From Metaphors of the Forest to Obscurity of Hashtags: Reading Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Nature has immense therapeutic effect upon human civilization. Literary artists across languages and cultures have diverted quite substantially their creative prowess to represent one of the dominant roles of Nature. In this sense “The idea of literature as therapy seems attractive”, according to Michael Wood who further confirms that literature “appears to represent a large simplification of a complex set of possible relations between text and reader” (Rethinking Therapeutic Reading: Lessons from Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot xii). Hence, this larger group of readers further extracts inspiration from the text and finds healing at multiple levels of psychosocial as well as environmental wellbeing. Based on our assumptions upon this aspect of therapy in literature extracted through Nature, our proposed chapter would be a serious enquiry upon the climatic catastrophe the world is witnessing today that has enabled longer and drier summer seasons, causing frequent and uncontrolled wild fires. Considering this “bushfire” as the crux of our perspective in the chapter, we propose to focus upon the unprecedented bushfire in the forest of the eastern Australia (2019–2020) where thousands of koalas were charred to ashes, numerous kangaroos perished, and much of the indigenous fauna was devastated. To specify our perspective, we would consider the Australian writer, Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2021), as a case study to depict how the collapse of ecosystem affects the people eventually whereas they are consistently digressed by social media feeds that has made them evidently passive enough to resist actively towards this impending catastrophe. Where the slow yet persistent vanishing forest and its fauna is metaphorically depicted as the slow and painless disappearance of the novel’s central character Anna’s body parts, starting from her fingers, her knees, and then her eye, yet she, just like many others, is busy “hashtagging” the gruesome pictures in her Instagram stories of the devastating bushfire. However, on the other hand, to what extent does the literary text like the present one contributes itself as a sample of therapeutic usage in healing and combating such disastrous forces of the environment would be the focus of our experimentation. Furthermore, how the initiation of such literatures might prove itself as an intellectual activism against the global climatic catastrophe such as bushfire would remain the special concern of our research.