Introduction
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Introduction This thesis provides me with an opportunity to combine two interests, firstly, my concern for the environment, and secondly, my personal interest in British literature and comedy, and more specifically the work of comedian and novelist Ben Elton. Today, environmental change is a hot issue (excusez le mot), and linking it with English literature, or rather British comedy in particular, will hopefully provide an original and productive meeting between two frameworks. I intend to shed a fresh light upon a global problem about which a great deal has already been said, and remains to be said. Another reason why I have chosen this subject is the fact that the environment, and especially its change, has become a prominent issue over the past decades. Climate Change or Global Warming and related issues such as air pollution, the hole in the planet’s protective ozone layer, the harmful effects of acid rain, the disappearance of snow on permanently frosted slopes, the melting of polar ice-caps, the subsequent rise of the sea level, the overcutting of the world’s last remaining great forests, the loss of topsoil and groundwater, the overfishing and toxic poisoning of the oceans, the fact that we are drowning in our own garbage, the increasing rate of extinction of plant and animal species. the potential danger of UV-rays,… all of these things and their apocalyptic potentialities have become an ever- increasing aspect of worry for many people over the past twenty to thirty years. In the seventies and eighties environmental concern was primarily the domain of young subcultures such as hippies and punks. Yet the winds have been turning for quite some time now. ‘Ordinary’ households across the globe are expressing their concern, and, more importantly, this concern has been institutionalised. Political measures have already been introduced in order to contain the problem and international conferences have resulted in agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol. The environment is accordingly receiving attention in today’s media. Not only are there more news reports about it, there are also an increasing number of novels containing an environmental theme published each year, and this environmental frenzy did not go unnoticed by Hollywood either. Films such as The Day After Tomorrow and An Inconvenient Truth display an apocalyptic vision of a very near future, due to man’s lack of respect for the environment. 1 During my research for this thesis, I was quite surprised to see that there is in fact, to this day, a heated debate going on about the climate and the role of mankind in its change. Subsequently, I could not help but notice that the modern media today only provides very one-sided reports on this matter. What is going on? As I will explain in detail, the discussion on whether the environment is actually going to waste or not has been abandoned or ignored (cf. chapter one) and replaced by the seemingly overall agreement that man is the one to blame. The only debate that still seems to be conducted is when this ecological point of no return will occur. The question is no longer ‘if’, but ‘when’. And the opinions on when this apocalypse will occur, vary greatly. This ice-age could even start next summer, or any other given moment in the next hundred years […] Realistically this means that the threat posed by the ice lessens the average lifespan of every human on this planet by several years. […] Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Nepal, and New- Zealand are countries that are in danger of being completely or almost completely destroyed by land-ice. 1 (my translation - S.V.) These are the words of a BBC documentary from 1974. And these are the words of Al Gore in the 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth: For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man- made global warming, starting around in the seventies and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now. (…) The scientists are virtually screaming from the rooftops now. The debate is over! There's no longer any debate in the scientific community about this. But the political systems around the world have held this at arm's length because it's an inconvenient truth, because they don't want to accept that it's a moral imperative.2 1BBC 1974, as quoted in: Karel Beckman, Het Broeikaseffect Bestaat Niet. De mythe van de ondergang van het milieu. Amsterdam 1999. p.15 2 Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, Paramount 2006 2 Quite in opposition to what Al Gore tells us, there still exists a heated debate within the scientific community today. Exemplary of this is the 2007 documentary film The Great Global Warming Swindle. The film brings together sceptical scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus regarding human-caused (or anthropogenic) global warming. The film claims that in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore has misrepresented the data, and that the actual relationship between carbon dioxide and the temperature is the other way round (that is, rise in temperature causes an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The film implicitly accuses An Inconvenient Truth of manipulating scientific data to meet political ends. The health of the planet we live on concerns us all, but in a world of terrorism, cancer, spin doctors and viewer ratings, in short, in a world in which fear sells, it is best to adopt a sceptical stance, to do one’s own research and to try and draw one’s own (careful) conclusions. For the reader’s sake, I must add that there is a lack of academic sources concerning Ben Elton3. This is due to his not being a writer of ‘literature’. At first, this seemed somewhat of a disadvantage, especially when writing a thesis primarily concerned with his writings. But in time, I came to regard this as an advantage. I do not envy those who write about the work of a classic, great author, such as Shakespeare. Their notepads or screens can never be blanc. Literally thousands of other people’s ideas must unequivocally and endlessly echo within the paper. It is difficult to make a contribution in a field where the soil has been exhausted. There is too little breathing space left for new ideas to take root. I am probably one of the first students of English to tackle environmental literature, and to boot link it with Ben Elton. Especially from chapter three onward, some of my secondary literature may even appear far- fetched to the reader, but he or she should remember that I chose to contribute something to a new field of interest, instead of selecting one of those often-treaded paths, solidly worn out in the concrete of seasoned ideas. There is surprisingly little academic interest in ecology from a literary point of view. Luckily, one publication has recently given a strong new impulse towards more research in this virginal field of interest. The link between literature and ecology has been made by Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty. From the 1980s onward, she has been pursuing an interest in 3 This excludes website and newspaper articles 3 ecology, while remaining a literary professional. She coined the concept of ecocriticism. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artefacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman.4 Glotfelty has edited and published an anthology of ecocritical essays in 1996 under the title The Ecocriticism Reader, Landmarks in literary ecology. She was the first American academic whose appointment included ’literature and the environment’.5 As Love points out, our society has been faced with three crises in the last thirty years: civil rights, women’s liberation, and environmental degradation. All three have become subject of widespread social concern. The discipline of English has addressed the concerns of civil rights, equality for minorities, and women’s liberation through widespread attention and no small amount of action in such crucial areas as hiring and promotion practices, literary theory and criticism, and canon-formation. Race, class, and gender are the words which we see and hear everywhere at our professional meetings and in our current publications. But curiously enough, the English profession has failed to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment, the acknowledgement of our place within the natural world and our need to live heedfully within it, at peril of our very survival.6 I am convinced that the new and rapidly growing field of literary ecology, in its crossing of the boundaries between the humanities and the sciences, has a bright future ahead of it. The facts and fictions of climate change, and the overblown debate surrounding it, will be my object of attention in the first chapter of this thesis, entitled Apocalypse Now? This chapter will serve as a reference frame for the rise of a fairly recent phenomenon, namely the publication of novels primarily concerned with ecology. A few terms denoting this phenomenon are nature writing(mostly concerning non-fiction), eco-fiction (Robinson7), eco- 4 Cheryll Glotfelty, Introduction, Literary studies in an age of environmental crisis.