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On a very windy March day, I went for a walk around Addison’s with visiting Scholar Anne Duprat, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Picardy Jules Verne in France. Our conversation roamed from Homer’s Odyssey to Anthony Trollope’s rain-soaked proposals, with Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and more thrown in. Along the way, we talked randomness, climate change, and what might happen if Austen herself joined us for a stroll.
This conversation was originally recorded as part of the Addison’s Talks podcast. Listen to the other episodes here.
I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your academic career so far, and what brought you to Magdalen?
I’ve been working on a major five-year project supported by the Institut Universitaire de France, which has given me something quite rare and wonderful—academic freedom. It’s allowed me to travel and collaborate with colleagues around the world. So I did this big collective project on chance and randomness which was a cultural history of randomness of how we deal with chance in fictions, in stories and so it was a collaborative thing across different disciplines. That project brought me to the Maison Française d’Oxford, where Raphaelle Garrod and Alice Roulière invited me to Magdalen – and here I am.
So the project on chance—how does that link up with your current work on weather in fiction?
It’s actually the same project. Weather is, in many ways, one of the clearest examples of randomness. It intervenes in our carefully laid plans with no intent or agency. It rains on your proposal, it ruins your harvest, or your picnic. It has no meaning—and that’s exactly why it’s so interesting. It’s the world interrupting us.
I love that idea—the weather as a kind of narrative disruption. But how does it fit into fiction when fiction is ostensibly about planning and creating a narrative and making things fit?
it’s a very good question actually. It is the blind spot. If you ask any classic playwright, he would say that interrupting the action with rain is the worst idea you could have, because it’s like it’s even worse than Deus Ex Machina. It’s completely meaningless and it’s absolutely not dramatic, it’s not glamorous, there is nothing about it. And yet, and yet The Tempest, King Lear, the weather does figure there, it does feature there, because it is either representation of the fact that the world is not us, the world intervenes.
And I feel like when it shows up in fiction, it’s always the dramatic stuff—storms, floods, things going wrong.
But yes, the dramatic weather is more memorable. Take Trollope, for example. In The Claverings, there’s a proposal of marriage that completely collapses because of a sudden rainstorm. It’s wonderful because Trollope’s world is so orderly, so rational, and suddenly this random burst of nature derails everything.
Is that your favourite instance of weather in fiction?
I love Trollope. I love that suddenly, for him, in this instance, the weather exists – and it’s one of my favourite instances because it shouldn’t be there, and yet it is. And once it is, the whole narrative is changed.
Do you feel, when you’re reading, that the weather connects you to characters, or even contemporary audiences through time?
It’s exactly the same but we perceive it differently.
Why?
For instance in lullabies, in French lullabies like Il Pleut, il pleut, Bergère, it’s raining shepherdess, it’s a lovely pastoral 18th century song, the rain is perceived in very different ways than we perceive it.
There is a story of rain and a story of the perceptions of rain. Right now, for instance because of climate change, a rain in summer is a blessing and you expect it like God’s bounty and it was perceived very differently during the Little Ice Age. Our context changes everything.
That leads nicely into my next question—how do you think our relationship to weather is shifting now, especially as the climate crisis becomes harder to ignore?
Oh absolutely! It’s all important to watch the way we talk about weather and climate in fiction because the thing is that the people who are responsible for shaping our imaginations, fiction writers and directors and filmmakers, they all acknowledge the climate, and the threat of climate change.
As one of my colleagues at UCL put it, weather has gone from bit-part player to the star of the show. Climate fiction treats weather as a main character, as an agent of change. But it also shows us ways of creating change, and allows us to figure out what our role in climate change will be.
You wrote in the piece you sent me about a connection between weather and creative practice. Could you talk a little about that?
That brings us to the Aeolian harp—a fascinating idea from the early 19th century, especially in American thought. It’s a wind harp, literally played by the wind. It inspired a whole way of thinking about art not as something entirely made by humans, but something made in collaboration with nature. You see this now in land art, and even in writing, where you might try to write in the moment, to let the external world shape the internal. Think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway—a novel that weaves the weather, the walk, the moment into consciousness itself.
I used to think I hated Virginia Woolf!
So did I! But then one day, I was walking to a lighthouse in Brittany and suddenly, I got it. I understood what she was doing.
So, if you could take anyone else on an Addison’s walk who would it be?
She’s not my favourite writer, but I think I’d love to take Jane Austen. She is so embedded in her time. I’d love to see how she’d react to today’s world – to contemporary feminism, to new social structures, climate change. She’s one of those writers that always goes through retellings, or being reimagined for a new audience. We’re always reinterpreting her – but I wonder how she would interpret us.
Thank you so much to Anne for joining us on such a blustery day, and taking time out of the busy schedule of a visiting Fellow. We can’t wait to see what Anne works on next.