Page 99 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

humans and other animals. At the end of Canadian/American Lydia Millet’s novel How

the Dead Dream (Soft Skull, 2007) a former stockbroker lies by a muddy riverbank

pressed against a lost young mammal, trying to love it like a mother, tentatively

imagining his way into its consciousness.

In any attempt to re-wild our literature the reader is essential as a co-creator of wildness.

Writers may de-centre the human in their work and push their own consciousness

elsewhere but the reader must notice the displacements and respond empathetically to

the live-ness of other elements: animal, vegetable, geological, meteorological. If the

reader doesn’t bring a reciprocal desire and attentiveness to her reading, the writer’s

attentions will not register. Larger, necessary cultural transformations require writers and

readers to engage in this process together.

Repetition is a strategy of trauma, a way of calling attention to the traumatized place that

needs to change but can’t. Stories use repetition to enact change. Narrative power

arises when the element that returns alters. In this way, stories enact hope. They

contain, structurally, the possibility of change and the opportunity to see anew. Through

stories we can create a world with radical and ever-extending forms of empathy that also

make space to acknowledge all that we don’t know of the world around us.