1 00:00:00,542 --> 00:00:03,294 Welcome to the On Paradise podcast series. 2 00:00:03,294 --> 00:00:07,757 I'm Paul Basu, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford 3 00:00:07,841 --> 00:00:11,886 and curator of ‘On Paradise: Between Hope and Memory’, 4 00:00:11,886 --> 00:00:15,807 an exhibition featuring the work of the artist Saad Qureshi 5 00:00:15,932 --> 00:00:19,102 at the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities in Oxford. 6 00:00:19,769 --> 00:00:23,690 ‘On Paradise’ is part of ‘Utopia Now!’, a season of events 7 00:00:23,690 --> 00:00:28,611 that asks how we might live, imagine and create differently, and why 8 00:00:28,653 --> 00:00:32,240 imagining new futures matters now more than ever. 9 00:00:33,199 --> 00:00:38,288 As part of the exhibition, I spoke with Humanities scholars across the University 10 00:00:38,288 --> 00:00:42,667 who in different ways work on themes relating to Paradise and Utopia 11 00:00:42,709 --> 00:00:45,712 in different cultural and historical contexts. 12 00:00:46,546 --> 00:00:50,425 In this episode, we hear the reflections of Wes Williams, 13 00:00:50,425 --> 00:00:53,845 Professor of French Literature... On Paradise. 14 00:01:09,486 --> 00:01:10,445 I’m Wes Williams. 15 00:01:10,445 --> 00:01:14,741 I'm a Professor in French Literature here at the University of Oxford. 16 00:01:16,534 --> 00:01:17,410 I'm also a Tutor, 17 00:01:17,410 --> 00:01:20,413 so that means a teacher and a fellow, at Saint Edmund Hall. 18 00:01:20,455 --> 00:01:23,792 And for some time I was the Director of TORCH, 19 00:01:23,833 --> 00:01:26,836 which is the Oxford Research Center in the Humanities. 20 00:01:27,045 --> 00:01:29,923 And I tell you that, because it means that I'm interested in 21 00:01:29,923 --> 00:01:35,345 interdisciplinary stuff and in performance and in bringing academic research 22 00:01:35,345 --> 00:01:38,973 together with other forms of thinking, making, doing. 23 00:01:42,894 --> 00:01:44,270 A long time ago now, 24 00:01:44,270 --> 00:01:47,982 I'm not going to say how long, I began research 25 00:01:48,066 --> 00:01:51,528 thinking that I was going to write about 17th-century gardens. 26 00:01:51,569 --> 00:01:57,242 And as you know, Paradise is another word for garden in the Greek 27 00:01:57,242 --> 00:01:58,076 and afterwards. 28 00:01:58,076 --> 00:02:01,704 And I was thinking about gardens 29 00:02:01,746 --> 00:02:06,626 as both actual spaces and as kind of imagined places. 30 00:02:06,626 --> 00:02:12,048 In the end, that thesis turned into a book about pilgrimage, 31 00:02:12,048 --> 00:02:16,886 and in particular about pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 16th and 17th century. 32 00:02:16,886 --> 00:02:19,389 And then I got interested. I'm not going to give you the whole life. 33 00:02:19,389 --> 00:02:23,810 But then I got interested in the bits that got left out of that story. 34 00:02:23,810 --> 00:02:28,940 So the bits on the edges of the maps or the bits, the sort of people 35 00:02:28,940 --> 00:02:31,985 and places that didn't fit a kind of pilgrimage - 36 00:02:31,985 --> 00:02:33,611 I'm going there and then I'm coming home again - 37 00:02:33,611 --> 00:02:35,697 sacred story. 38 00:02:35,697 --> 00:02:40,451 And ended up thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and how people 39 00:02:40,451 --> 00:02:44,789 who don't fit into certain kinds of place might be considered monstrous. 40 00:02:49,586 --> 00:02:52,005 Paradise means many things in different languages, 41 00:02:52,005 --> 00:02:55,842 but I suppose what I meant by saying, 42 00:02:55,884 --> 00:02:56,926 as you know, Paradise 43 00:02:56,926 --> 00:03:00,930 is a garden or garden is a Paradise is to do with the etymology of the term 44 00:03:00,930 --> 00:03:05,518 that comes partly from Greek, where parádeisos... 45 00:03:05,560 --> 00:03:10,857 Paradise is another way of talking about a specific place 46 00:03:10,857 --> 00:03:15,236 that's probably close to nature and probably an organized garden. 47 00:03:15,236 --> 00:03:18,823 In other words, not just nature in the raw, but somewhere 48 00:03:18,823 --> 00:03:23,369 where culture has met nature and you've made a place that is special. 49 00:03:23,661 --> 00:03:26,497 And that's what we call gardens, if you like. 50 00:03:26,497 --> 00:03:30,418 I mean, you can call them other things, but that's where the word comes from, 51 00:03:30,460 --> 00:03:32,128 etymologically. 52 00:03:32,128 --> 00:03:33,755 Well, that's one version of it. 53 00:03:33,755 --> 00:03:38,092 And then of course, when it becomes religious, then you sort of displace that 54 00:03:38,635 --> 00:03:41,429 to heaven within the Christian tradition or somewhere else. 55 00:03:41,429 --> 00:03:45,350 And then there's the whole Latin tradition 56 00:03:45,350 --> 00:03:50,063 of the locus amoenus or the pleasant place that you construct. 57 00:03:50,104 --> 00:03:53,691 So it's always this combination of a place apart 58 00:03:53,816 --> 00:03:58,279 and nature organized into something. 59 00:03:58,446 --> 00:04:00,823 So that's not, at least... 60 00:04:00,823 --> 00:04:04,202 Yeah, in the tradition I'm interested in, it’s not wild nature, 61 00:04:04,202 --> 00:04:07,330 it's nature with a human cultural element involved in it. 62 00:04:07,330 --> 00:04:11,042 And that's how I still think about Paradise for the most part. 63 00:04:14,462 --> 00:04:15,338 I think for me, 64 00:04:15,338 --> 00:04:19,884 Paradise is always going to be not necessarily created, 65 00:04:19,926 --> 00:04:24,389 but at the intersection of human agency and other agency. 66 00:04:24,389 --> 00:04:27,934 So created means I have all the agency, or at least it 67 00:04:27,976 --> 00:04:32,313 imagines that my agency is primordial or the first mover. 68 00:04:32,355 --> 00:04:36,401 I don't think that about Paradise and the the paradises 69 00:04:36,484 --> 00:04:42,031 and the utopias that I've been exploring are not all just made by humans. 70 00:04:42,407 --> 00:04:46,077 They are often found and designated. 71 00:04:46,160 --> 00:04:50,248 But even in the finding, you're kind of making because naming is making as well, 72 00:04:50,290 --> 00:04:53,710 or coming across something and saying, right, that's Paradise. 73 00:04:54,210 --> 00:04:56,004 You're kind of making it into Paradise. 74 00:04:56,004 --> 00:04:59,966 So the act of naming or the act of shaping, or the act of even 75 00:05:00,008 --> 00:05:03,886 recognizing something that may already be there, 76 00:05:03,886 --> 00:05:09,100 but that is altered by your being there, by you're coming upon it. 77 00:05:12,937 --> 00:05:14,856 More's ‘Utopia’, when it was first 78 00:05:14,856 --> 00:05:18,651 published, was a group of people 79 00:05:18,818 --> 00:05:23,072 who lived in a peninsula and thought, you know what? 80 00:05:23,114 --> 00:05:25,450 Life would be better if we were an island. 81 00:05:25,450 --> 00:05:28,411 And that's because they'd imagined themselves 82 00:05:28,411 --> 00:05:33,499 somehow as separate and distinct, and that they could run their own 83 00:05:33,958 --> 00:05:36,961 community better by being separate. 84 00:05:37,086 --> 00:05:43,134 So they dug a trench at the end of the peninsula 85 00:05:43,134 --> 00:05:47,138 and turn themselves from a peninsula, almost island, into an island. 86 00:05:47,138 --> 00:05:49,515 And then they called that Utopia. 87 00:05:49,515 --> 00:05:53,519 So that's both found and there. 88 00:05:53,519 --> 00:05:55,772 In other words, it was already nearly an island. 89 00:05:55,772 --> 00:06:00,026 And what they did was turned it into an island by deciding, we want this 90 00:06:00,026 --> 00:06:05,281 to be different to what it currently is, but nonetheless, it's nearly there. 91 00:06:05,281 --> 00:06:09,786 So it's the it's the shaping of a nearly island into an island 92 00:06:09,786 --> 00:06:11,287 that generates utopia. 93 00:06:11,287 --> 00:06:16,084 And that's the kind of movement, 94 00:06:16,084 --> 00:06:19,087 cultural movement that I'm most interested in. 95 00:06:19,087 --> 00:06:21,589 You find something or you're in a situation. 96 00:06:21,589 --> 00:06:26,803 You think this could be better if we just did this, or we just did that 97 00:06:26,803 --> 00:06:29,931 or made this place different somehow? 98 00:06:30,681 --> 00:06:35,311 I guess I'm more interested in that than suddenly discovering a whole world 99 00:06:35,311 --> 00:06:40,066 that you didn't know existed, and then naming that as Paradise. 100 00:06:40,149 --> 00:06:44,445 Although that, of course, happens at the same time as More's writing Utopia. 101 00:06:44,445 --> 00:06:49,492 So in the Renaissance, in the 16th century broadly, that's a time in which, 102 00:06:50,410 --> 00:06:52,537 you know, Europeans go to what we now 103 00:06:52,537 --> 00:06:55,540 call America and go, oh, this is Paradise. 104 00:06:55,540 --> 00:06:56,541 But even that, 105 00:06:56,541 --> 00:07:00,878 then they're shaping and naming something because of what they already recognize. 106 00:07:04,340 --> 00:07:08,261 It falls within the genre of the counterfactual. 107 00:07:08,261 --> 00:07:12,306 So the thing that's not actually factual but has a relation to the real. 108 00:07:12,432 --> 00:07:15,685 So you imagine something, it's a what if story, you know, it's a 109 00:07:15,726 --> 00:07:18,312 what if we did this? What if this were the case? 110 00:07:18,312 --> 00:07:22,150 But of course, it presents itself initially as a real narrative 111 00:07:22,191 --> 00:07:25,862 because there were lots of stories like it circulating 112 00:07:26,028 --> 00:07:29,323 in the early 16th century where people said, oh, I've been across the ocean 113 00:07:29,323 --> 00:07:31,951 and I met these people, and this is how they were. 114 00:07:31,951 --> 00:07:38,124 So it fits within a genre of real life experience, 115 00:07:38,124 --> 00:07:43,337 but it's very soon, clearly not that once you start to think about it. 116 00:07:43,337 --> 00:07:46,591 And so, yeah, again, that's a sort of slippage 117 00:07:46,591 --> 00:07:50,219 between genres, between modes, between kinds of thinking 118 00:07:50,511 --> 00:07:53,473 that I think is fundamental to Paradise, 119 00:07:53,473 --> 00:07:57,894 actually, which is not here, but what if? 120 00:07:57,894 --> 00:08:00,730 Those two gestures, we're not there now? 121 00:08:00,730 --> 00:08:04,859 But what if we were or what if we did this? 122 00:08:04,901 --> 00:08:06,194 But what if we went there? 123 00:08:06,194 --> 00:08:08,613 Or what if we traveled back in time or forward? 124 00:08:08,613 --> 00:08:11,699 And, you know, all of those are quite small 125 00:08:11,699 --> 00:08:15,077 displacements, which begin with where we are now 126 00:08:15,453 --> 00:08:19,749 and are thinking about what if where we are now were different. 127 00:08:23,669 --> 00:08:26,672 I do think dissatisfaction or 128 00:08:27,256 --> 00:08:32,261 even disappointed hope, disappointment at how things have turned out 129 00:08:32,428 --> 00:08:37,266 is fundamental to utopian imagining, 130 00:08:37,350 --> 00:08:44,440 but it's also born out of a more active hope than just dissatisfaction. 131 00:08:44,482 --> 00:08:47,818 In other words, a belief that that some kind of action - 132 00:08:47,818 --> 00:08:50,530 we're back to agency again - that some kind of action 133 00:08:50,530 --> 00:08:54,158 will make things better or will make things different. 134 00:08:54,492 --> 00:08:59,705 You're not going to be utopian unless you're already unhappy 135 00:08:59,705 --> 00:09:03,167 or even enraged by the current circumstances. 136 00:09:03,167 --> 00:09:07,171 If you don't think there's an injustice or an instability or an in, you know, 137 00:09:07,213 --> 00:09:08,464 something wrong. 138 00:09:08,464 --> 00:09:11,592 But I don't think that 139 00:09:11,592 --> 00:09:16,264 dissatisfaction is necessarily the grounding move. 140 00:09:16,556 --> 00:09:19,016 I think the grounding move is hope. 141 00:09:19,016 --> 00:09:22,019 It's always hope of something better. 142 00:09:26,232 --> 00:09:29,068 Of course, I recognize that there are paradises... 143 00:09:29,068 --> 00:09:32,738 There are histories of Paradise or 144 00:09:33,489 --> 00:09:37,076 cultural accounts of Paradise which are beyond the human 145 00:09:37,118 --> 00:09:42,039 or extraterrestrial or heavenly, where they're not really utopias, 146 00:09:42,081 --> 00:09:45,668 they're just a different place altogether and a perfect place. 147 00:09:45,710 --> 00:09:49,130 And in that sense, if I'm not doing too much of around 148 00:09:49,130 --> 00:09:53,926 the circle, Utopia in that sense, is just a moment in the history of Paradise. 149 00:09:54,510 --> 00:09:58,389 There have been paradises forever, but More intervenes... 150 00:09:58,431 --> 00:09:59,432 Thomas More intervenes 151 00:09:59,432 --> 00:10:03,519 in 1516 to say, okay, how about we think of this as an island? 152 00:10:03,519 --> 00:10:05,813 And how about we think of it as a city? 153 00:10:05,813 --> 00:10:08,149 And how about we think of it as a republic? 154 00:10:08,149 --> 00:10:13,446 You know, he gives it a political shape and a societal shape, 155 00:10:13,487 --> 00:10:16,741 that it's actually not just a garden somewhere after you die. 156 00:10:16,907 --> 00:10:19,785 So he turns it from a religious 157 00:10:19,785 --> 00:10:22,955 or otherworldly fantasy 158 00:10:22,955 --> 00:10:28,419 into a political fantasy about agency, about what people can do. 159 00:10:28,753 --> 00:10:32,590 And sure, that's a different moment in the history of Paradise, 160 00:10:32,590 --> 00:10:35,384 but I still think it's part of the history of Paradise. 161 00:10:40,514 --> 00:10:41,182 The urban 162 00:10:41,182 --> 00:10:46,812 imaginary that is at the heart of More's utopia has become dystopian 163 00:10:46,812 --> 00:10:48,648 in the last 100 years, 164 00:10:48,648 --> 00:10:53,194 and so many dystopias are set in cities that have gone wrong. 165 00:10:53,194 --> 00:10:54,445 Many, many, many. 166 00:10:54,445 --> 00:10:58,616 And that's partly about history of industrialization and the way 167 00:10:58,658 --> 00:11:03,746 cities have turned out to be places of great injustice and great inequality. 168 00:11:03,871 --> 00:11:08,793 But it's also because of an enduring fantasy about nature 169 00:11:08,793 --> 00:11:12,922 as a regenerative force, and about if you could 170 00:11:12,922 --> 00:11:17,093 leave the city and find somewhere green, you could start again. 171 00:11:17,134 --> 00:11:20,388 That... I'm calling it a fantasy, 172 00:11:20,388 --> 00:11:25,726 that that idea is now under such threat because of the environmental crisis 173 00:11:25,726 --> 00:11:32,358 and because of the state that the planet is in, that we have put it in. 174 00:11:32,358 --> 00:11:36,070 And so, to that degree, 175 00:11:36,445 --> 00:11:39,407 the imagination of utopia 176 00:11:39,407 --> 00:11:44,537 as the founding of a new place in a space that's not been found or explored 177 00:11:44,537 --> 00:11:48,582 or turned into that of human habitation before, 178 00:11:48,916 --> 00:11:52,962 is now terribly complicated because it's bound up, obviously 179 00:11:53,003 --> 00:11:59,677 with colonization, with industrialization, with globalization as a negative force of 180 00:11:59,677 --> 00:12:02,763 and with the whole notion of the Anthropocene, 181 00:12:02,763 --> 00:12:06,976 the degree to which humans have... human impact on nature. 182 00:12:07,017 --> 00:12:10,688 Precisely what I was saying was good at the beginning is actually 183 00:12:10,688 --> 00:12:13,733 just largely dreadful and destructive. 184 00:12:13,858 --> 00:12:18,487 So I think it's much harder now to imagine Paradise 185 00:12:18,863 --> 00:12:21,866 as somewhere on earth that you haven't been to yet, 186 00:12:22,032 --> 00:12:24,869 because you feel that probably as soon 187 00:12:24,869 --> 00:12:27,913 as you got there, you'd break it, or 188 00:12:29,373 --> 00:12:30,875 that it doesn't exist anymore 189 00:12:30,875 --> 00:12:35,296 because the whole world has been sort of broken already. 190 00:12:35,546 --> 00:12:38,382 Obviously, TV programs tell you the opposite, 191 00:12:38,382 --> 00:12:41,802 that there are many, many TV programs in which people go to 192 00:12:43,220 --> 00:12:45,514 various places and say, oh, this is Paradise. 193 00:12:45,514 --> 00:12:49,059 And they imagine in particular various 194 00:12:49,477 --> 00:12:53,689 forms of life, cultural communities that aren't 195 00:12:53,689 --> 00:12:57,777 constructed, the way in which those of us who are watching the TV generally live, 196 00:12:57,777 --> 00:13:01,405 and they still construct a Paradise out there. 197 00:13:02,156 --> 00:13:05,326 But, I mean, those are difficult because they're really still 198 00:13:05,326 --> 00:13:09,038 just producing a fantasy that is on the edge of destruction. 199 00:13:09,038 --> 00:13:12,541 I don't want to be too bleak, but I do think that that history is 200 00:13:12,541 --> 00:13:16,003 now contaminated, polluted... 201 00:13:16,045 --> 00:13:20,382 You know, you can use all sorts of words that have to do with the process of 202 00:13:21,717 --> 00:13:24,720 soiling, the 203 00:13:25,387 --> 00:13:27,640 depurifying - whatever the word is - 204 00:13:27,640 --> 00:13:35,481 the notion of a natural space that can somehow regenerate itself. 205 00:13:35,481 --> 00:13:39,860 I do think that's much, much more difficult to imagine now than, say, 206 00:13:39,860 --> 00:13:43,656 even a hundred years ago, and certainly than during the Renaissance. 207 00:13:43,823 --> 00:13:45,491 But actually even in the Renaissance. 208 00:13:45,491 --> 00:13:47,576 I mean, if you look at Shakespeare's Tempest, 209 00:13:47,576 --> 00:13:50,579 you know, they end up on this island that looks like Paradise. 210 00:13:50,621 --> 00:13:55,709 And very quickly you realize, well, okay, there's been slavery going on here. 211 00:13:55,709 --> 00:13:57,419 There's a plantation here. 212 00:13:57,419 --> 00:14:01,465 This is also a place of injustice, deep injustice. 213 00:14:01,507 --> 00:14:05,803 Not only is Caliban enslaved, but so is Ariel. 214 00:14:05,803 --> 00:14:07,221 In other words, so is nature. 215 00:14:07,221 --> 00:14:10,224 So is the figure that represents 216 00:14:10,266 --> 00:14:12,810 things that can move and become other creatures and so on. 217 00:14:12,810 --> 00:14:16,272 And so yeah, it's not only recently 218 00:14:16,272 --> 00:14:19,358 that we thought we can't quite sustain this. 219 00:14:19,859 --> 00:14:23,696 As to why we keep thinking we can't sustain it, I don't know. 220 00:14:27,700 --> 00:14:28,367 I'm not going to 221 00:14:28,367 --> 00:14:31,912 make too many claims for the 16th century, but that begins in the 16th century. 222 00:14:31,912 --> 00:14:32,913 It really does. 223 00:14:32,913 --> 00:14:38,335 When when the French and Portuguese, and to some degree the Spanish, go to 224 00:14:38,502 --> 00:14:42,006 what's now Brazil, to very specifically to what's now Rio. 225 00:14:42,131 --> 00:14:45,426 They go to the baia de Guanabara, as it was called then, 226 00:14:45,426 --> 00:14:50,973 and they encounter the Tupinambá tribe, or the Tupinambá culture, 227 00:14:51,098 --> 00:14:54,810 and they live... 228 00:14:54,894 --> 00:14:59,023 So Montaigne - 16th-century writer who then Shakespeare 229 00:14:59,064 --> 00:15:04,236 kind of picks up on - says, they live without law, without property. 230 00:15:04,278 --> 00:15:08,741 They don't even know the word for treachery, for lies. 231 00:15:08,741 --> 00:15:11,744 So there's a sort of understanding... 232 00:15:12,453 --> 00:15:17,458 Misunderstanding, probably, but an understanding nonetheless of a culture 233 00:15:17,458 --> 00:15:23,964 that doesn't have all the things that European culture at the time... 234 00:15:25,549 --> 00:15:29,094 with which European culture at the time was corrupted, whether that's property 235 00:15:29,094 --> 00:15:34,266 or laws of inheritance or deception or singular families. 236 00:15:34,266 --> 00:15:39,647 I mean to be generally lived in a group and raise children collectively and so on. 237 00:15:39,647 --> 00:15:44,193 So and also Montaigne argues that their wars are just wars. 238 00:15:44,944 --> 00:15:48,948 So. And this is on the back of travelers 239 00:15:48,948 --> 00:15:52,826 who went there in the 1550s and 60s and then wrote about it. 240 00:15:52,826 --> 00:15:55,829 But even then, 241 00:15:55,913 --> 00:15:59,124 very quickly, they become figures 242 00:15:59,458 --> 00:16:04,046 for Catholics or Protestants in the civil war in France. 243 00:16:04,213 --> 00:16:08,801 So cannibals, for example, they eat flesh and they drink blood. 244 00:16:08,801 --> 00:16:11,553 Who else eats flesh and drinks blood? Well, Catholics. 245 00:16:11,553 --> 00:16:15,641 So very quickly they become assimilated to Europe, 246 00:16:15,849 --> 00:16:19,436 to the to the contemporary concerns of the writers. 247 00:16:19,436 --> 00:16:21,605 And I think that process goes on 248 00:16:21,605 --> 00:16:25,943 Eevery time we meet another culture or another place. 249 00:16:25,943 --> 00:16:31,824 We translate it into our own obsessive or difficult concerns. 250 00:16:31,907 --> 00:16:34,576 And I think that's just inevitable. 251 00:16:34,576 --> 00:16:38,038 I mean, it's kind of bleak, but it's also actually imaginative. 252 00:16:38,038 --> 00:16:39,081 That's how we work. 253 00:16:39,081 --> 00:16:41,125 And that's sort of okay as well. 254 00:16:45,713 --> 00:16:48,966 I think the idea of Paradise 255 00:16:49,049 --> 00:16:53,804 endures because it's necessary. On two levels, really. 256 00:16:53,971 --> 00:16:57,099 One. 257 00:16:57,182 --> 00:17:01,937 It's necessary because it feeds the human imagination. 258 00:17:01,937 --> 00:17:05,315 And that is part of a kind of 259 00:17:06,900 --> 00:17:09,903 a way of imagining, of 260 00:17:10,154 --> 00:17:12,406 thinking about what the future is going to be. 261 00:17:12,406 --> 00:17:16,368 Paradise like utopia is a way of 262 00:17:16,618 --> 00:17:21,290 imagining your place within time, either a future or a past. 263 00:17:21,331 --> 00:17:23,167 We've lost it or it's still to come. 264 00:17:23,167 --> 00:17:28,380 So Paradise functions as a kind of... one of many ways 265 00:17:28,380 --> 00:17:31,967 in which we think about our place in history, our place in time, 266 00:17:32,176 --> 00:17:35,137 our place in the sort of long 267 00:17:35,179 --> 00:17:40,059 story of humans on the Earth and precisely its relation 268 00:17:40,059 --> 00:17:44,021 to gardens, to nature and so on, is a way of thinking about what 269 00:17:44,021 --> 00:17:47,941 we either have done, or can do, or owe, 270 00:17:48,233 --> 00:17:52,071 or will owe to soil, to plants, 271 00:17:52,071 --> 00:17:55,866 to animals, to, to to those other living creatures. 272 00:17:55,866 --> 00:17:58,577 The more than human world in which we now operate. 273 00:17:58,577 --> 00:18:02,289 And I think Paradise is fundamental to that. We need that. 274 00:18:02,289 --> 00:18:05,584 And maybe we need it more now than we've ever needed it, I don't know. 275 00:18:08,545 --> 00:18:12,883 I think it's enduring because it's a way of thinking about place, 276 00:18:12,883 --> 00:18:17,763 and about places we care about at a much more micro-human level. 277 00:18:18,013 --> 00:18:22,017 You know, I have my own little paradises that I can go to. 278 00:18:22,226 --> 00:18:25,646 They happen to be the hills of South India because that's where I grew up. 279 00:18:25,687 --> 00:18:26,939 And it's more specific than that. 280 00:18:26,939 --> 00:18:29,942 I could take you to a village and say, right, this is it, or a town, 281 00:18:30,150 --> 00:18:32,986 of course, it's now been built over and all the rest of it, but it's still there. 282 00:18:32,986 --> 00:18:36,740 I think that the idea of Paradise is either something lost 283 00:18:36,740 --> 00:18:40,619 or something still to come is fundamental to us as individuals as well. 284 00:18:40,661 --> 00:18:43,831 Not just as a kind of group, species or culture. 285 00:18:43,914 --> 00:18:49,503 I think each person probably has some 286 00:18:51,296 --> 00:18:52,673 rootedness, some 287 00:18:52,673 --> 00:18:56,468 sense of where their happy place, 288 00:18:56,468 --> 00:18:59,638 if you like, where they would either like to go 289 00:18:59,638 --> 00:19:02,850 or whether, more importantly, in a way where they can go 290 00:19:03,308 --> 00:19:07,646 when they're in a point of pressure, turmoil, difficulty and so on. 291 00:19:07,688 --> 00:19:13,986 So it's just a level of personal being where we are now. 292 00:19:14,027 --> 00:19:16,947 We need somewhere else 293 00:19:16,947 --> 00:19:20,617 to think about, to be in, to imagine our way to, 294 00:19:21,702 --> 00:19:26,039 to both endure where we are now, but also to thrive where we are now. 295 00:19:26,081 --> 00:19:30,544 It's not always negative, you know, it absolutely can be a way of thriving. 296 00:19:30,669 --> 00:19:31,712 To think about the 297 00:19:31,712 --> 00:19:35,299 no place to think about the other place to think about the happy place. 298 00:19:35,382 --> 00:19:39,428 All of them are puns for Utopia, but all of them are 299 00:19:40,345 --> 00:19:41,847 included in the word utopia. 300 00:19:41,847 --> 00:19:43,473 But also to think about, 301 00:19:43,473 --> 00:19:47,769 to go back to Paradise, to think about some kind of garden space. 302 00:19:47,769 --> 00:19:51,982 Some space that's outside where we are now. 303 00:19:52,024 --> 00:19:53,442 Another place. 304 00:19:56,528 --> 00:19:57,696 Paradise in the French 305 00:19:57,696 --> 00:20:01,909 tradition, certainly becomes gardens. 306 00:20:01,909 --> 00:20:06,580 So, in the 17th-century novel, you have a whole series of gardens 307 00:20:06,663 --> 00:20:12,711 which are not only actually constructed in Versailles in various other places, 308 00:20:12,711 --> 00:20:17,633 but also in novels, and become... moving through that garden 309 00:20:17,799 --> 00:20:20,719 takes you on a journey to love, 310 00:20:20,719 --> 00:20:23,722 to peace, to a better world. 311 00:20:24,139 --> 00:20:27,100 The most famous of these is probably the Carte de Tendre, 312 00:20:27,100 --> 00:20:29,561 which is the Map of Tenderness. 313 00:20:29,561 --> 00:20:34,608 And it's a it's a map in a very, very long 17th-century novel 314 00:20:35,484 --> 00:20:36,944 where you go... 315 00:20:36,944 --> 00:20:38,111 It's very Bunyanesque. 316 00:20:38,111 --> 00:20:45,619 You go through, past the lake of indifference to the, the the bushes of tenderness. 317 00:20:45,619 --> 00:20:49,539 And then and it's, it's basically teaching you how... teaching men 318 00:20:49,581 --> 00:20:54,920 how to be less aggressive and more gentle and more loving. 319 00:20:54,920 --> 00:20:59,341 It's within a tradition of gallantry, or galanterie in French, 320 00:20:59,341 --> 00:21:03,136 which is a kind of how do you teach love? 321 00:21:03,136 --> 00:21:08,684 And within that the Paradise as garden in which you find yourself lost, 322 00:21:08,684 --> 00:21:13,897 but then eventually, by following a path, will discover what it is to love 323 00:21:13,897 --> 00:21:17,818 and what true inclination is, what true tenderness is, and so on. 324 00:21:17,859 --> 00:21:22,281 Very, very strong tradition in the 17th century, within a particular 325 00:21:22,322 --> 00:21:27,452 kind of set of... within court and within the sort of area around the court. 326 00:21:32,207 --> 00:21:34,001 The other moment at which 327 00:21:34,001 --> 00:21:36,920 Paradis, as a term, or Paradise, gets picked up, 328 00:21:36,920 --> 00:21:40,716 is actually very strongly in romantic poetry, 329 00:21:41,008 --> 00:21:45,429 where on the one hand, you've got a whole series of poems, 330 00:21:45,470 --> 00:21:49,808 a bit like Wordsworth's Lake poems, you've got Lamartine and various other 331 00:21:49,808 --> 00:21:54,062 people writing about lakes and rivers and the beauties of nature. 332 00:21:54,062 --> 00:21:57,441 And then you've got Baudelaire who writes largely 333 00:21:57,441 --> 00:22:01,737 about various forms of intoxication 334 00:22:01,737 --> 00:22:05,198 through poetry, through hashish, 335 00:22:05,490 --> 00:22:10,829 and through sexual love that take you to Paradise. 336 00:22:10,829 --> 00:22:13,248 So it's alive and well in the 19th century. 337 00:22:13,248 --> 00:22:14,916 And for Baudelaire, that's very urban. 338 00:22:14,916 --> 00:22:16,501 So that's the thing that you can get through 339 00:22:16,501 --> 00:22:19,087 wandering through the city and then encounters 340 00:22:19,087 --> 00:22:21,340 with people in the city, you don't go to nature. 341 00:22:21,340 --> 00:22:24,426 Paradise is if you like this, 342 00:22:24,426 --> 00:22:27,387 this, this... getting to Paradise, 343 00:22:27,429 --> 00:22:31,016 you go through a portal that's somewhere within the urban space. 344 00:22:31,016 --> 00:22:32,100 But that's another story. 345 00:22:32,100 --> 00:22:34,144 I mean, that's about, well, it's the same story. 346 00:22:34,144 --> 00:22:37,564 It's about intoxication as a mode of ecstasy 347 00:22:37,647 --> 00:22:41,193 that takes you into a different place, takes your body into a different place, 348 00:22:41,234 --> 00:22:44,571 frees you from where you are now, and then you're in Paradise. 349 00:22:44,613 --> 00:22:48,075 You know, you've got to do the things that will take you there... 350 00:22:48,075 --> 00:22:50,410 in Baudelaire’s poetry at least. 351 00:22:50,410 --> 00:22:54,956 So yeah, it's not freedom imposed on you by a political structure. 352 00:22:54,956 --> 00:23:00,253 Let's say it's it's something you do some imagination, act of your imagination 353 00:23:00,337 --> 00:23:04,424 to imagine the world as other than it is, and then you're there, 354 00:23:04,674 --> 00:23:06,259 or at least on the way there. 355 00:23:10,889 --> 00:23:14,684 The focus of my work is texts, is literary. 356 00:23:14,893 --> 00:23:16,353 I mean, literature is a complicated term, 357 00:23:16,353 --> 00:23:19,981 but but fictional texts and or texts that have... 358 00:23:20,524 --> 00:23:23,068 they might be historical records, but where there's 359 00:23:23,068 --> 00:23:26,321 the work of the imagination is evident in the writing. 360 00:23:26,571 --> 00:23:30,283 And I say that because I looked at, as I say, these pilgrimage accounts, 361 00:23:30,283 --> 00:23:32,494 which were accounts of real journeys, and 362 00:23:32,494 --> 00:23:36,289 I've done a lot of work on medical texts, for example, in the 16th, 17th century, 363 00:23:36,289 --> 00:23:41,044 which are actual case studies of different kind of people and so on. 364 00:23:41,044 --> 00:23:44,506 But the work of the imagination is very powerfully in there, 365 00:23:44,506 --> 00:23:47,509 and that's what I'm looking to find. 366 00:23:48,468 --> 00:23:51,930 It is mainly texts, and I suppose 367 00:23:52,597 --> 00:23:57,394 that's why I think of Paradise as a fictional construct 368 00:23:57,394 --> 00:24:03,066 or as a counterfactual effort of the imagination. 369 00:24:07,028 --> 00:24:08,447 When I think of fiction, I'm 370 00:24:08,447 --> 00:24:12,451 not just thinking of letters and words on a page, I'm also thinking of images. 371 00:24:12,451 --> 00:24:16,705 It's only when I myself get involved in theater or film 372 00:24:16,705 --> 00:24:21,793 that I get into 3D worlds of imagining, but for the most part, 373 00:24:21,835 --> 00:24:28,216 my focus as both as a researcher and as a teacher is on words, on stories, 374 00:24:28,258 --> 00:24:31,261 as enacted in, 375 00:24:31,887 --> 00:24:36,266 yeah, organized words on a page, interrupted by images, 376 00:24:36,308 --> 00:24:41,271 I guess, or complemented by images, but mainly words. 377 00:24:41,313 --> 00:24:43,690 Now, why is that useful for Paradise? 378 00:24:43,690 --> 00:24:46,401 Because I yeah, in the end, I think, as 379 00:24:46,401 --> 00:24:49,738 I've said a number of times, the word Paradise is interesting. 380 00:24:49,738 --> 00:24:52,741 The history of the term, the word utopia, 381 00:24:52,824 --> 00:24:56,578 It's the words themselves that are generative I think. 382 00:24:57,579 --> 00:25:01,249 They then generate all sorts of other modes of experience 383 00:25:01,249 --> 00:25:06,213 and apprehension and grabbing and shaking and touching of other 384 00:25:07,297 --> 00:25:09,633 kind of kinds of, of place or experience. 385 00:25:09,633 --> 00:25:12,719 But, for me, what I'm interested in 386 00:25:12,761 --> 00:25:15,764 is what, what the words release. 387 00:25:15,931 --> 00:25:21,353 And like I said, right at the beginning, for me, a Paradise or a utopia begins 388 00:25:21,353 --> 00:25:27,234 with an act of naming, which is a kind of shaping of a place or a time. 389 00:25:27,400 --> 00:25:32,447 So yeah, it's the language, it's the words. 390 00:25:32,447 --> 00:25:37,410 It's the history of those terms that seem to me 391 00:25:38,286 --> 00:25:40,539 most interesting. 392 00:25:40,539 --> 00:25:43,416 I mean, utopia’s, a speech act. If I say it so, then it must be so. 393 00:25:43,416 --> 00:25:48,922 But on the other hand, I know it's not, so that that, that sort of 394 00:25:48,964 --> 00:25:50,966 and that shimmering between what is and isn't 395 00:25:50,966 --> 00:25:53,969 and whether speech makes something or doesn't make something 396 00:25:53,969 --> 00:25:55,011 really interesting to me. 397 00:25:55,011 --> 00:25:59,599 I mean, it's a it's why we do this stuff, I think... why I do the stuff I do at least. 398 00:25:59,641 --> 00:26:00,225 Yeah. 399 00:26:10,277 --> 00:26:14,823 Thank you for listening to this episode of the On Paradise podcast series. 400 00:26:14,990 --> 00:26:19,578 Please explore other episodes by searching for On Paradise 401 00:26:19,619 --> 00:26:22,622 at podcasts.ox.ac.uk. 402 00:26:23,790 --> 00:26:24,499 Goodbye.