Literature for a Changing Planet by Martin Puchner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literature for a Changing Planet by Martin Puchner Greg Brown Martin Puchner Literature for a Changing Planet Princeton. Princeton University Press. 2022. 160 pages. martin puchner's Literature for a Changing Planet is an urgent call for rereading the stories that have shaped our world. Human beings have reached a point of tremendous environmental influence, collectively. Our actions will shape the biosphere from here on. The humanities play a vital role in the way we see the planet, but without a clear vision, which history and literature can provide, we will meet the coming dangers blindly. Puchner argues there is value in reading world literature ecologically from literally the beginning: The Epic of Gilgamesh. From this most ancient text, he draws familiar themes of civilization versus wilderness. Anyone familiar with the work will remember the praise of civilization's values, the equation of wandering and exile with grief, and the seduction of the wild man, Enkidu, into society. Tracing the interaction between the built and wild environments across "a number of foundational epics," Puchner next moves to the Odyssey's famous scene: Odysseus's defeat of the cyclops Polyphemus. Once again, the text contrasts and praises the Greeks' settled ways of life with the different, uncivilized manners of the giants. Puchner highlights the rhetorical purpose of Odysseus's tale, told as it is to a court upon whose graces he depends. These stories of civilization versus the wilderness persist across times and cultures. Consistent with his global focus, Puchner turns to another origin of literacy, Mayan literature. An independent invention of writing, so rare and nearly obliterated as to be virtually unknown compared to readers familiar with Odysseus or even Gilgamesh, "the Popol Vuh includes an account of the creation of humans" completely separate from that of Mesopotamia. There are intriguing differences, such as how the reverence for clay in brick-making Uruk is absent in the Popol Vuh, written by a culture that worked in stone. Yet this elaborate epic of Mesoamerica arrives at similar themes regarding the value of settled life and reverence of the staple crops of its region, just as The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey do. The centrality of resource extraction to urban societies' most basic stories repeats across space and time, independently. Puchner argues that this reveals something fundamental. At this point, Literature for a Changing Planet introduces one of its most challenging assertions: writing is deeply complicit in resource-extractive ways of living. The ancient texts of the world arise from settled ways of life; they facilitate the organization of labor and participate in empire-building; they defend their societies from outside forces, including those humans who were still living in nomadic communities or otherwise at large; and they define the rest of nature as wildernesses. Thus, reading world literature ecologically requires reading it subversively, against its grain. This assertion remains central to Puchner's argument and culminates in "a reading protocol" of seven principles "[drawing] on the insights of both [world literature and ecocriticism]." These principles range from bearing in mind that we are reading works in "a medium that is complicit with, and therefore most likely defensive of, settled life and the resource extraction required to sustain it" to recalling that "neither the canons of world literature nor world literature anthologies are neutral tools." Puchner insists that the complicity of literature with the causes of climate [End Page 76] crises is not a reason to discard it, but rather to read it carefully and to make room for orality as well as written literature. Literature for a Changing Planet places the invention of world literature in Weimar, January 31, 1827, when Goethe is reported to have said "the era of world literature is at hand." The forces of industrialization, colonization, and incipient globalization make this moment possible, having put into Goethe's hands literature from across the globe. This fact complicates Puchner's praise of world literature as having a greater chance of healing nature than narrow nationalist literatures. It seems at first glance to be a paradox, just as the complicity of writing itself undermines its ability to address the problem. After all, farmer and philosopher Wendell...