How The Literature Of Fire Can Help Readers Find Hope Among The Ashes

(MENAFN- The Conversation) “We are living apocalyptically.”

The philosopher Bruno Latour uttered those words in an interview discussing the 2018 California wildfires .

His comments ring all the more true in 2025, as residents of the Los Angeles area grapple with the horror and despair of the deadly wildfires that have razed thousands of homes and businesses and have left at least 25 people dead .

From coast to coast, from hemisphere to hemisphere, once-in-a-lifetime environmental catastrophes are now regular occurrences. Large-scale burning occurs out of season, and fires burn hotter and spread farther than ever before .

Latour has called it“living in the end times”; he points to a need to find different ways to live, as extreme events that were once just the subject of dystopian films simply become a part of everyday life.

My work on how writers emotionally respond to fires shows that literature and reading have a vital role to play.

Works about fire often emphasize recovery and resolution, while also offering a space to work through complex emotions. If these are, as Latour fears,“end times,” literature can help readers learn how to survive, cope and keep hope alive.

With the pace and tone of a thriller, George R. Stewart 's 1948 novel,“Fire,” follows a California forest fire from the moment it ignites until it is extinguished several days later.

Stewart's biographer, Donald M. Scott, described“Fire” as“the first novel about fire ecology,” and the environmental impact of fires is certainly an important part of the work. But“Fire” is also a novel that is deeply interested in how people come together in the face of disaster.

Stewart was so committed to creating a realistic representation of a burning forest that he visited fires with a forest ranger as part of his research for the book. His burning scenes are graphic and engage with the practicalities of firefighting, as well as its human cost.

But the novel also celebrates kinship, with characters forming deep bonds as they work together to beat back the blaze. This sense of a shared experience is vital.

One of the story's central figures, the veteran forest ranger Bart Bartley, imagines the fire as an enemy,“Evil, malignant, and scheming.” Fire historians Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen , who have worked with fire-affected communities, affirm Bartley's depiction, noting how fire“makes its victims feel hunted down and its survivors toyed with.”

Yet in grappling with this“evil” force, Bartley feels“great human love” for those working alongside him.

Stewart's work is also striking for its focus on renewal.

After the flames are conquered, the novel's narrator surveys the damage. At first he sees a landscape that's“fatally scorched.” But his despondency gives way to a more optimistic interpretation:“In the next few years the still-standing older trees might re-seed the ground beneath them.”

The novel, which also examines events from the perspective of animals, ends with an extraordinary vision of hope:

Emphasizing that fire is a natural phenomenon, Stewart focuses on regrowth. He reminds readers that burning has an ecologically important role and that what seems like an apocalyptic present can soon transform into a regenerative future.

The historian Stephen J. Pyne has called our fire-prone age the Pyrocene . So it's no surprise that more writers are weaving wildfires into their stories.

Amitav Ghosh 's novel“Gun Island” features a wildfire in its early chapters. But Ghosh isn't content to let his fiction speak for itself; his 2016 nonfiction work“The Great Derangement” is an exhortation for contemporary writers to incorporate representations of natural disasters into their work to reflect the way that disaster now impinges upon everyday life.

The Australian writer and Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan 's 2020 novel,“The Living Sea of Waking Dreams ,” responds to this challenge.

Unlike Stewart's novel, fire is not front and center of the work, which Flanagan has described as a“rising scream .” When the story, which is set in Australia, begins, bushfires rage, and it seems as if they'll be central to the plot. However, they simply smolder away in the background – just as they do in real life for many of those who aren't directly affected by fire. Yet.

The novel's true focus, it turns out, is on the overwhelming experience of living in a world where natural disaster succeeds natural disaster. It follows the protagonist, Anna, who seeks relief from her mother's terminal illness by scrolling through social media feeds. She finds herself inundated with endless images of climate emergencies. Her doomscrolling leaves her depressed:“She no longer knew if the fires were already over even though they hadn't yet really begun.”

Through the glow of her smartphone, Anna sees“Photos of ember blizzards. Smoke so thick you couldn't see across a road. Four thousand people ... gathered on a beach with the firefighters forming a cordon around to protect them.”

In other scenes, she views image after image of animals injured in wildfires. For Anna,“Summer was frightening. Smoke was frightening ... Choking was frightening. Today was frightening. Tomorrow was terrifying, if we made it that far.”

However, like Stewart, Flanagan points to hope: Anna eventually connects with another character, Lisa, whose interest in environmental history and Indigenous fire practices offers an alternative to the isolating terror evoked by social media.

Flanagan ends the novel by rejecting both individualism and apocalyptic sensationalism.

The discovery of an endangered chick transforms the story from one of misery to one of hope. Lisa, who finds the tiny bird, suddenly sees the world not as hopelessly burning but as“extraordinarily alive.” When the novel ends, she is“not downcast nor defeated,” but inspired to connect more closely with the land and its inhabitants.

Human stories don't have to end with disasters. Instead, catastrophes can signal the beginning of something new, and reading about them can highlight regrowth and recovery in the midst of despair.

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