The Guardian - Amitav Ghosh*
The climate crisis casts a much smaller shadow on literary fiction
than it does on the world. We are living through a crisis of culture –
and of the imagination
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In the eye of the storm … a tornado in Kansas.
Photograph: NZP Chasers/Getty Images |
It
is a simple fact that climate change has a much smaller presence in
contemporary literary fiction than it does even in public discussion. As
proof of this, we need only glance through the pages of literary
journals and book reviews. When the subject of climate change occurs, it
is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories
are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could
even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by
definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of
the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the
genre of
science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.
There is something confounding about this peculiar feedback loop. It
is very difficult, surely, to imagine a conception of seriousness that
is blind to potentially life-changing threats. And if the urgency of a
subject were indeed a criterion of its seriousness, then, considering
what climate change actually portends for the future of the Earth, it
should surely follow that this would be the principal preoccupation of
writers the world over – and this, I think, is very far from being the
case. But why?
It is as though, in the literary imagination, climate change were akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel
Why does climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than
it does on the world? Is it perhaps too wild a stream to be navigated
in the accustomed barques of narration? But the truth, as is now widely
acknowledged, is that we have entered a time when the wild has become
the norm: if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these
waters, then they will have failed – and their failures will have to be
counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure
that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.
Clearly, the problem does not arise out of a lack of information:
there are surely very few writers today who are oblivious to the current
disturbances in climate systems the world over. Yet, it is a striking
fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is
almost always outside fiction. A case in point is the work of
Arundhati Roy:
not only is she one of the finest prose stylists of our time, she is
passionate and deeply informed about climate change. Yet all her
writings on these subjects are in various forms of nonfiction.
When I try to think of writers whose imaginative work has
communicated a more specific sense of the accelerating changes in our
environment, I find myself at a loss; of literary novelists writing in
English only a handful of names come to mind:
Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Barbara Kingsolver, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy,
Ian McEwan
and T Coraghessan Boyle. No doubt many other names could be added to
this list, but even if it were to be expanded to 100, or more, it would
remain true, I think, that the literary mainstream, even as it has
become more
engagé on many fronts, remains just as unaware of the crisis on our doorstep as the population at large.
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| Viggo Mortensen, left, and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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I have been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it
is true of my own work as well, that this subject figures only obliquely
in my fiction. I have come to be convinced that this discrepancy is not
the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar
forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded
as serious fiction.
In his seminal essay “The Climate of History”, Dipesh Chakrabarty
observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental
assumptions and procedures in this era of the Anthropocene, in which
“humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical
processes of the Earth”. I would go further and add that the
Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities,
but also to our common sense understandings and beyond that to
contemporary culture in general.
There can be no doubt, of course, that this challenge arises in part
from the complexities of the technical language that serves as our
primary view of climate change. But neither can there be any doubt that
it derives also from the practices and assumptions that guide the arts
and humanities. To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the
utmost urgency: it may well be the key to understanding why today’s
culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is
perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the
broadest sense – for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a
crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
Culture generates desires – for vehicles and appliances, for certain
kinds of gardens and dwellings – that are among the principal drivers of
the carbon economy. A speedy convertible excites us neither because of
any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding
of its engineering. It excites us because it evokes an image of a road
arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind
in our hair; we envision
James Dean and Peter Fonda racing toward the horizon; we think also of
Jack Kerouac and
Vladimir Nabokov.
When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island
to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain
of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an
ember in that fire. When we see a green lawn that has been watered with
desalinated water, in Abu Dhabi or southern California or some other
environment where people had once been content to spend their water
thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an
expression of a yearning that may have been sparked by the novels of
Jane Austen.
The artefacts and commodities that are conjured up by these desires
are, in a sense, at once expressions and concealments of the cultural
matrix that brought them into being.
This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider
histories of imperialism and capitalism that have shaped the world. But
to know this is still to know very little about the specific ways in
which the matrix interacts with different modes of cultural activity:
poetry, art, architecture, theatre, prose fiction and so on. Throughout
history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological
calamity and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change
prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices?
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New York freezes in director Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow. |
From this perspective, the questions that confront writers and
artists today are not just those of the politics of the carbon economy;
many of them have to do also with our own practices and the ways in
which they make us complicit in the concealments of the broader culture.
For instance, if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this
period of accelerating carbon emissions, favour shiny,
glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, what are the
patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist,
choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I
not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me
complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace?
In
the same spirit, I think it also needs to be asked, what is it about
climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the
preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture
writ large and its patterns of evasion?
In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed
the Sundarbans and made cities such as Kolkata, New York and Bangkok
uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and
literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for
traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when
they fail to find them, what can they do other than to conclude that
ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into
the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the
realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so
congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the
time of the Great Derangement.
On the afternoon of March 17, 1978, when I was 21, I was stuck in the
middle of the first tornado to hit Delhi in recorded meteorological
history. As is often the case with people who are waylaid by
unpredictable events, for years afterwards my mind kept returning to my
encounter with the tornado. Why had I walked down a road that I almost
never took, just before it was struck by a phenomenon that was without
historical precedent? To think of it in terms of chance and coincidence
seemed only to impoverish the experience: it was like trying to
understand a poem by counting the words. I found myself reaching instead
for the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning –for the extraordinary,
the inexplicable, the confounding. Yet these too did not do justice to
my memory of the event.
Novelists inevitably mine their own experience when they write. No
less than any other writer have I dug into my own past while writing
fiction. It is certainly true that storms, floods and unusual weather
events do recur in my books, and this may well be a legacy of the
tornado. Yet oddly enough, no tornado has ever figured in my novels. Nor
is this due to any lack of effort on my part. Indeed, I have returned
to the experience often over the years, hoping to put it to use in a
novel, only to meet with failure at every attempt.
I was stuck in the middle of the first tornado to hit Delhi – but no tornado has ever featured in my novels Amitav Ghosh
On the face of it there is no reason why such an event should be
difficult to translate into fiction; after all, many novels are filled
with strange happenings. Why then did I fail, despite my best efforts,
to send a character down a road that is imminently to be struck by a
tornado?
In reflecting on this, I find myself asking, what would I make of
such a scene were I to come across it in a novel written by someone
else? I suspect that my response would be one of incredulity; I would be
inclined to think that the scene was a contrivance of last resort.
Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted
would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability?
Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told,
fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives such as
those of
The Arabian Nights,
Journey to the West and
The Decameron
proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another.
Novels too proceed in this fashion, but what is distinctive about the
form is precisely the concealment of those exceptional moments that
serve as the motor of narrative. This is achieved through the insertion
of what Franco Moretti, the literary theorist, calls “fillers”.
According to Moretti, “fillers function very much like the good manners
so important in Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the
‘narrativity’ of life under control – to give a regularity, a ‘style’ to
existence”. It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up,
through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative”.
It
is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through “the relocation
of the unheard-of toward the background ... while the everyday moves
into the foreground”. As Moretti puts it, “fillers are an attempt at
rationalising the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few
surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all”.
This regime of thought imposed itself not only on the arts but also on the sciences. That is why
Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle,
Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant study of the geological theories of
gradualism and catastrophism is, in essence, a study of narrative. In
Gould’s telling of the story, the catastrophist recounting of the
Earth’s history is exemplified by Thomas Burnet’s
Sacred Theory of the Earth
(1690) in which the narrative turns on events of “unrepeatable
uniqueness”. As opposed to this, the gradualist approach, championed by
James Hutton (1726‑97) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), privileges slow
processes that unfold over time at even, predictable rates. The central
credo in this doctrine was: “Nothing could change otherwise than the way
things were seen to change in the present.” Or, to put it simply:
“Nature does not make leaps.”
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A satellite image of the Ganges delta, which is vulnerable to flooding
as sea levels rise. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/UIG via Getty Images |
The trouble, however, is that Nature does certainly jump, if not
leap. The geological record bears witness to many fractures in time,
some of which led to mass extinctions and the like: it was one such, in
the form of the
Chicxulub
asteroid, that probably killed the dinosaurs. It is a fact that
catastrophes waylay both the Earth and its individual inhabitants at
unpredictable intervals and in the most improbable ways.
Distinctive
moments are no less important to modern novels than they are to any
other forms of narrative, whether geological or historical. It could
not, of course, be otherwise: if novels were not built upon a
scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the
Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern
novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality
of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events
continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a
certain kind of narrative a recognisably modern novel.
Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures
with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the
real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability
that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same
as that which obtains outside it; this is why it is commonly said, “If
this were in a novel, no one would believe it”. Within the pages of a
novel an event that is only slightly improbable in real life – say, an
unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend – may seem wildly
unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear
persuasive.
If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a
writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable
even in real life. For example, a scene in which a character is walking
down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of
weather phenomenon?
To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court
eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in
residence; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that
surround the manor house – those generic out-houses that were once known
by names such as the gothic, the romance or the melodrama, and have now
come to be called fantasy, horror and science fiction.
So far as I know, climate change was not a factor in the tornado I
experienced. But the thing it has in common with the freakish weather
events of today is its extreme improbability. And it appears that we are
now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by
our current standards of normality, highly improbable: flash floods,
hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat,
sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial
lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes.
This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global
warming defies both literary fiction and contemporary common sense: the
weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability.
Indeed, it has even been proposed that this era should be named the
“catastrophozoic” (others prefer such phrases as “the long emergency”
and “the penumbral period”). It is certain in any case that these are
not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily
accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.
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An Indian woman pulls a prawn fishing net from the mud embankment on the
Matla river, in the Sundarbans delta. Photograph: Deshakalyan
Chowdhury/AFP |
Poetry, on the other hand, has long had an intimate relationship with
climatic events: as Geoffrey Parker points out, John Milton began to
compose
Paradise Lost
during a winter of extreme cold, and “unpredictable and unforgiving
changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton’s fictional
world, like the real one in which he lived, was ... a ‘universe of
death’ at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold.” This is a universe
very different from that of the contemporary literary novel.
I am, of course, painting with a very broad brush: the novel’s
infancy is long past, and the form has changed in many ways over the
last two centuries. Yet, to a quite remarkable degree, the literary
novel has also remained true to the destiny that was charted for it at
birth. Consider that the literary movements of the 20th century were
almost uniformly disdainful of plot and narrative; that an ever greater
emphasis was laid on style and “observation”, whether it be of everyday
details, traits of character or nuances of emotion – which is why
teachers of creative writing now exhort their students to “show, don’t
tell”.
Yet fortunately, from time to time, there have also been movements
that celebrated the unheard-of and the improbable: surrealism for
instance, and most significantly, magical realism, which is replete with
events that have no relation to the calculus of probability.
There is, however, an important difference between the weather events
that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and
magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events
are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly
improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real.
The ethical difficulties that might arise in treating them as magical or
metaphorical or allegorical are obvious.
But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it
would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat
them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality
that makes them so urgently compelling – which is that they are
actually happening on this Earth, at this time.
*Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable is published by University of Chicago.
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