What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

By the late Victorian era, letter-writing and journal-keeping were highly evolved, but as one reaches back through time, before the Penny Post, the evidence of daily life thins out. By the time you reach the beginning of the seventeenth century, you are reliant on a handful of well-off and well-connected individuals, often aristocratic, with leisure to record quotidian existence or the goings-on at court. On the Barn’s bookshelves were a dozen biographies of Shakespeare, and another thirty covering the lives of other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. These books contrived to convey a fair degree of intimacy with their subjects. But Shakespeare’s case can stand for the rest. We still know very little about him. The cultivation and examination of the self, as represented by the character of Hamlet – a revolutionary moment in world literature – had yet to be translated into a general habit of reflective journal-keeping. Handwritten letters tend to get lost. Though printing technology existed, there were no newspapers that took an interest in the lives and thoughts of mere playwrights. The author interview was a long way off. Traces of Shakespeare’s existence are mostly to be found in public records. He bequeathed centuries of dispute. He was an atheist, no, a Catholic. He kept a much-loved second ‘wife’ in London. He travelled to Poland. He didn’t write those plays.

However, our biographers, historians and critics, whose subjects were active from about 2000 onwards, are heirs to more than a century of what the Blundy era airily called ‘the cloud’, ever expanding like a giant summer cumulus, though, of course, it simply consisted of data-storage machines. We have inherited almost two centuries of still photography and film. Hundreds of Francis Blundy lectures, interviews and readings were recorded and remain available by way of the Nigerian internet. All his newspaper and magazine reviews and profiles exist in digital form. In 2004, when the Blundy phones became cameras, pictures of the Barn, its interior and the surrounding countryside proliferated. Neither he nor Vivien was active on social media accounts, but they sent thousands of digital messages during the later years of their lives. These track daily trivia, give an accurate record of friends and acquaintances, of poems completed, and trace the rise and dip of mood. They tell us of Vivien’s sorrows and regrets and all she wanted to let her sister Rachel and close friends know about them. We too can watch the daily news that troubled her contemporaries, the diverting scandals, the ancient sporting triumphs. We know everything that passed between Francis and his agent, publishers and translators, accountant, doctor and solicitor. Even his and Vivien’s browsing habits are now obtainable. Messages sent by end-to-end encryption have been laid bare. As our dean once said in a speech, ...

The peace could be wrecked by the whine of a chainsaw or the scream of a low-flying jet from the nearby military airbase, but on various points of the compass were the distant steeples and Norman towers of village churches almost a thousand years old, and across the landscape lay a jealously preserved latticework of old footpaths that ran through woods, across the last remaining meadows, alongside impure streams. They too, in theory, could have been rescued one day. As long as one stayed out of towns and cities, there was a continuity which must have shaped the understanding of a poet, and which is not available to us today. Too many absolute ruptures, cultural and physical, cut us off from Shakespeare. The Blundys and their contemporaries lived with a sense of proximity to him which they took for granted and which we can never recover by digital means.

Interesting to note that in the mid-2030s, ‘the Derangement’, respectfully capitalised, came into general usage as shorthand for the usual list of global heating’s consequences – a litany that wearied activists and sceptics alike. The term suggested not only madness but the vengeful fury of weather systems. There was also a hint at collective responsibility for our innate cognitive bias in favour of short-term comfort over long-term benefits. Humanity itself was deranged. The term did not stretch to include the related Metaphysical Gloom – the collapse of belief in a future, or more specifically, the fading of a belief in progress.

First-year students of literature or history who come to our department at the University of the South Downs have no interest in history. They prefer things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture. The few that make the effort are surprised to discover how approachable the past is, and how easy it is to understand the voices of historical figures. We like to tell them that their surprise should be all the greater. Writing in the late twentieth century, the poet James Fenton made the same point. Poetry and prose from the mid-sixteenth century onwards could be read without a dictionary. So, in Fenton’s and Blundy’s time there was already a continuous, 450-year tradition of comprehensible literature in English. That continuity, of course, stretches to include us. We on our sleepy overlooked archipelago-republic are the proud inheritors of that tradition. We introduce the students to Wyatt’s most famous poem, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. They have little trouble understanding that ageless refrain of low and high culture – she loved me, now she doesn’t. Always a good moment then to introduce the kids to the pleasures of rhyme royal and the joys of the iambic pentameter. We teach the orthodoxy, as demanded by the dean, but no one really believes that iambs form the basic rhythm of natural spoken English – look at all the trochees in this sentence. By their stresses, even iambs are trochees. That’s another matter – and there are ...

We discuss with our students the causes of this constancy in the language. There are various theories as to why we are at a virtual standstill. The department prefers the view that the past, in print and on the internet, has such accumulated weight that it holds our utterances steady, even as it comes close to crushing us. What has happened in English is also observed in Arabic and Chinese. That the past teaches us how to speak and write is the emphatic version of this view. In English, approximately 30,000 classics of literature, television and film press in on us, with more to be rediscovered. Vastly more numerous are the barely lesser works. In literature and the performing arts, the modes of transmission have changed, but most works are in the business of expressing or investigating the human lot, and these are just the fictional domain. There are even more classics of documentary, history, nature and science writing, biography, politics, anthropology, on and on, a bottomless well of treasures. Then all the highly informative trash, as well as diplomatic traffic, legislation, trade agreements, pornography, legal business, instruction manuals, industrial regulations and, beyond those, billions if not trillions of ordinary everyday digital personal exchanges, of fads and viral wonders, scandals and abuses and the torrent of each day’s news. It is hard now to regret that artificial intelligence did not add substantially to the pile before man-made disasters slowed its pro...

I’ve often dreamed of making an Atlantic crossing, if I ever had the funds. From what I’d heard, as soon as these passengers landed in America they would need to pay for the protection of a local warlord. The politics were complicated. Various armies and their offshoots were fighting to inherit the spirit and legitimacy of a glorious imperial past.

He listened to the fifteenth but could not be moved. When it ended, he sat in silence with the rest. The poem was accomplished, he was sure, but he could not eliminate a thread of dark feeling which he identified, as the applause began, as contempt. He clapped all the harder.

John administered an anaesthetic and sedative, phoned Tony to tell him he would be late home, scrubbed up and set to work with special cement, repairing what he could of the broken, feathery bones of the vertebrae, then stitching the wounds. He worked for two hours, seized by a familiar passion, when rescuing a particular animal stood in for all that was important in his life: keeping his struggling practice together, maintaining his loving relationship with Tony – the best thing that had ever happened to him – and doing his best for his younger brother, who suffered from MS. The three elements of his existence were grafted into the body of a serpent, and therefore she had to be returned to full health. It drove him on, this mode of metaphorical thinking – and it often worked. The couple, Sam and Jackie Bryant, came the next day to check, and again a week later to take the patient home in a grass-lined aquarium, into their convalescent care. He wrote out instructions on diet and the rest. Earthworms would have to do. A month later they were back and together, vet and clients, drove after work to Wytham woods. He chose a quiet corner away from the main tracks, and not far from a pond. For ten minutes the snake lay still before sliding slowly into the undergrowth. When its tail vanished at last, the trio gave a cheer. On the way back, they stopped at a Thameside pub, the Trout, for a celebratory beer. During drinks before dinner, it had bothered John when everyone had chuckl...

As Francis reached the end of his third sonnet, Mary Sheldrake, who had immediately thrilled to the poem, reflected as she had before, that poetry, not the novel, was literature’s indispensable form. The spoken or written poem was as old as literature, perhaps as old as speech, with roots in song, in the rhythms of daily life and the body’s pulse, in the hunger to catch the passing moment and to glorify love. It was not a generous concession she was making, but an uneasy one. Poetry, it was said, was the senior service. She had sat with novelists on onstage panels and contributed to the usual extravagant claims for her art, but it was the poets who made the book of life. The novel was the froth of recent centuries. It had developed to meet the needs of intelligent, privileged women excluded from formal education and meaningful work. Indeed, ‘work’ was the word Jane Austen and others used to describe womanly hours of incessant and pointless embroidery as they chatted about their neighbours. And so, Mary insisted, the novel grew into the paradigm of higher gossip. Love, marriage, adultery, contested wills – the stuff of neighbourly fascination. It took modernism to shake the novel up (Mary had no regard for Tolstoy or George Eliot) and offer it higher aspirations and bolder claims.

At this early stage, the students are not convinced. They cannot believe that pre-Inundation people of a mere century ago were at all like themselves. Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars. Behind this, though never stated, is the notion that they deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves. Most of our kids are well into their second year before they begin to accept that the men, women and children of the medium to distant past were once as real to themselves as we are. Until then, the students make little distinction between the tenth and twentieth centuries, between the Thirty Years War and the Third Sino-American War. Or between Mark Antony and Mark Twain.

Before the code was written for the Web, and then for email and social media, not even Samuel Pepys came close to the blizzard of humdrum diurnal doings to be found in our six cases.

Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of twentieth-century psychology. That did not stop people from relying on their own or from believing in the recollections of others, if it suited.

Long ago, as an undergraduate, I was required to adopt this approach. I was against it, even at the age of nineteen. I would tell my tutor that I wanted to write about a particular poem, not its reputation. Surely, it should be taken for granted that whatever I thought about the poem was an idea of the poem. I was not sufficiently informed or confident at that stage to make a good argument. I was easily swatted aside as a naïve empiricist. The only existence a literary work could have was in the minds of those who had read it – or, it should have been added, of those who had heard about it. My tutor tapped out the syllables on my sternum with, I remember, a long white finger: there is nothing else.

We are approaching the stasis of pre-modern days, when children could expect to live the lives of their parents and grandparents. Our relative isolation has enforced a form of peace, which some like me take to be stagnation. We cannot imagine how it was a hundred years ago, to experience the vertigo of accelerating change imposed by new technologies, by novel belief systems and by wars. People were blinded by the pace of events. They could not think clearly, even when there rose out of adversity some obvious benefits. It was repugnant to accept that the savagery of war had offered the possibility of a reprieve, a chance to correct the errors of the past.

The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.