal conflicts that drive the plot, unravel until the cosmos of the physical world aligns with the forming cosmos and mesosphere of the narrator’s world.
Adjustment becomes a means of survival.
A new order, a new cosmos, a new life, dominates the novel and the role of the environment is both invisible and present.
‘I was in advertising.. the young using the language of the retired’.
The modern world becomes an arcane reality. The novella’s lacunaes in language, symbolism, and dialogue are an artistically bold move that reframes language with new borders, and another way in which Hunter unites form and meaning.
It’s an artistic decision that embodies the DNA of the novel’s conflict as Hunter’s descriptions celebrate the style of the past whilst moving to the future. Hunter’s language is elite and trendy with a neo-classical twist.
The novel is ahead of its time. Hunter’s characterisation of the narrator captures an ecologically concerned young mother. In the narrator’s world there are fluctuations in body, hormones, family, world and soul..
This is one of the reason why the linguistic gaps in the narrator’s language appears unfilled however on closer analysis an intellectual reading can fill the symbolic space; and the idealogical and thematic conflicts require the reader to swim.
The spaces are a representation of today’s mind body problem. Hunter adroitly navigates away from shouty individualism or aesthetic trappings. Instead as readers we are invited connect this unravelling cosmos into a new order.
Today’s modern day mind body problem can find its seismic shifts from Cartesian dualism. Early modern scientists, thinkers, and theologians mediated, counselled, and cogitated about how saving the growing theological crisis between the body and its, all too, free-spirited elusive soul.
The soul roamed between temple and church and found its way between the early modern neoclassical Doric columns and the colossal architecture of a Brave New World.
In the horizon there was an enlightenment that threatened to eclipse the soul’s enduring lucid appeal. But after the body and soul bifurcated the body kept the house, and the soul moved into vaulted canopies of the Gothic era.
In the Gothic Genre, literature expressed a reaction to Cartesian dualism. An ethereal presence of something intangible not quite leaving the material world, manifested in hybrid supernatural states; sleepwalking, possession, vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, and characters with displays of intense eerie energy.
The ideological deprecation had not been as amicable as hoped. And with no philosophical mediator in place, a very complicated piecemeal arrangement has substituted a vast spiritual plane, where the soul once lived.
The aftermath of Cartesian philosophy lead to a range of reactions explored and exploded in literary, artistic, and contemporary culture, and the reverberations have lasted for centuries.
A centre for cosmos, world, and the individual has become a zeitgeist. Today psychology connects the individual within themselves, sociology connects us with others and neuroscience and biology tells of the processes within ourselves.
The cynosure of an ontological insecurity that inhabits the centre of this vast and globalised brave new hyper speeded world is an area of importance and exploration. Literature expressing some of the greatest conflicts of our time. Hunter combines modern day climate change with motherhood in the middle of a refugee crisis. Cleverly a number of binary oppositions create this effect.
There is a microcosm of the human body and the macrocosm of the earth as a body. The ongoing realignment between the flood/ waters breaking, the swelling of the body/ the swelling of water on land show a world where current boundaries are no longer working. A world which is environmentally reached its threshold. The narrator inherits the loss but also inherits the hope of building a new world and a new life.
At the core of the novel’s simplicity and complexity is the incipient growth of optimism. The narrator’s displacement in a world that is now displacing its inhabitants is an example of how our actions with the environment will eventually impact not only us, but everyone else.
There is the unraveling of the dual conflicts throughout the novel like the double helix staircase of DNA and the unravelling of the strands and rungs give way to form a cosmos which is imbued with the Z’s spirit.
There is a recurring theme of the world of a child and the inner world of a mother and these two themes are recurring though out the book like the strands of DNA. There is also the central running dual conflict of the environment and the role of a mother. These strands of DNA runs through out the novel and unravels as the novel progresses, and in the process encodes the work with an elusive spirit of growth and hope.
The earth like DNA is unravelled and swollen with a need for a new start.
‘A dove was sent to see if the water left the face of the land, but she found no place for her foot’