CLIMATE FICTION(S) #1 - Une série de séminaires autour de la notion de « climate fiction »

Seminar n°1: Toward an Ethics of Receptivity: Reading Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World

Guest-Speaker:  Peter Mathews, Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau
Respondent: Christine Vandamme, Senior Lecturer at Grenoble Alpes University, ILCEA4

This seminar will examine the novel The Bell of the World by Gregory Day, an Australian author whose work has gained increasing recognition over the past few years as an important literary commentator on humanity’s relationship to the environment. At the start of his career, Day’s “Mangowak” trilogy of novels explored stories set along the southeast coast of Australia through a Catholic spirituality. His reputation began to grow when he published Archipelago of Souls in 2015, shortlisted for the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award, about a soldier who retreats to a small Australian island, emotionally damaged after spending the war resisting the Nazis in Crete. His fifth novel, A Sand Archive (2018), is about an engineer, F. B. Herschell, who is charged with stabilizing the soil along the southeast coast to allow the construction of the now-famous Great Ocean Road. This task takes him to France in the 1960s where, between witnessing mass demonstrations and falling in love with his host’s daughter, he studies sand-dunes along the French coast, bringing back with him a species of grass to Australia. Despite the success of this venture, he increasingly comes to regret his decision, as the kind of grass he used is intrusive and does not suit the Australian environment. The novel is not only a powerful meditation on how change, both social and environmental, shapes the lives of its characters, but it was also a major critical success: it was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, and won the Patrick White Literary Award. Day also won the Nature Conservancy Australia Nature Writing Prize in 2021.

In this seminar on Day’s latest novel, The Bell of the World, we will start by considering with Day’s decision to go against the conventional tendency to tell stories about the environment that look to the future, while emphasizing the necessity and urgency of action to avoid disaster. The Bell of the World, by contrast, asks the reader to look back rather than forward: the story’s two main arcs are set, firstly, in the years just before World War I, and secondly, sometime in the 1960s. In a similarly counter-intuitive manner, Day’s metaphor of the “bell of the world” emphasizes the importance of receptivity over action as the first and most crucial step toward establishing harmony with the environment. Finally, a rereading of modernism is crucial to understanding Day’s novel, with a particular focus on the book’s references to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Tom Collins’s Such is Life (1904), and the experimental music of John Cage, who appears as a fictionalized version of himself in the novel. Taken together, these three starting points – looking back to the past, learning to how to listen, and reinterpreting modernism – will provide a critical matrix for reading and understanding this powerful novel about humanity’s relationship to the environment in the context of climate change.