Illustration: The globe lies on the spine of a book and a spotlight shines on it.

Speechless into the Future

30.08.2023

By Amitav Ghosh

Does Western literature steer clear of climate change? Indian writer Amitav Ghosh calls on authors in the West to take climate change more into account in novels. There is still no world novel on climate change.

That climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena is not hard to establish. To see that this is so, we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal, and the New York Times Review of Books. When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon.

lt is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.

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 by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. lt 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.

Accustomed Barques of Narration

When novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction, photo: Greg Bakker via unsplash

But why? Are the currents of global warming too wild 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 torrents, 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 of 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.

Or consider the even more striking case of Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, a much-admired historical novel set in eleventh-century England. Kingsnorth dedicated several years of his life to climate change activism before founding the influential Dark Mountain Project, "a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself:' Although Kingsnorth has written a powerful nonfiction account of global resistance movements, as of the time of writing he has yet to publish a novel in which climate change plays a major part.

I too 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. ln thinking about the mismatch between my personal concerns and the content of my published work, I have come to be convinced that the 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.

The Climate of History

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 commonsense 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 window on climate change.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.

But neither can there be any doubt that the challenge 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 contemporary 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. lt 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.

Longings in a Chain of Transmission

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 bad 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 midwifed by the novels of Jane Austen. The artifacts 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?

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, favor 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?

The artifacts 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, photo: Fikry Anshor via unsplash

Banishment From the Preserves of Serious Fiction

In the same spirit, I think it also needs to be asked, What is it about climate change that the mention of it should Iead 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, the largest mangrove forests on earth, and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers 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 should they-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 recognizing 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.

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 recognizably modern novel.

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 […].

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 Iong 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 outhouses 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."

The superstorm that struck New York in 2012, Hurricane Sandy, was one such highly im probable phenomenon: the ward unprecedented has perhaps never figured so often in the description of a weather event. In his fine study of Hurricane Sandy, the meteorologist Adam Sobel notes that the track of the storm, as it crashed into the east coast of the United States, was without precedent: never before bad a hurricane veered sharply westward in the mid-Atlantic. In turning, it also merged with a winter storm, thereby becoming a "mammoth hybrid" and attaining a size unprecedented in scientific memory. The storm surge that it unleashed reached a height that exceeded any in the region's recorded meteorological history.

Never before bad a hurricane veered sharply westward in the mid-Atlantic.

Indeed, Sandy was an event of such a high degree of improbability that it confounded statistical weather-prediction models. Yet dynamic models, based on the laws of physics, were able to accurately predict its trajectory as well as its impacts.

But calculations of risk, on which officials base their decisions in emergencies, are based largely on probabilities. In the case of Sandy, as Sobel shows, the essential improbability of the phenomenon led them to underestimate the threat and thus delay emergency measures.Sobel goes on to make the argument, as have many others, that human beings are intrinsically unable to prepare for rare events. But has this really been the case throughout human history? Or is it rather an aspect of the unconscious patterns of thought-or "common sense" -that gained ascendancy with a growing faith in "the regularity of bourgeois life"?

I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth's unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism-a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell's, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.

They Obeyed Their Instincts

It is a fact, in any case, that when early tremors jolted the Italian town of L'Aquila, shortly before the great earthquake of 2009, many townsfolk obeyed the instinct that prompts people who live in earthquake-prone areas to move to open spaces. It was only because of a governmental intervention, intended to prevent panic, that they returned to their homes. As a result, a good number were trapped indoors when the earthquake occurred.

No such instinct was at work in New York during Sandy, where, as Sobel notes, it was generally believed that "losing one's life to a hurricane is ... something that happens in faraway places" (he might just as well have said "dithyrambic Iands").

In the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway.

In Brazil, similarly, when Hurricane Catarina struck the coast in 2004, many people did not take shelter because "they refused to believe that hurricanes were possible in Brazil".

But in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. lt is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Chatterjee, and their like, mocking their mockery of the "prodigious happenings" that occur so often in romances and epic poems.

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 Penumbra 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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About the Author

Amitav Ghosh

Author

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta in 1956 and now lives in New York. His multi-award-winning novels and non-fiction books include "Flood of Fire" or "The Circle of Reason", "The Shadow Lines" and "In an Antique Land". This text goes back to his book "The Great Derangement – Climate Change as the Unthinkable", which was published in 2016 by Penguin Books.

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