Half a lifetime ago, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan popularised the idea of the global village. Since then it has been a favoured cliché for millions of journalists and pundits. Before the credit crisis, cheerleaders of the Washington consensus talked ad nauseam of the pleasures of the free market, the joys of having beef from Argentina and wine from France in the supermarket, and how the hi-tech Lexus enhanced the charms of the olive tree. These miracles of commerce were unquestionably desirable, providing you could afford them.
The dream of a world linked by markets was meant to last forever, or at least as long as the wealthy countries could determine what future the rest would have. In changed circumstances, however, when the apostles of conspicuous consumption are forced to take account of swine flu, nuclear proliferation and a resurgent Taliban, the interconnected planet can appear dangerously cosmopolitan. Perhaps the decoupling of economies and markets, the separation of countries and races isn’t such a bad idea after all. Strident nationalists in Europe and America love to frame their arguments this way: Better the homeland you know, however guarded and inward-looking, than the global village you don’t.
JMG Le Clézio, the current Nobel laureate for Literature, is a striking example of how much gets lost in these simplifications. At a literary festival in New York earlier this week, Le Clézio explained how his ongoing fascination with “interculturality” arose from the circumstances of his unusually varied life. As the son of a colonial official who moved around the ruins of Europe’s empires, he learned firsthand how complex and inter-connected different cultures had become through the shocks of history. A child of French parents, he learned Creole in Mauritius. In Cameroon a District Officer taught him how to listen for gorillas thumping on their chests; elsewhere, he watched “the troops of Field Marshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seeking a passage to the north of Italy and Austria.”
In later life, as a widely travelled man of letters, Le Clézio kept noticing profound and often surprisingly subtle connections between different landscapes and cultures. Sadly, many of these likenesses were obscure to those who lived entirely within a single culture. But to Le Clézio the echoes were unmistakable. Having watched the colonial French boss African workers around, he intuitively understood the world of William Faulkner, but as a victim of war he also understood the marginalization which engaged Camus and Fanon. After early experiments with literary form, the world’s hidden dialogue with itself became one of Le Clézio’s great themes.
In his Nobel lecture, Le Clézio spoke of the danger of “the idea [put forward by the writer Stig Dagerman] that literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas and images that remain foreign to the vast majority.” He mentioned the need for “spread[ing] the word to all those who have been excluded, to invite them magnanimously to the banquet of culture.” That need can easily be ‘misunderestimated,’ and was, in the years of the second George Bush. During that time, a smaller and smaller fraction of humanity overwhelmed the conversation and disinvited several of the few who were lucky enough to be at the banquet of culture in the first place. In the last decade, literature has become the cultural preserve of a tiny portion of humanity and only a small fraction of that fraction are actively engaged in the political life of their societies. In the early ’90s, in the wake of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the American writer Don DeLillo warned presciently that “the men who shape and influence human consciousness are the terrorists.” Less dramatically, but often just as perniciously, we have allowed our consciousness to be reshaped by politicians who simplify the planet into easy constituencies, or economists who reduce whole continents to statistical trends and trade balances. Writers and artists who argue for a more inclusive vision are little candles of hope throwing limited beams against the darkness, like Shakespeare’s good deeds in a naughty world.
Only connect, wrote EM Forster, hauntingly. Connect the passion with the prose and life can make sense. When we summon the imagination to connect with the distant poor, with strange sounding refugees and war victims, then the underlying truth of the “global village” cliché no longer seems stale and dispensable. These connections restore the world to its full complexity and they allow us to understand ourselves anew. A single passage from Le Clézio, read by the writer Adam Gopnik at the end of their hour-long conversation in New York, will serve to illustrate the force of this insight. It is worth quoting in its entirety: “I am not alone. I know a thousand times over that I am not alone. I only exist, physically, intellectually, morally, because of millions of others who exist and have existed around me. This isn’t an abstract idea, it’s a slice of life, a simple part of reality.
And to those others I owe everything, absolutely everything: my name, my address, my nose, my skin, the colour of my hair, my life and my most secret thoughts, my dreams, and even perhaps the place and hour of my death. And in the same manner that I’ve been formed, I form and I make, I am at the same time father, brother, friend, creator, destroyer. Murderer? Who knows. To be born is to be plunged into a small universe, where the relations are without number, where each detail, each second that passes, is important and leaves its traces.”
