Los Angeles Review of Books - Steve Paulson*
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| Novelist Amitav Ghosh |
THE EVIDENCE of climate change is all around us — record
temperatures, superstorms, the crack in the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The news
keep getting grimmer, and once you really take in the worst-case
scenarios of the next few decades, it’s hard not to feel numb. But if
global warming is the most pressing problem facing the planet, why do we
see so few references to it in contemporary novels, apart from
post-apocalyptic science fiction? Where is the great Climate Change
Novel?
These questions haunt the acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh. He
believes artists of all kinds — but especially writers — have a moral
responsibility to confront the issue, and so far, they’ve failed
abysmally. In his recent nonfiction book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,
he makes the case that climate solutions can’t be left to scientists,
technocrats, and politicians. “The climate crisis is also a crisis of
culture, and thus of imagination,” he writes. We need radically new ways
of thinking, even a new paradigm, to see how the Anthropocene is
already transforming our lives. And who’s best equipped to show us this
reimagined landscape? Artists, of course.
It’s a nuanced and often dazzling argument. Ghosh draws on a wide
range of sources — climate scientists, philosophers like Bruno Latour
and Timothy Morton, Pope Francis’s encyclical letter, postcolonial
theorists. He believes the inward turn of modern art has cut it off from
the natural world, and that we desperately need a new approach.
Ghosh is steeped in the cultural and political dimensions of literature. In his own novels like The Glass Palace and Sea of Poppies,
he has chronicled the lives of the dispossessed and the powerless. But
as he admits, his fiction has only indirectly tackled climate change.
And the challenge is daunting. How do you make a compelling story out of
an abstract idea like gradual climate change? Even cataclysmic events
like floods and hurricanes — what Ghosh calls the “fingerprints of
climate change” — present their own artistic problems.
I talked with Ghosh about the failure of contemporary art, why
culture cannot be separated from nature, and his own traumatic
experience of severe weather.
You can listen to his interview with Ghosh
here.
¤
STEVE PAULSON: You tell a story from 1978 when you were a
student in Delhi and a storm came whipping through the city. What
happened?
AMITAV GHOSH: It was really something much stranger
than a storm. It was a time of year when there aren’t any storms in that
part of the world. But that day there was a hailstorm. I was, I think,
21, and I decided to pack up my books and head back to my room in the
university. The weather suddenly got worse. When I looked over my
shoulder, I saw this sort of strange finger extruding from a cloud. That
was really the only word I had for it at that time, because such
phenomena were completely unprecedented in northern India in those
days. Suddenly I saw this thing whipping down directly at me and I had
the presence of mind to look for a place to hide. If it were today, I’d
probably stop to take a selfie and would not live to tell the tale, but I
did have the sense to go and hide. It was a tornado — the only tornado
in the recorded meteorological history of Delhi. And it went down that
one road for a quarter of a mile or so. And I happened to be there on
that road that day, just at that time.
You write that you almost stopped to seek shelter in a place that was destroyed by the tornado.
Yes, that’s right. Other people were huddling against a glass door
under an awning. I could tell that there wouldn’t be much shelter for me
there. So I ran around the corner and managed to find a little balcony
to shelter under. All of this literally took about a minute, though in
my memory it lasted forever. After the tornado had passed, I went back
and looked, and those people had been sucked through the door. I think
dozens were killed. Many had been terribly hurt. It was a disaster scene
like I’ve never witnessed. It was extraordinary. When I looked down the
road, buses had been carried into colleges, whole sides of buildings
had been ripped out. One was just dumbstruck.
When you look back at that experience, what do you make of it?
It’s a very strange thing. For many years I did try to write about
that experience. I’m a novelist, and novelists like to put stuff like
this in their books. And I’ve often tried but I was never able to do it
simply because the very bizarreness of the experience, the very
improbability of it, was such that it was really impossible to put it in
a book. The novel has its own conventions of probability and
believability. So someone is walking down a road and at just that moment
this completely unprecedented thing happens. How do you put that into a
novel?
You’re saying truth really is stranger than fiction.
That is exactly the case. Truth is much, much stranger than fiction.
In fact, most of the time fiction is a very watered-down version of the
world. In a novel you try to create a world that will make sense to the
reader and somehow events that have such an extreme degree of
improbability don’t seem to belong within those parameters.
It’s not just novelists who don’t want to deal with these
extreme events. It’s our larger intellectual culture. We really don’t
know how to talk about cataclysmic events. Sure, there’s the occasional
major storm or earthquake, but those are usually written off as unique
occurrences. For the most part, we assume that what happens in nature is
gradual. It’s not sudden and huge.
It’s something even stranger than that. This whole question has
become very pressing for me, especially in the context of contemporary
climate change. I often find myself asking my friends — many of whom are
writers and artists — how they respond to events that have a clear
climate change fingerprint. It’s such an extraordinary thing that you’ll
see any number of books and films that visualize the projected drowning
of New York City at some point in the future.
We’re flooded with apocalyptic stories!
We are. And yet if you ask yourself or your friends, has anyone
responded to the actual drowning of New York City in 2012 with a novel
or story or film or a painting? There’s nothing. Absolutely zero.
Hurricane Sandy did not spawn a lot of novels?
Nothing. I don’t know of a single story in which Hurricane Sandy
plays a part. And that’s an extraordinary thing because New York City
has an incredible concentration of writers, filmmakers, and artists of
all kinds, and many of them were very badly affected by Hurricane
Sandy. Hurricane Sandy hit the Chelsea part of New York, which has been a
major arts neighborhood for the last 20 years. Many artists live
there. Many of them lost work. Many of the major galleries lost stuff.
Yet if you ever ask an artist, have you produced any kind of work in
relation to this, most of them will look at you in astonishment. It just
hasn’t entered their minds.
How do you explain this?
[
Laughs.] I struggle to explain it. I’m saying this about
New York, but the same is true of Mumbai. Mumbai is a city with a huge
film industry. Many writers, artists, and painters live there. I
recently met a friend and his wife, who are two of India’s most
important artists. There was a terrible rain bomb event in Mumbai some
years ago. Their house was flooded. They were separated from their
daughter for several days and were traumatized by this event. I asked
them if this trauma had ever shown up in their work and again, they just
were completely astonished. It’s just not what the modern creative
imagination is about.
I’ll tell you why. If you ask any artist or writer what their work is
about, or what the sphere of art or literature is, the first thing they
would say is that it’s a sphere of absolute freedom. And what does
freedom mean in the Western tradition? In some very important respect
it’s freedom from nature. Only people who are free of nature were
thought to be capable of creating their own history, creating their own
art. People who had to respond to nature constantly were thought to be
without consciousness, without history, without art.
That’s the traditional definition of culture. Culture is what is not nature.
But just traditional since the late 18th century. That’s when these
divisions were put in place. Before that, these distinctions never
applied. Within the Enlightenment you have this deification of humanity,
the centrality of the human and the exclusion of the nonhuman from
everything. And if you think of the way our universities are set up now,
what do we have? We have the sciences, which deal with nature, and we
have the humanities, which deal with the human. So what about all those
things that are not human? Well, you might as well say, “To hell with
them.”
I would say climate change really dissolves this completely false
distinction between the human and the natural. What we see now is an
environment, a nonhuman world, which is completely animated by human
actions. It’s the stuff we put into the atmosphere that is actually
creating these incredible perturbations all around us, like Hurricane
Sandy. They are not something that we could call “natural.” They are
something on which we have left our own fingerprints and they’re coming
back to visit us in these ways.
We often think of climate change as a science problem. We’ve
emitted too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and we need a
technological fix. You’re saying it’s much more than that?
It’s much, much deeper than that. In my view science can only tell us
about the symptoms. These are only symptoms that we see around us.
Science is very important because it’s alerting us to these symptoms.
And if the scientists weren’t out there telling us about this, we would
want to ignore them, because all these things go so profoundly against
our intellectual makeup, our history, our education.
If the climate crisis is not essentially a science problem, what is it?
I would say it’s really a problem of culture. It’s a problem of our
desires. I can give you so many examples of that, but just to take a
small example: if you travel to the Middle East or to water-stressed
parts of Australia, you’ll see people trying to grow lawns. They use
these fossil fuels to make water. They purify seawater and create,
through very energy intensive processes, very expensive water to create
lawns.
And really, why? People who lived in these areas 200 or 300 years ago
didn’t know about lawns, didn’t care about lawns, didn’t want lawns. So
where does this desire for the lawn come into being? You have to think
about a whole history and culture of people reading, perhaps, Jane
Austen and imagining English greensward all around them. That becomes
the model of the good life. What we are all chasing is a model of the
good life that comes to us from culture.
Fiction very powerfully shapes our desires and our imagination. But
even more powerfully, when fiction is translated into film. If you just
think of images of freedom, what does freedom mean to us today? So often
the imagery of freedom has to do with an automobile or a motorcycle.
Life on the road, when you’ve chucked the trappings of civilization and you’re off on your own wild ride.
That’s right. You’re speeding down an open road with your hair
blowing in the wind. That’s really what freedom has come to mean to us.
Yet we never consider that this kind of freedom is dependent on the
road, on the machine that some giant corporation produces for you, and
on the gas that an even more enormous corporation produces for you. So
it’s really not freedom at all.
Do we need a totally different idea of freedom?
Of course. We have to rethink the centrality that freedom has within
our conceptions of modern culture and the good life, and we have to
start thinking about alternative ways of imagining our lives. For
example, California is perhaps the ultimate example of a place where
people were always encouraged to think of absolute freedom, to buy and
consume as they pleased. Yet when California hit this drought a couple
of years ago, they instituted water rationing and people didn’t really
complain. They managed to adjust their lives around it. So we really
have to think about these things. Freedom doesn’t consist of how much
you consume or buy. It’s something more essential. It’s located in your
mind, your body, your soul.
So to really come to grips with climate change, we need a
whole new way of thinking about fundamental values, whether it’s freedom
or this notion that humans are at the center of everything. We need a
leap of the imagination.
Yes. We need to imagine our lives in a completely different way. And
the technological fixes aren’t going to solve the matter for us. Of
course, technology can help. But the reason we can’t just depend on
alternative energy is because of what we learned in the mid-19th
century. There was an economist named Samuel Jevons, one of the earliest
energy economists. He was famous for finding the Jevons Paradox, which
demonstrates that greater energy efficiencies actually lead to greater
consumption of energy. It’s the same phenomenon as the paperless office
paradox. Once the internet came into being, everybody thought people
would use less paper. But to the contrary, they actually use a great
deal more. So we can’t depend on efficiencies. We have to look at the
other end. And that’s consumption. We have to look at it through the
prism of our desires and our modes of living.
You said novelists don’t write about cataclysmic storms and
natural events because they don’t seem to be the stuff of fiction. Yet
there has been a recent surge in what’s been called “cli-fi” —
climate fiction. What do you think of those novels?
It’s certainly true that there is a lot being written about
projections of what might happen. But again, let me just come back to
the example that I started with. There are any number of novels and
films about the possible drowning of New York. And yet there’s nothing
about the actual drowning of New York.
It really troubles me. When our only way of dealing with these issues
is by projecting them into a landscape of fantasy, what we’re really
doing is denying the reality of our lives because climate change is not
in the future. Climate change is now. It’s happening all around us. It’s
affecting and impacting our lives very powerfully. When we project
these things so much into the future, we actually give people a way of
not trying to cope with these issues as they unfold around us.
The Day After Tomorrow,
that famous Hollywood film that came out over 10 years ago, was
actually a very good film. And yet do you think it had any impact at all
in alerting people to climate change? It probably had none, because it
projected all of these events into a future. So people tend to lump
climate change in the same box as extraterrestrials and visitations from
vampires.
So what we call “serious fiction” —
literary fiction —
has pretty much stayed away from climate change. It’s been left to fantasy and science fiction.
Yes. It’s not entirely the case. Ian McEwan has written about climate change in his book
Solar. Barbara Kingsolver has written a wonderful novel in which climate change plays a part. It’s called
Flight Behavior.
So it’s not entirely absent, but if you look at the mainstream of
literary fiction today, it’s carrying on much as it was 20 or 30 years
ago and there seems to be absolutely no recognition of the profound
rupture that divides the world of today from the world of 1990.
Has climate change figured in your own fiction?
It has in oblique ways. And let me just say here that this book I’ve written,
The Great Derangement,
is an introspection in a way. It’s really me trying to cope with my own
inability to grapple with climate change. So I’m not pointing the
finger at anyone nor is it in any way my intention to reprove other
writers for what they choose to write about. That’s none of my business.
So I’m trying to explore my own limitations.
I have written about climate change obliquely. But when I look around
the world now and see the impacts that are actually unfolding around us
in such profound and important ways, how is it possible that I have not
paid enough attention to this? You know, people of my generation used
to ask our parents, what did you do in World War II? And our children
are going to say to us, how did you respond to this? I think the world
of the arts and culture will not have a very convincing response.
You said that your goal is not to point fingers, but you do
point a finger at John Updike, who in a book review once defined the
purpose of the novel as an “individual moral adventure.” You take issue
with that idea, right?
Very much so. But let me say that Updike’s description is correct in
relation to his own practice and the practice of the great majority of
writers around the world today. They are writing about individual moral
adventures. They are writing about people’s individual lives. But what
is so interesting to me is that Updike’s statement really comes at
exactly the same time that we have this invention of neoliberal
economics, where everything is really about individual choices.
So the economic system filtered into what was expected of a novelist?
That’s absolutely the case. This neoliberalism that started in the
late ’80s has had a profound effect on all our thinking in so many
ways. It profoundly affected the ways that artists and novelists think
about their work. Look at earlier novels. Take an iconic, really great
American novel like
The Grapes of Wrath. How could you possibly call that an “individual moral adventure”?
The Grapes of Wrath
is perhaps the single most influential novel written by an American in
the 20th century. It’s in every way a novel about a collective
predicament. If you take the first chapter, it’s really what I would
call a climate novel before its time. That first part is such a powerful
piece of writing. You take another great iconic American novel,
Moby-Dick,
which to me is perhaps the greatest novel of the 19th century, if not
of all time. In what way would you describe this as an individual moral
adventure? It’s not. It’s about a collective predicament. So the very
idea that someone like Updike, who was not only a novelist but also an
American critic — the sort of authoritative voice speaking on behalf of
American literature — that he could make such a statement is itself a
kind of absurdity. It just shows an utter blindness to what in fact an
American tradition has produced over the years.
Updike was reviewing the 1984 novel Cities of Salt
by Abdul Rahman Munif. He described that novel as insufficiently
Westernized, so he believed the novel by definition is supposed to have
this Western value of the individual moral adventure. Are you saying
there are many other kinds of novels?
Absolutely. It seems to me that if you take the world that we are
going into now, it’s very hard to treat it as an individual moral
adventure. How is the life of someone running away from some terrible
hurricane, how can you treat that as an individual moral adventure?
We’re responding to all these crises around us.
Yet if you go back in the history of the novel — and I guess
we’re talking about the Western novel — isn’t that what happens in
novels? These tend to be stories about how individual lives change over
time.
No, I don’t really think that’s the case. Look at some of the great novels of the Western canon. You look at
Les Misérables,
for example. The list is endless, actually, of novels that are really
about collective predicaments. But again let me say that Updike’s
summation of the novel was correct for his time, for his practice, for
the practice of the great majority of his contemporaries.
If we’re living in a different age now and we need a new
mindset, a different imaginative space, what would it mean to write
about a universe that is animated by nonhuman voices?
That’s really the problem, isn’t it? Because the nonhuman has no
place within novels, a genre that really grew out of this whole process
of separating the human from the nonhuman. Again, let me let me return
to
Moby-Dick. One reason why
Moby-Dick really is such
an extraordinary novel is because it doesn’t make the separation between
the human and the nonhuman. To Melville the whale is very much a
creature with intention and perhaps with even greater agency than the
human beings that it’s dealing with. Melville never makes a distinction
in that sense between the world of the human and the nonhuman. In his
book he returns time and time again to telling us what whales do, what
whales are. That’s so hard to imagine in the world of today’s
literature. Yet that’s exactly what makes
Moby-Dick such a
transcendent piece of writing. Melville was in a sense a pantheist. For
him, every part of the world of man and nature was animated by forces
that were divine.
Your critique is not just about the modern novel. It’s really
about the humanistic philosophy that most of us have come to believe in
the contemporary era. Human beings are at the center of everything, and
what we come up with in our own minds is what matters. Do we need an
entirely different way of thinking about art?
I certainly believe that. For me, it’s troubling and distressing
because after all I’m very much a part of that world. And suddenly you
realize that so much of it is completely hollow in relation to the world
we face, a complete turning away from what is actually pressing upon
our lives so urgently. I mean, how do you really cope with that?
But isn’t climate change hard to turn into a compelling
story? It’s very abstract. It’s hard to wrap your head around this
concept of very gradual change that will have catastrophic consequences.
How do you do that well in a novel?
That is exactly the point. It’s not that human beings have not in the
past dealt with these issues. In fact, humans have always dealt with
these issues. Think of the part that storms and clouds play in the
Odyssey.
Think of the cataclysmic weather events that are in the Bible or even
in Milton’s writing at a time of great climatic perturbation. There’s a
darkness in his writing.
I think the most important thing is that novelists shouldn’t write
about climate change. I mean, that’s the whole point. As soon as you
conceive of your object as something called “climate change,” your work
dissolves. What you have to be writing about is actually your changed
reality. This is what novelists have always done. Novelists have written
about war, about famine, about all sorts of things. This is the changed
reality that we have to try to confront. When we try to think of this
thing in terms of a single object, it does in fact become very abstract
and dull. But if you look at the actual impacts that are unfolding
around us, they’re anything but abstract and dull. They’re incredibly
powerful, overwhelmingly powerful. It’s so interesting that Hurricane
Katrina resulted in so many important documentaries and nonfiction
books. And even Hurricane Sandy has resulted in some good nonfiction
work. But where is the fiction? Where’s the culture? Bill McKibben
pointed to this decades ago, asking where is the culture that reflects
our changing reality.
Is it a matter of writing stories where, say, Hurricane
Katrina figures into the plot? Or are you talking about something even
more fundamental?
I don’t think I can offer any kind of program. That really is the
problem. Every writer has to try and reimagine their work and think
about their craft in a different way. There is just not a single program
that will lead you there. If you sit around trying to write the big
climate change book, you’re almost inevitably going to end up writing a
kind of apocalyptic science fiction. That’s not actually the reality of
the world that we live in.
In The Great Derangement, you say Asia is central to
the story of climate change, but those of us in the West don’t realize
that. Why is Asia so important?
For any number of reasons, but it’s actually been very interesting to
immerse myself in this whole climate change literature. It’s a
discourse almost completely centered on the West. It’s very strange
because nobody would deny that the climate crisis has been precipitated
by the very rapid growth of China, India, and Indonesia over the last 20
years. That’s actually what precipitated the crisis we’re in. Yet
everybody wants to think this crisis grows entirely out of the West,
whereas historically it’s perfectly possible to demonstrate that it’s
not. In India, people were incredibly eager to take up the carbon
economy in the early 19th century. The small country of Burma had an oil
economy going back a millennium.
What changes if we bring Asia more centrally into this story?
For one thing, the history of it changes. Secondly, it also makes us
very aware of issues of climate justice. Asians were denied the fruits
of the fossil fuel economy through acts of power.
Because the occupying colonial powers didn’t allow certain kinds of development.
That’s right. People in India and elsewhere were very eager to take
up the fossil fuel economy, but they were literally kept out of it
through administrative, financial, and military means. So the inability
of the rest of the world to tune into the fossil fuel economy wasn’t
because of any lack of interest or capacity on their part. It was
because they were actively forced out. So yes, it makes the arguments
for climate justice even stronger. It really does change our thinking
about these things. At the same time it’s important for people in Asia
and Africa to acknowledge that this is a common human problem. This
isn’t a problem that you can just ascribe to one part of the world and
say all the rest of the world figure merely as victims.
To come back to your native country, India, you lay out a
scenario of what could happen in Mumbai, a city of 20 million people, if
a Category Four or Five storm swept through it. We really have not come
to grips with what might happen.
I started thinking about Mumbai’s vulnerability because of Hurricane
Sandy. I spend part of my time in India, not far from Mumbai. And when I
saw what Hurricane Sandy did to the New York region, it occurred to me
to ask what would happen if a similar storm hit Mumbai. Let’s remember
that although Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, it wasn’t an incredibly
powerful storm by the time it actually hit New York. Similarly, it
wouldn’t necessarily have to be a Category Four or Five storm that could
have a devastating impact on Mumbai. Even a Category Two or Three
storm, if it were to make a direct hit on Mumbai, would have a
devastating effect.
You see, Mumbai was originally six or seven islands. It was an
estuarine landscape just like New York. But unlike New York, Mumbai has
been built up into this promontory by filling in huge stretches of land.
These are called reclamations, but in a world of sea level rise, it’s
the sea that’s going to do the reclaiming. We can see this scenario play
out on a daily basis in Mumbai. Already many times of the year at
exceptionally high tides, many roads and some neighborhoods are subject
to floods. Now, if a major storm were to hit Mumbai — which is not an
entirely unlikely scenario because of intensifying cyclonic activity in
the Arabian Sea — it would be absolutely catastrophic.
Are you talking about millions of people dying?
One doesn’t want to put a number on it, but yes, I think it would
result in very serious casualties. With cyclone warnings as we have
nowadays, we have perhaps four or five days to evacuate Mumbai. But
Mumbai is actually connected to the mainland only by a couple of
arterial roads. So just logistically to evacuate everybody out of Mumbai
would be very difficult. The most exposed part of Mumbai has a
population of perhaps 10 or 11 million people but to remove all of them
would be a Herculean task. And we know from the experience of Katrina
and Sandy and other storms that many people don’t actually leave.
They don’t have the means. And where will they go? They decide
they’ll take the risk and try and ride it out. Besides, many people are
afraid of having their belongings looted, especially middle-class
people. So much of their assets consist of their apartment and their car
that they don’t want to leave those things. You can be sure that
several million would actually stay behind to experience this storm. So I
think people would be completely unprepared. One thing that became
apparent to me while writing this book is that I went through all the
disaster preparation scenarios of the local governments and it’s
perfectly clear that they’re not prepared for a major cyclone.
Isn’t there also a nuclear facility in Mumbai?
Two nuclear facilities. The city is literally jammed between two
major nuclear facilities, both of which sit directly on the water. Think
of what happened with Fukushima. So it’s something one really doesn’t
want to think about. But one good thing that’s come out the book is that
a major climate scientist, Adam Sobel at Columbia — who’s written a
very important book about Hurricane Sandy — got involved with Mumbai.
He’s got a team now doing impact studies on what a major storm would
mean for Mumbai. And various citizens groups have also started
responding.
This is quite a bleak assessment. How would you assess our prospects for surviving the climate crisis?
I don’t think we have a choice. It’s on us. We have to cope as best
we can. And even if we make all the necessary changes today — if today
we were to stop emitting fossil fuels altogether — we know that some of
the impacts are inevitable. A sea level rise, for example, can’t be
halted at this point. There are other very scary phenomena. It appears
that the traditional carbon sinks — the oceans, forests, and soils —
have actually passed their absorption point and are now emitting carbon
dioxide. So all of this is very troublesome. You know, I’m not a
scientist. I can’t make projections about what’s going to happen in the
future but it’s perfectly clear that at an experiential level, human
beings just have to be ready.
I was in Phoenix, Arizona, earlier this year, where they have a very
good climate change group. Many of them told me that this is a place
that should never have been settled. It was only possible to settle
Phoenix because of air conditioning. But you recently saw the heat wave
in Phoenix. At a certain point even air conditioning is not going to
serve you. How do you manage when the outside temperature is over 50
degrees [Celsius] as it was recently in Kuwait? So these impacts are
upon us. They are unfolding on a day-to-day basis all around us. And
that’s why it’s so strange that we only treat this as something that’s
projected into the future.
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*Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally syndicated show To the Best of Our Knowledge. He’s the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science.
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