WHOSE RAW MATERIALS?

The new provincial literatures

by Daisy Hildyard

In the early spring of 2020, a few weeks before the first pandemic lockdown, I read an interview in the newspaper that changed the way I felt about the future. The architect Rem Koolhaas was discussing an exhibition he was about to open at the New York Guggenheim, but he didn’t sound like a man on a promotional junket more like a self-proclaimed prophet, holding forth. He was talking about the conditions of the planet today, and his conviction was that the countryside, not the city, has become the location of “truly radical change.” Urban life has nothing new to show us: every city looks the same, “a predictable accumulation of roads, towers, icons”; meanwhile, out there on the 98% of the earth’s surface that is not occupied by cities, things are more volatile, speculative, “profoundly unfamiliar.”

At the Guggenheim, the exhibit “Countryside, The Future” featured stories of these places, from across the planet. German ghost villages repopulated by Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Robots cleaning the contaminated fields of Fukushima. A colossal greenhouse complex, 30 times the size of Manhattan, in eastern China. An ecological buffer zone in a Ugandan National Park, planted with species that are designed to deter humans and gorillas from encroaching on one another’s home territories. An indoor dairy in the Qatari desert. In this world, at the brink of ecological and social crisis, Koolhaas argues, the countryside is diverse, inventive, and spacious. It’s the place to find a way forward.

I found these ideas unsettling. I’d always accepted the conventional associations: cities are modern, while the countryside looks to the past. I grew up in a village in the north of England, and I remember it as authentically bucolic. I played in haystacks, stole fruit from other people’s trees, spent all day out in the fields and woods alone, not coming home until it was dark.

I had other memories, though, and they’d never quite meshed with these generic scenes. All the kids in my village grew up in front of the television and Nintendo console; we spent as many hours gaming as we did playing outside. Cocktails of chemicals pesticides, fertilizers, routine medi- cations ran through the earth and all our bodies. The village was networked into supply chains that were often visible, the loaded lorries that came along the rural roads running our village to the city, to the docks and airports, to other continents, and back. The haymaking, apple-picking story of rural life never found a place for any of this.

When I imagine the landscape of the future, what I see is familiar from sci-fi. Large, strangely shaped buildings. Screens and reflective windows. Smooth, quiet machines. These are settled zones, horizons lined with towers and flyovers. When I consider this idea of the contemporary countryside, I realize that I have seen very different futuristic forms in reality, standing in open spaces, during and since my childhood. There was a quarry near the village in which I grew up, an enormous valley with its own roads and small buildings. I must have passed it and looked down on it many thousands of times, and never once set foot inside. More recently, there’s the Amazon hangar that I pass on the train; it doesn’t flash past as a building usually does, but runs on and on for several minutes. There’s the long, low shed housing battery hens on the edge of the local nature reserve a stench of ammonia comes over you before you see the building. There’s a new recycling plant outside my city, which looks like a monumental washing machine; my own waste passes through there. Up on the North York Moors, there’s a missile-warning and space-surveillance system co-owned by the British and US governments. Enormous radar plates, visible for miles around, are guarded by fences, warning signs, and soldier-staffed checkpoints, which look incongruous on the bare expanse of heather.

Each of these constructions is situated in a rural landscape. They have different purposes, but they’re all built on an awesome scale. Koolhaas describes the urbanization of the contemporary as an environmental problem: a story that permits urban cultures to repurpose the rest of the planet as “a back of house for urban civilization, a residual, enabling domain, where all the needs, demands, impositions of the urban can be orchestrated and implemented at will.” These rural architectures are true to that. They are places of production and surveillance, homes for industrialized bodies. There is something inhuman about each one: huge, windowless, guarded or otherwise concealed all the wrong shape and size for a person. They’re places that provide and process the raw materials of the urban environment, but they’re also places you’re not supposed to see.

This suggests a new story for the contemporary countryside. When I read about it, I had recently begun writing a novel set in the rural north of England. I had been thinking about how all of life not only provincial life happens in a local environment. All surroundings are small village, neighborhood, river mouth, strip mall, mountain slope, block, or highway. I wanted to tell a different kind of story from the pastoral tradition as I was familiar with it, a rural story that was not enclosed within its fields and farms, but one that was open to and active within a global world. I needed that because I wanted the story to help me see how the world is connected and made up, right now and everywhere.

England went into lockdown a short time later. Isolated at home, I had an intensified experience of the outside world as a place that was interconnected, a place in which the stories of people and animals, and plants, and technologies, were crossing and unfolding against one another in new ways. I had this new sense of intensity and profusion, out there a liveliness as a distinct new landscape. I thought: perhaps this is just me. Over the following months, this last year up to now, I read other new books on the countryside, to see what stories for the future can be found in the contemporary rural form.

Marit Kapla’s Osebol (2021) is an oral history of the titular village, a small and quiet place in Värmland, western Sweden. Kapla, a journalist, grew up in Osebol, and a few years ago she went back to interview the remaining inhabitants. In Osebol, Kapla edits and orchestrates their words over short, broken lines, so that the thick book, in Peter Graves’s English translation, reads like a long, plainspoken poem.

Osebol is on a river, the Klarälven, and surrounded by forest. Forestry was the old industry there, flagging now. The place is steeped in the past. Many of the inhabitants are elderly, and even the younger villagers recall the beauty and the struggle of the old ways of life. Sleeping on the floor in hay. Hungry children going door-todoor to beg for food. Ice skating, itchy wool stockings. Dances, berry picking, lifting the potato harvest. The painful physical labor of forestry in winter. Christmas loaves, baked with rye, raisins, and cumin, in the shape of angels. The publisher’s synopsis sees Osebol as “secluded” and “quiet,” a place of “heirlooms” and “memories,” its story told in the “gentle rhythms of simple language.” The review in The Times Literary Supplement calls the book a “dusty mosaic,” a “fugue.”

When I read it, I saw something else. In fact, I felt surprised that it had been read, so straightforwardly, as a fugue for a lost pastoral world. The village is different these days. People eat pasta, not potatoes, and the kids are all on their phones. There’s a hydroelectric dam upstream, adequate broadband for remote workers. Social change is something that confronts the community, and it feels unexpectedly direct here, somehow too close. Osebolers speak as direct witnesses to crises that extend beyond them, beyond their village, around the world. There is a reception center for asylum seekers sited in an old forestry building. AnnaKarin helps out there. In conversation, she returns to her motivation for wanting to do something, which turns on the difference between hearing news of a refugee crisis and living in a close-knit community with people who have been through it. You read about “the things that happen” to refugee boats on the Mediterranean, but you can’t take it in. And then a real person materializes. Anna-Karin found herself sitting opposite a mother who had been in one of those boats, holding on to her two-year-old boy so that he wouldn’t fall in. “That’s when it becomes real,” says Anna-Karin. The center is slated to close, and she asserts that the refugees are not outsiders but integral participants in a changing community, “part of the local picture.” Some would consider staying, she thinks. The problem is job opportunities. “They don’t grow on trees.” The village is distinctly global now, within and beyond the refugee center. The population has diversified: there are residents from Amsterdam, Łódź, California. There are second homeowners (“we love the silence, we love the nature”), Estonian laborers, and German tourists. The globalization of the countryside comes to the fore in conversations about work. Jan is in construction. He describes his industry’s internationalization, moving from wooden chipboard to by-product pasteboard, modular assembly, and global shipping. Åke, a retired metallurgist, produced metals for spacecraft, ice breakers, nuclear reactors. These days labor costs are reduced by globalizing production. Metal products are circulated through different countries for mining, processing, and fabrication. “They’re not exactly thinking about the environment.”

One retired widower makes an unnerving speech about a widespread movement away from the physical environment. Per Erik, born in 1940, used to work with electrics. As a child he liked taking household objects apart to look at their mechanisms. “There weren’t many things / I could leave alone.” He taught himself how to fix cars, then found employment looking after the machinery in the chipboard factory. He describes with precision the lacquered, coiled wiring on an electric motor. Suddenly, he cuts forward to broadband connection. Despite his lifelong interest in electrics, he is circumspect about the possibilities here. He wonders aloud what the future will bring. In five or ten years, perhaps, fiber will be obsolete. Personally, Per Erik prefers paper to wireless payments. “What would happen if we had a long electricity cut?”

Per Erik’s speech is disorientating, switching past and future, and reimagining a movement towards the virtual not as historical progress, but as a withdrawal from the material world. His speculation emerges not from an old-fashioned mistrust of new technologies but from an experienced feeling for its material basis. Many of his neighbors are similarly concerned with this with the surroundings as material. “We live in the middle of the forest,” says Åke. “That’s your raw material.” István, a Stockholmer who established a commune in the village decades ago, didn’t see his community as part of a “green wave” movement back to the land. The motivation was industrial: he was planning to manufacture wooden playpark equipment. They moved to Värmland because it made sense to work here, “where there was plenty of the raw material / for what I was going to do.”

Whose raw material? Christer, a joiner, sees the rural landscape as the “back of house” for civilization that Koolhaas has described. “A town can’t function without the countryside,” says Christer. The village is a place in which people sit quietly sharing memories of tea dances and stooking the wheat, and it is equally a place whose inhabitants are confronting Europe’s refugee crisis, environmental collapse, rapid technological change, and problems with the costs human, environmental, and financial of globalized labor. It’s not that these macro-phenomena are bigger or more real in the village than they are in the city, but they are differently visible to the villager, who speaks with every newcomer, who witnesses the process through which a forest becomes flatpack furniture. The scenario Per Erik envisions, of extended wireless cut-off, is one I have never encountered in history books, nor in contemporary life. But I have come across it in speculative futures, describing what could happen as climate emergencies hit.

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At the other end of Europe, a different village shares some of Osebol’s concerns.

Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019), translated from the Catalan by Maya Faye Lethem, is a novel set in a village in Catalonia. It’s an intergenerational story that turns on a catastrophic event: the accidental killing of a young man, Hilari, by his friend Jaume. Jaume is in love with Mia, Hilari’s twin sister. However, the book pulls focus from these characters to accommodate a wider panorama: its chapters are narrated by many different voices. Jaume speaks, as does Mia, but so too do the lightning, the black chanterelle mushrooms, the ghosts of witches, a roebuck, a local council official, the collective voice of the mountain’s bears.

Like Osebol, this village culture is an old world in many ways. Children build forts, catch rabbits, eat wild strawberries. There’s a chestnut festival in October. The people here are steeped in myth and ritual. Jaume says that his mother was a water sprite. His parents were giants. They made him out of snow.

But the present and future are also here. Solà has some fun with cosmopolitan stereotyping of the backward countryside. A city-dweller, visiting Mia’s butcher’s shop, sees it as a place that is “frozen in time.” It’s all “so authentic,” this village, with its primordial, otherworldly mountain panorama and its bad coffee. But he can’t deal with Mia’s erratic opening hours.

The village is not otherworldly or frozen in time; it’s trapped in history and of this world. There are witches and bears, but there are also employment problems, Vicks VapoRub, Stieg Larsson novels, asphalt, and hard shoulders. Solà’s countryside is carved with slick dark curving highway, and it’s wired up. When lightning strikes, locals know to avoid electrical poles and animal fences, as well as the rocks and the caves. A villager, looking at the hillside, sees the electrified livestock fence as something that gives pause. “So modern, the most modern of things, that electric fence. Modern but designed for the mountain.” The estrangement between the rural landscape and the contemporary world is taken as read, but that “but” it isn’t borne out by the histories of technological development, or the actual view.

At the heart of When I Sing…, the mountains themselves speak, inhabiting an expanded sense of time that destabilizes any and all existing human stories of this place. They offer an alternative real to the villager’s or the tourist’s time, moving from the primeval past of geological formation (a slow, blind violence) to the remote future (another apocalypse, “The next beginning”). The mountain narrative sweeps away the human experience of time as tiny and insignificant. From their deep-time perspective, “nothing lasts long.” •

Esther Kinsky’s Rombo (2022), translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt, brings us to another isolated European mountain village, and it does something similarly estranging with human perspective. Kinsky is German, writing now, but Rombo takes place in Friuli, northern Italy, and spans the weeks of summer 1976. In May that year, and then again in September, the landscape and the community were torn apart by two earthquakes. Rombo lies somewhere between Solà’s novel and Kapla’s listening project: it’s a fictional oral history, frequently shifting its grounds. It combines human stories and natural histories, sometimes recounting a neighborhood feud, elsewhere delineating with precision the geology, the plants, the light, and their histories. The narrative describes emergent stories, as various plants sprout from their soil minerals and weather conditions; animals are grazed around the plants; humans farm the animals and construct a landscape of buildings, roads, fields, placed according to their needs and their up-and-down relationships with other species and with one another.

This is a narrative that notices the ways in which humans and the planet shape one another; it’s a story of and for the climate change era. Kinsky integrates this distinctly contemporary way of seeing with 1970s rural life. She describes the traces of the antique manifesting in these “secluded zones with their own languages, dulled by waning use, their own shrill, helpless songs, and tricky dances.” She describes the incisions of modernity, a landfill site at the side of a highway. Arriving there, a lorry driver has nowhere to deposit his cargo, the site is already overflowing with concrete waste and cannot accept any more “everlasting scrap.” In the dump, there are piles of balanced toilets, sinks, bidets, and bathtubs. “Inerti is the elegant name for this rubble; it does not stir, already familiar with the lethargy of eternity.”

The mountain’s inerti is like a vision from a daylight dream, like the images of floating islands of trash mid-ocean, band-aids in turtles’ stomachs, the plastic flip flops that have been discovered in the Mariana Trench. It’s rare to catch glimpses of inerti at scale occasionally maybe, when passing a scrapyard or visiting the garbage dump. That’s because we tend to store it away from the centers of population. Kinsky’s roadside dump bears witness silver print, 8 x 10 inches to the utilization of rural areas as repositories for everlasting scrap. It miniaturizes the condition of the wider environment as a holding-house for human inerti, a holding house that is running out of capacity. It’s an apocalyptic vision earth stifled under the weight of eight billion broken toilets.

After the earthquakes, many people leave the mountain. For departees, the isolated slopes are “snares of memory and sentiment.” But Kinsky suggests a different way to be moved by this place and moment. The earthquake is described as a “time to learn, wide awake, about the new situation, the new order of things.” It’s no longer possible to live as though the landscape is an inert backdrop. Disaster shakes up the landscape, and the inhabitants no longer know where a familiar path will lead. For Gigi, a woodcutter and goatherd, the earthquake makes him feel that human life is as small as the smallest pebble in the river. Like the deep time of Solà’s mountains, Kinsky’s geological presence changes the perspective, so that the human scale is diminished it’s not the only scale. It’s disorienting for Gigi, “a new order of things in the world.”

The association between city and modernity has always been a fiction. That isn’t how space and time are woven into one another, with the future zoned in metropolitan areas and the past amassing around the edges. People on the Tibetan Plateau and the Congo Basin are living and breathing in the present; meanwhile, the past exerts a powerful influence at Shibuya Crossing and in Silicon Valley. And it follows logically from here that the great novels of rural Europe have never truly been separate from the contemporary world. Thomas Hardy writes about new upheavals in science. Elizabeth Gaskell’s stories are set deep in cultures of heavy industry and engineering. The farming novels of Émile Zola and Halldór Laxness explore and indict, in their different ways, the flows of capital and power.

So, do these new rural narratives have anything new or distinct to say? Koolhaas’s idea of a “back of house” gives a particular contemporary perspective on the contemporary world. These books explore the provincial as a place where people confront environmental and social changes, the home of the modern world’s raw materials. If you want to learn about a palace, you might learn more by visiting the servants’ quarters than by standing in the ballroom. These books go into the backstage places factory, quarry, forest, dump, reception center that service urban life.

I noticed something else, though something beyond the rural settings that connects these three books. At first, I thought it was incidental. After a while, I changed my mind about that. It’s a structural thing: each narrative is polyvocal, there are no protagonists, and the stories are not configured by the conventions of major and minor plotlines. Readers and reviewers of all three books were struck by this. Nicci Gerrard, reviewing Osebol in The Guardian, describes how it gives us “voices of people who are usually unheard.” In the same paper, Christopher Shrimpton describes Solà’s multivocal narrative as “nothing if not inclusive.” Maria Stepanova describes Rombo “speaking out with many mouths and living voices.” The books created experiences of plurality; it was as though each reader’s attention had been redistributed, scattered more widely. For Gerrard, in Osebol, “each voice is given equal weight.” Shrimpton describes Solà’s narrative as “democratic.” Stepanova feels Rombo’ s “compassion and solidarity not only with us human beings, but with the whole world.”

These multiplied voices articulate themselves in different ways, and language itself is also multiplied: the books are all polyglot as well as polyvocal. I read them in translation in English, but Catalonia and Friuli are already multilingual environments. Osebol has become so as it internationalizes. And the books extend towards communication outside words. Gerrard merges the Osebolers’ talk with other environmental noises: their conversation sounds like something caught on the wind; she compares their flowing and renewing language with the Klarälven. The speakers themselves tell stories of wolf calls, the plop of a beaver jumping into the river, and the quiet of the open, which makes the ears buzz. Solà develops a playful idiom to voice the nonhuman directly articulating, for example, the mushrooms’ pleasure in the rain: “Mmmmmmm, we said, mmmmm, rain.” Kinsky’s book has chapters that narrate the experiences of rivers and geologies, and the narrative also attends to the diverse ways in which different species embody and communicate aspects of the unfolding story. In the time before the earthquake, a caged bird’s whistling has the power to sour milk. Wild birds are restless, rattled. Dogs bark. The goats stand “incredibly still,” and their milk is bitter. Language mills around this confusion of experiences: “There are countless words to explain what transpired at the end of a day of three suns, yowling dogs, restless carbon snakes.”

I wondered whether there was a word for this radical redistribution of voices, proliferating to the point of bewilderment within and beyond language. I recalled a term in a book I’d read a while ago, and went back to the book, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think (2013), to find it. The word, when I located it, struck a chord: provincializing. Kohn proposes a movement to “provincialize language,” drawing on historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe (2000). Kohn and Chakrabarty are both using the word to describe a redistribution of power through a process of diversifying. Kohn is thinking with forms of communication beyond language. He argues that academics might “provincialize language” by accepting that it is not the central or highest form of communication, merely one mode of communication among many different noises and cries, motions or actions that exist and are useful in the human world and in the lives of other species. This has the effect of reorienting relations between species, redressing the effects of a tradition in which humans have habitually thought of themselves as the most advanced and most important species. As a way of understanding an ecosystem, this is more generous and loving, and it’s also more true. Chakrabarty questions the application of Western social theories to non-Western histories and invites his readers to imagine what new histories and new worlds might emerge if this assumption of universality and centrality were to be relinquished, and if differing theories were applied in different places. Again, this raises the prospect of a more realistic, more diverse and distributed understanding of wisdom.

Provincializing narratives, generalized from Chakrabarty via Kohn, is a word for recognizing that certain identities and perspectives have historically been elevated and naturalized in anglophone cultures as though they were universal but they’re not. This centralization structures and exercises power. Straight white modernity has historically positioned itself as a global leader and apogee, a norm, a baseline, a protagonist, a center from which other ways of being, and other beings, are pushed to the margins. This narrative itself is power’s raw material. Provincializing this narrative means telling a story in which this position is dislodged: the centralized subject is only one form, story, voice, idea, identity, and there are others.

These rural stories reject conventions of center and margin; of protagonist and supporting cast, in favor of intertwined polyvocal stories, including those of other species and ways of being. This doesn’t mean that every voice in the story is exactly equal, but that the books have a panoramic focus that widens the narrative space for difference. They bring quieted voices into earshot and strain the conventions of priority. There’s a sense of purpose.

I read these three books after I’d written my own novel Emergency, which tells stories of different people and animals and plants and machines that live in and around a village in the north of England. As a reader, I could see a cause or context that I hadn’t conceptualized when I was writing: I could see why I’d wanted this form in that setting. Polyvocal and multispecies stories are not unique to rural literature of course not; however, it isn’t a coincidence that these provincial stories share this distributed approach to narrative because that is where the provincial embeds itself in form. The new provincial puts forward differing voices, redistributing and unsettling the narrative. It offers a way of seeing and of being in the world that changes power relations. As a subject, the provincial is as interesting as any other localized environment, but no more. As a form, the new provincial suggests a world of difference.