A Lesson for (and From) a Dystopian World - Rowan Williams - NYT's The Stone .

A Lesson for (and From) a Dystopian World

By Rowan Williams, May 24, 2019

Throughout his life, the American writer Russell Hoban produced a number of startlingly original novels. Perhaps the most startling of them all is “Riddley Walker,” first published in 1980. (Hoban died in 2011.)

The book belongs to the dystopian genre that has become fairly popular in recent decades. What makes it unlike any other is its language — a version of English as it might be spoken by people who had never seen words or place names written down, an idiom among the ruins of half-remembered scientific jargon, folklore and garbled history.

In the post-apocalyptic universe created by Hoban, words create ripples of meaning, echoes reaching into the heart of language and thought through a thick fog of cultural trauma and loss. People live in the shadows of the myth of Eusa, a character modeled after St. Eustace, the Roman general who, according to the legend, converted to Christianity after having a vision of Christ between the antlers of a stag.

In the myth, the ill-intentioned “Mr Clevver” encourages Eusa — whose name deliberately echoes “U.S.A.” — to hunt for the Addom that “runs in the wud,” the woods (but also the “would,” a reference to human desire and will). When Eusa finds the Addom (standing for both a split atom and a mortally wounded and divided “Adam”), he tears him apart, causing everything in the world to be devastated in a nuclear explosion.

At the center of the novel is Riddley Walker, the narrator and protagonist of the story — the vessel through which Hoban reflects on the forces that rule nature and human life.

Just a teenage boy, Riddley is reeling from the sudden death of his father when he stumbles upon a secret plot to recreate the weaponry that wrecked the world. At one point, he finds himself among the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral — “Stoan branches unner a stoan sky,” stone branches under a stone sky.

Here he is reduced to inarticulacy by what he sees and senses. What he believes he is encountering is power, the living force of the natural forest that the stone branches echo in their shapes. For the cathedral’s builders to have been able to produce such an effect, Riddley recognizes, they must have “put ther selfs right” with the “girt dants,” the great dance at the root of the world’s life.

Riddley feels growing in him the imperative to let go of the attempt to oppose power with power. “THE ONLYES [onliest] POWER IS NO POWER” is the message he hears: Approaching the world’s living energy with the goal of enforcing our control over it is the beginning of that destructive process that reaches its climax in the nuclear apocalypse.

But the threat of disaster must always have been there, he realizes, from the very first human attempts to find and to speak order in the world. Even Canterbury, from the moment of its creation, bore within itself the potential for corruption. “May be soons [as soon as] that 1st stoan tree stood up the wrongness hung there in the branches of it.”

And yet, human beings still have the ability to put themselves right with the power that lies around them. Such ability depends on their readiness to loosen their grip on the world that is crushed and torn by the force of their holding. Only in doing so they can achieve a fusion of natural and human energy, and a beauty that is so intensely harmonious that it hurts.

It is anything but a passive response to the world. It requires our own focused attention, listening for the flow of life to discover an energy that pulls together and not apart. This is what human power is when it is “put right”: an alignment with nature that, rather than being destructive, leaves behind the violent battles for control and domination.

Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

We regularly think about power in the context of rivalry and contested space, as the element that allows us to realize our projects without being hindered by other agents. Hoban invites us instead to imagine power in terms of convergence and alignment, not as the expression of individual capacities in lethal competition.

To be clear: I am not talking about encouraging the powerless to abandon any hope for some measure of control over their lives. The hope that all may find the power to speak for themselves is fundamental to a healthy society. But such a hope is illusory if it is simply the desire to reverse existing patterns of control to our advantage.

Today, global politics is trapped in zero-sum games, and the massive menace of a climate crisis is as terrifying a prospect as the nuclear horrors described in “Riddley Walker.” It is time for us to look unmercifully at our expectations of limitless economic growth — a fantasy that will eventually strip us of all power to manage our environment.

We must step back from the feverish language now prevalent in politics, where opposition is increasingly absolute and there is no room for compromise. We must search for ways of giving voice to and empowering the most vulnerable people among us, and to say goodbye to a world ruled by unaccountable elites. And we must create effective global vehicles of cooperation in the face of crises that do not recognize national boundaries — from climate change to disease outbreaks, to forced migrations prompted by diseases, ecological disasters and bloody civil wars.

Time is running out. Unless we reimagine the power we seek for ourselves in terms of solidarity and compassion, our future will be the wasteland of Russell Hoban’s fantasy.

Rowan Williams is the former archbishop of Canterbury.