An interview with Paul Kingsnorth on England, the Fens and his novel The Wake, originally published in Managed Retreat #1
JPT: 1066 has a totemic significance in our historical consciousness; it’s seen as the birth of the nation — a view especially promulgated by the political right. Your novel The Wake seems to follow your other work on ‘England’ by seeking a deeper Englishness, predating Norman invasion and counter to its cultural influence. Why did this period of history attract you?
PK: I’m not sure whether 1066 is regarded as the birth of the nation by the political right especially. Is that the case? It seems to me that this strange view is widely held across the spectrum: on the school curriculum, for example. Knowing what I do about it now, it seems astonishing to me. It’s as if the birth of France were dated from 1940, after the Nazis invaded. The English nation had existed for centuries before the Norman invasion.
I think this strange sense of injustice, even about something that happened thousand years ago, is one of the things that interested me in the period and perhaps led to me writing this book. The English know so little about their early history. Until I started reading up about this period, I had no idea that there was a decade long guerrilla resistance movement to the Norman invasion after 1066. Why don’t we know this? Why aren’t English children taught about it in schools? Whenever I come across something that appears to be hidden I’m immediately attracted to it.
JPT: There seems to be a pattern in early texts of the British Isles like The Battle of Maldon and Y Gododdin of holding cultural identity in the face of defeat but with 1066 we are encouraged to identify with conqueror rather than the conquered, to follow a continuity of Kings. The feudal division of property post Norman victory seems to have established the concentration of land ownership that still haunts the country today. What kind of conversations do you think we can have about that today nearly a millennium on?
PK: It’s a fascinating question. You’re absolutely right, that we have been encouraged to internalise our oppression. If you wanted to think psychodynamically about it, you could perhaps argue that the imperialism which the English became so good at later in their history was a subconscious reaction to the violent suppression they themselves had suffered in the 11th century. Perhaps this is taking things too far, but it continually fascinates and pains me that the English still seem to believe that 1066 was the founding date of their nation rather than the date of its conquest, which is what it was in reality.
What kind of conversations can we have about this now? Well, I’m glad to see that we’re having one here. We are in an interesting period of history in England. I would say there are currently two identifiable mainstream narratives about English history, neither of which I agree with. Firstly there is the traditional Toryish tubthumping version of Englishness, the England of Wellington and Churchill and great battles and kings and conquests. This is the history of the powerful, seen through the eyes of their court chroniclers.
Then there’s the alternative which the liberal left has posited in recent decades, which is an attempt to demolish Englishness as a narrative altogether and replace it with a historically spurious ‘multicultural Britishness’, in which everything and anything of value to the English is relentlessly ‘deconstructed’ and they are left without a national story to call their own. This is a history built on guilt and shame, and it has little to offer beyond that.
I think both of these stories have run out of steam. I’d like to believe we are at a historical moment during which the English can begin to discover a different narrative of their own history, a narrative that is genuinely English, which accepts continuity and tradition, but which also sees us as a people who need to reclaim their sense of self from a dominant ruling class which still runs the country today. Of course, this is probably a naïvely optimistic thought!
JPT: Ideas of political and poetic ecology such as reclaiming our sense of place, acting locally, reinhabiting our landscapes all support a more regional focus and therefore an engagement in England with English (rather than British) identity. This ecological Englishness is a concept you have written passionately about, and something which I also resonate with. We have some suspect fellow travellers though — from the Kinship of Husbandry through to postwar British fascist organisations and curious ensembles like English Green and Albion Awake… How do you navigate this landscape? What are the paths to English identity that avoid the nationalist trap?
PK: I like the phrase ‘ecological Englishness.’ I think this is crucially important, and in all honestly I think we worry too much about these ‘fellow travellers’. It often seems to me that the left uses the threat of ‘giving succour to the far right’ to conveniently avoid discussing these issues at all.
That’s not to say this isn’t an issue: of course it is. Narratives of place and belonging are very easy to hijack in that way. But I just don’t think it’s very difficult to make it clear where you stand. I do that myself in Real England. In fact, I think is vital that more of us do that. The more English people who talk about place and belonging, who reclaim their history both from the jingoistic right and the multicultural left, and who also make it very clear that they want nothing to do with the far right or any of the idiots on that part of the political spectrum, the better for the nation as a whole. It’s quite possible to have a sense of place and ecology and tradition and continuity without sinking into hostility to outsiders, and I think more of us need to make that clear.
JPT: In the American environmental movement the native peoples of the continent have provided, for the descendants of European settlers, a mythic/historical source of ideas of how those lands might be inhabited. Ideas ranging from banal and ill considered appropriations to more sensitive appreciations like those of Gary Snyder.
What mythic role is there for English indigenes, from Palaeolithic traversers of the land bridge to the Anglo-Saxon people? What are the dangers in dancing with this narrative?
PK: The meaning of indigeneity in the modern world is a fascinating question, and its one I seem to have been stumbling across a lot lately. We had a discussion about precisely this question at last year’s Dark Mountain Festival. I had been talking about the English road protest movements of the early 1990s, which in some ways I thought were a fascinating example of a modern, indigenous English resistance movement. But a woman in the audience suggested that people in England could not really call themselves ‘indigenous’, even if their ancestry here went back to 1066 and beyond, because indigeneity is not simply a description of how long people have been somewhere, but an indicator of how they live there.
I thought that was a very interesting point to make. Take myself: I can trace my family back in this country nearly 1000 years, and there are clear indications that they went back further than that. In that sense, I can certainly call myself a native Englishman, and I’m happy to do so. But could I call myself indigenous? If I think of my friends in West Papua, in New Guinea, for example, I don’t think I could call myself indigenous in the same way as they do. Not because they have inhabited that land longer than the English have inhabited theirs, but because they inhabit it very differently.
I live a modern life, as the product of an industrial machine, and I could be living much the same life in America or France or Brazil or more or less anywhere now. In that sense, I am in this land but not of it, and that applies to all of us children of modernity. Perhaps indigeneity is really about intimately understanding a place and its stories. If that is the case, there are very few indigenous people left in Europe. And if that in turn is the case, I would come back to the point you made earlier about an ‘ecological Englishness’, which seems to be simply another way of talking about the same thing. How can we be a people that inhabits a place; really understands it, feels part of the bioregion, behaves as if it were only one of the species here? That’s an ecological way of living, and that’s also an indigenous way of being. I aspire to that, though I will never get there.
JPT: When you know something of the novel’s subject matter its title The Wake immediately evokes the guerrilla Hereward ‘the wake’, leader of local resistance to the Norman Conquest, most famous from the fictional rendering in Charles Kingsley’s novel. But other associations are brought to mind — the wake as that which comes after, aftershocks, the trail of a boat in water, the remembrance of the dead — and also wakefulness, of those who are alive to what is actually happening, watchful. What does the title mean to you?
PK: Well spotted! I chose the title for its multiplicity of meanings. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t say any more. I want to avoid the trap of explaining this novel, not least because I’m not entirely sure where parts of it have come from myself. I don’t think works of fiction should be easy, or even necessarily possible, for the rational mind to access in full. That’s part of the joy of creating, and hopefully reading, them.
JPT: The extract from The Wake published in the first Dark Mountain journal has an evocative setting above a drowned forest, where old ideas are also submerged. The terraqueous terrain of the Fens, the setting for the novel, is known as the historical refuge of Hereward and his fellow resisters — is that the only reason why you chose this area? What contribution has the particular quality of Fenland made to the novel? How does the conflict of wild and ‘tamer’ inform the novel?
PK: I chose the fens for a number of reasons. One of them was that in the Anglo-Saxon period there was a particular class of free landed farmer, known as ‘sokemen’, who were only found in these Eastern counties, and these people seem to have the qualities that I wanted represented by the main character of the book. Then of course there was the presence of Hereward, and the fact that the wild strangeness of the fens seemed to provide me with the kind of natural environment I needed. This story is as much about place as it is about people.
JPT: Recently you have written about the ‘dark ecology’ of Ted Kaczynski, and of the attraction people are finding in the ideas of Deep Green Resistance. An increasing number of concerned individuals are pondering how to act in the face of a rampaging industrial civilization that is apparently untameable by regular democratic means and set on murdering most of the more than human world. Some no doubt will choose a path of violence, against property at least, if not people — and you have expressed your own concerns about this. What role(s) do you think the guerrilla will play in the action and imagination of the environment movement this century?
PK: Well, what is a guerilla? What is a terrorist? These are descriptive terms for people who use violence that is not sanctioned by the state. Of course, before the rise of the state and its claim to a monopoly of violence, these concepts were meaningless in these sense we understand them now. I’ve not doubt that some people will use violence to try and prevent the worst excesses of industrial society. And why shouldn’t they, given the excesses that society is responsible for every day? Before anyone easily objects to this they should look very hard at where their meat has come from or the source of the gold in their wedding ring or the coltan in their smartphone. We are all enmeshed in violence every day. The stark reality is that most of the time somebody else does it for us and we don’t see the results. Of course, recognising the extreme violence that fuels the everyday workings of an industrial society does not give us carte blanche to do anything we like in the name of opposition to it. This is one of the problems I have with Deep Green Resistance. I think they romanticise violence. I also think their strategy and tactics are unworkable, and their ideological position is way too hard left for me. Still, at the very least they are asking questions that most people are not prepared even to look at.
I think we all need to develop an ethical position on this question. The great moral and ethical dilemma of our time is that this rampaging industrial machine is now running on its own steam. Democracy can’t contain it, and neither can any other peaceful means we know of. What to do? Everybody has to find an answer to that question. My novel tries to explore some of the ramifications of trying to answer a similar question a millennium ago. It’s one that has run throughout human history.
