A mainstay of these classes is Amitav Ghosh's essay, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In some classes, we've just covered part 1 of the book, but this fall we read the entire book.
On The Great Derangement, Part 1
The Great Derangement is a powerful example of inventive, highly accessible, socially engaged literary criticism in action. An accomplished novelist with a long career behind him, Ghosh is interested in the role of cultural work (including the work of fiction) in addressing the climate crisis. He suggests, at various points, that writers of serious literary fiction have been failing to address the crisis:
“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.” (The Great Derangement)
He’s also interested in when and how scientific paradigms (i.e., gradualism vs. catastrophism) might be applicable to analyzing and categorizing works of literature. Along the way, he introduces a number of analytics that professional scholars could probably explore further.
Ghosh takes, at times, a very broad approach to the topic – he can draw on his knowledge of 19th century Bengali novels, Romantic poetry, contemporary literary fiction, and so on. Very few scholarly accounts of these topics would attempt to do the same – we tend to be much more specialized and limited to specific periods and regions. Sometimes that broad scope can also cause problems, since he at times makes claims that might cause questions or doubts. (If you say that a certain genre or niche in the literary world can’t represent climate change, what happens when someone published a book that tries to do that?) Put more positively, his overly general claims might create opportunities that scholars have then attempted to engage – to fill in the gaps in his account of topics like the oil encounter or, more generally, representations of climate change.
Sections 1-2: Ghosh's personal / family background and the Bengal delta
To my eye, there are two insights here. One is Ghosh’s status as someone descended from climate refugees -- his ancestors lived on the banks of the Padma River in what is today Bangladesh, but were forced to move when their village was destroyed in a flood.
(In other books, Ghosh has also talked about the legacy of the Partition of 1947 on his family -- politics has also forced his family to move in the past, as it has for so many people in border areas in South Asia. My own family, too.)
The other is that there is a mutability built into the landscape that people in the Bengal delta that people who live there are well aware of. The landscape is not static -- just there -- it feels more like a living thing. For many of us in other parts of the world, that’s not how we look at the landscape.
To be clear, he’s not talking about climate change -- he’s talking about the environment being an entity with which we interact every day.
He has a somewhat abstract passage about ‘recognition’ in Section 2, which runs as follows:
Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge. To recognize, then, is not the same as an initial introduction. Nor does recognition require an exchange of words: more often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition.
The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.
This, I imagine, was what my forebears experienced on that day when the river rose up to claim their village: they awoke to the recognition of a presence that had moulded their lives to the point where they had come to take it as much for granted as the air they breathed.
In other words, recognition is a moment where we gain knowledge that we actually already had. Locally, he’s using this to talk about how his ancestors must have reacted when their village was wiped out by a flood. But I suspect he is also using this as a metaphor early in the book to try and get us to think about the environment -- and climate change. This is something we already knew perhaps, but have come to take for granted.
It might be a good opportunity to discuss that. What’s something that connects you to the environment? What are aspects of our daily lives that suggest our dependence on the world beyond human-built environments? Was there an experience or a moment that gave you the same sense of ‘recognition’ Ghosh talks about?
In Section 3, he starts to talk more actively about climate change, and his first insight is that it’s actually relatively rare to see it discussed in serious fiction:
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 appears in these publications, it is almost always in relation to non-fiction; 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 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. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.
His hunch, which he develops in subsequent sections, is that serious literary fiction is built around a style of writing and world-building that discourages extreme representations in favor of ‘everyday life’:
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. In 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.
Also in Section 3, he mentions Arundhati Roy, an important Indian writer and activist whose works we’ll look at in greater depth later in the term. He points out that her work hasn’t foregrounded climate change (though if we read The God of Small Things that point might actually be debatable).
Paul Kingsnorth (mentioned above) is an accomplished author and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain project, a group of authors who have strong environmentalist investments. That project has been going strong and has published more than 20 issues of a journal (indeed, they have a call for submissions out now on their website), as well as a manifesto called Uncivilization. The thesis of Uncivilization is that we can’t wait for scientific/technological solutions to climate change -- rather, we need to rethink the obsession with progress and the growth mentality.
Section 4 begins with a reference to Dipesh Chakrabarty, and here we see Ghosh use the term “anthropocene.”
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 human-induced climate change, 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.
He also uses the phrase that gives him the title of his book, The Great Derangement:
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 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.
Section 5 is one of the most intriguing and vivid sections in the entire book -- it recounts Ghosh’s personal experience in March, 1978 with an extremely rare tornado in central Delhi. But it’s not until Section 6 that he unpacks the incident and contemplates the impact it had on him. Notably, he points out that until the writing of this nonfiction book, he’s never been able to use that experience in fiction -- it seemed too improbable to fit any of the stories he’s written.
Here, he makes a contrast between what we might think of as pre-modern narratives (he names The Arabian Nights, The Journey to the West, and The Decameron) and modern novels. Premodern narratives “proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another.” There isn’t much explanation of how we get from here to there. One thinks of a classic picaresque tale -- the hero survives one bizarre challenge, and then goes on to encounter another.
Modern novels work differently -- they have the ‘fillers’ of everyday life. Novelists work hard to make even exceptional events seem probable. This is largely a Western invention, though Indian novelists like Bankim Chandra Chatterji embraced it. (He contrasts the modern Indian novel to Buddhist Jataka stories and the Urdu dastaan narrative tradition.)
For Ghosh, there is a big idea here -- a link to a parallel event in modern science. The novel becomes a ‘calm passion’ -- a “rationalization of modern life” -- at the same moment that gradualism became a dominant philosophy in geology.
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.’
In contrast to gradualism is catastrophism. He makes an interesting -- but somewhat slippery -- point that serious modern novels like the ones he’s describing do nevertheless contain exceptional events, but that novelists work hard to conceal them.
He also mentions that there are whole areas of narrative -- the space of genre fiction (today, fantasy, horror, science fiction, romance -- earlier, the Gothic, melodrama, etc) that don’t follow these rules. These genres never disappeared during the peak era of serious literary fiction, they were just marginalized. Genre fiction has traditionally not been reviewed in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books.
This point might seem a little narrow -- it depends on two premises, one, that serious literary fiction doesn’t deal with climate change (that may or may not be true, and in any case, it might be changing), and second, that genre fiction is generally taken less seriously. I’m not sure this is true in quite the same way it once was, and again, it’s a bit artificial. This is a question of cultural capital, not a question of whether alternative narrative forms exist.
(People who read science fiction certainly take it seriously!)
In Section 8, Ghosh talks about the Uncanny.
But what I am trying to suggest is perhaps better expressed by a different word, one that recurs frequently in translations of Freud and Heidegger. That word is uncanny—and it is indeed with uncanny accuracy that my experience of the tornado is evoked in the following passage: ‘In dread, as we say, “one feels something uncanny.” What is this “something” and this “one”? We are unable to say what gives “one” that uncanny feeling.’
It is surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change. Writing of the freakish events and objects of our era, Timothy Morton asks, ‘Isn’t it the case, that the effect delivered to us in the [unaccustomed] rain, the weird cyclone, the oil slick is something uncanny?’ George Marshall writes, ‘Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, and the high-carbon lifestyles that are changing them, are extremely familiar and yet have now been given a new menace and uncertainty.’
No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors.
Section 9: Here, Ghosh recounts the cataclysmic tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean after a 9.0 earthquake near Indonesia. December 26, 2004. Large-scale death and devastation all along the coasts -- Thailand, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka were especially badly hit. 227,000 deaths and millions lost their homes. Here, Ghosh describes his visit to the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Indian Ocean. These are territories of India. The Andamans were fine -- they are mountainous islands, but the Nicobar islands were badly hit. He describes the paradox of modern settlements -- coastal properties, owned by wealthier people, were worse hit than properties further inland, typically owned by indigenous villagers.
Section 11: The vulnerability of the city of Mumbai. Ghosh describes the intense rain that fell on Mumbai on July 26, 2005 -- 94.4 cm of rain (nearly 40 inches!) in 14 hours. The epic rainstorm caused massive flooding, breakdown of drainage systems, loss of power, and stranded millions of commuters. One could think of this as a freak event, but one has to consider the prospect of more cyclones on the western coast of India. If a strong storm -- on the order of a Hurricane Sandy -- were to hit Mumbai, it would be devastating.
Section 12: Port Canning. Fukushima. Henry Piddington.
This is a wild story about a climate 'Cassandra' figure. Henry Piddington was influenced by an American meteorologist, Colonel Henry Reid. He was the author of a books called An Attempt to Develop the Law of Storms (1838); Piddington also coined the word “cyclone.” He published a pamphlet in 1853 warning about the danger of the storm surge at the new port being constructed -- Port Canning. The new Port was still built and operated for only three years after its inauguration (1864-1867), when it was wiped out by a massive storm surge. Essentially, a story about local knowledge and scientific competence -- both the locals and Piddington knew that a major port in a highly exposed location wasn't advisable in the Bay of Bengal -- and how it might be disregarded by politicians eager to maximize their profits.
The implications for the present day are clear -- the obvious example to consider might be the damage done by a tsunami at Fukushima, despite warnings from earlier / traditional inhabitants not to build below a certain line.
Section 15: Here, Ghosh tells a story that might be familiar to scholars of Romanticism. He describes the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 -- which led to major climate disruptions over the next couple of years. Clouds of smoke and ash in the atmosphere disseminated across the globe.
The effects were still being felt a year later -- in 1816, called the “Year without a summer”:
The seismic event that began on April 5, 1815, on Mount Tambora, three hundred kilometers to the east of Bali, was the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Over the next few weeks, the volcano would send one hundred cubic kilometers of debris shooting into the air. The plume of dust —1.7 million tons of it—soon spread around the globe, obscuring the sun and causing temperatures to plunge by three to six degrees. There followed several years of severe climate disruption; crops failed around the world, and there were famines in Europe and China; the change in temperature may also have triggered a cholera epidemic in India. In many parts of the world, 1816 would come to be known as the “Year without a Summer.”
He recounts how Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and others all gathered in rented villas near Geneva -- and engaged in the famous "scary story" competition that would lead to the first draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
More on that story here.
