ABSTRACT
The Garden of Eden is known to us through the experience of reading stories. The story of the Fall was probably not the first to describe the qualities of a lost place and it was certainly not the last. At the outset of the last century, for example, Hudson's Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest described very different experiences from those found in the industrial society with which Hudson was familiar. Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth1 uses many more examples to show that literature provides us with experiences that are not found in scientific knowledge and political propaganda. There is then a dilemma: either we define literature as a Utopian consolation for the realities of scientific and political discourse, or we insist that the experiences of literature are real and we find scientific and political discourse alien. We must, then, either give up valued experience or give up on the expectation that we can make the changes we need to make in the institutions which govern us by complying with their systems of exclusion. Such an unattractive choice is for many a persisting and uncomfortable double-bind.
