Why does literature not deal with climate change or global change, except rarely or in the outposts of climate/science fiction, set in the future? What does Laudato Si’ tell us about a way forward?
Excerpts from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Berlin Family Lectures) by Amitav Ghosh, published in Sept. 2016. References are all to the kindle edition.
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.59
It arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.65
When inflamed lungs and sinuses prove once again that there is no difference between the without and the within; between using and being used. These too are moments of recognition, in which it dawns on us that the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing.71
The grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.95
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.142
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.146
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 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.151
(Amitav Ghosh was present, by chance, in the path of) the first tornado to hit Delhi—and indeed the entire region—in recorded meteorological history. And somehow I, who almost never took that road, who rarely visited that part of the university, had found myself in its path. Only much later did I realize that the tornado’s eye had passed directly over me. It seemed to me that there was something eerily apt about that metaphor: what had happened at that moment was strangely like a species of visual contact, of beholding and being beheld. And in that instant of contact something was planted deep in my mind, something irreducibly mysterious, something quite apart from the danger that I had been in and the destruction that I had witnessed; something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life.198
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? Improbability is the key word here, so we have to ask, What does the word mean? Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but rather an inflexion of it, a gradient in a continuum of probability.219
But what does probability—a mathematical idea—have to do with fiction? The answer is: Everything. For, as Ian Hacking, a prominent historian of the concept, puts it, probability is a “manner of conceiving the world constituted without our being aware of it.” Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience. Before the birth of the modern novel, wherever stories were told, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely.223
…how storytelling must necessarily proceed, inasmuch as it is a recounting of “what happened”—for such an inquiry can arise only in relation to something out of the ordinary, which is but another way of saying “exceptional” or “unlikely.” In essence, narrative proceeds by linking together moments and scenes that are in some way distinctive or different: these are, of course, nothing other than instances of exception. 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 [Jane] 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.” Thus was the novel midwifed into existence around the world, through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday.229
Compare this with the following lines from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: “We leave the high road . . . whence the valley is seen. . . . The meadow stretches under a bulge of low hills to join at the back with the pasture land of the Bray country, while on the eastern side, the plain, gently rising, broadens out, showing as far as eye can follow its blond cornfields.” In both these passages, the reader is led into a “scene” through the eye and what it beholds: we are invited to “descry,” to “view,” to “see.” In relation to other forms of narrative, this is indeed something new: instead of being told about what happened we learn about what was observed. Chatterjee has, in a sense, gone straight to the heart of the realist novel’s “mimetic ambition”: detailed descriptions of everyday life (or “fillers”) are therefore central to his experiment with this new form. Why should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important? Moretti’s answer is “‘Because they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a ‘calm passion’ . . . they are part of what Weber called the ‘rationalization’ of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings. . . . Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.”256
Through much of the era when geology—and also the modern novel—were coming of age, the gradualist (or “uniformitarian”) view held absolute sway and catastrophism was exiled to the margins. Gradualists consolidated their victory by using one of modernity’s most effective weapons: its insistence that it has rendered other forms of knowledge obsolete.282
Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and “modern” worldview. Chatterjee goes out of his way to berate his contemporary, the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta, for his immoderate portrayals of Nature: “Mr. Datta . . . wants repose. The winds rage their loudest when there is no necessity for the lightest puff. Clouds gather and pour down a deluge, when they need do nothing of the kind; and the sea grows terrible in its wrath, when everybody feels inclined to resent its interference.” The victory of gradualist views in science was similarly won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern. In geology, the triumph of gradualist thinking was so complete that Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which posited upheavals of sudden and unimaginable violence, was for decades discounted and derided. It is worth recalling that these habits of mind held sway until late in the twentieth century, especially among the general public. “As of the mid-1960s,” writes the historian John L. Brooke, “a gradualist model of earth history and evolution . . . reigned supreme.” Even as late as 1985, the editorial page of the New York Times was inveighing against the asteroidal theory of dinosaur extinction: “Astronomers should leave to astrologers the task of seeking the causes of events in the stars.” As for professional paleontologists, Elizabeth Kolbert notes, they reviled both the theory and its originators, Luis and Walter Alvarez: “‘The Cretaceous extinctions were gradual and the catastrophe theory is wrong,’ . . . [a] paleontologist stated. But ‘simplistic theories will continue to come along to seduce a few scientists and enliven the covers of popular magazines.’”
In other words, gradualism became “a set of blinders” that eventually had to be put aside in favor of a view that recognizes the “twin requirements of uniqueness to mark moments of time as distinctive, and lawfulness to establish a basis of intelligibility.” Distinctive moments are no less important to modern novels than they are to any other forms of narrative, whether geological or historical. Ironically, this is nowhere more apparent than in Rajmohan’s Wife and Madame Bovary, in both of which chance and happenstance are crucial to the narrative. In Flaubert’s novel, for instance, the narrative pivots at a moment when Monsieur Bovary has an accidental encounter with his wife’s soon-to-be lover at the opera, just after an impassioned scene during which she has imagined that the lead singer “was looking at her . . . She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out, ‘Take me away! carry me with you!’” 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. 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. 304
So far as I know, climate change was not a factor in the tornado that struck Delhi in 1978. The only 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 normalcy, 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. The superstorm that struck New York in 2012, Hurricane Sandy, was one such highly improbable phenomenon: the word unprecedented has perhaps never figured so often in the description of a weather event.340
never before had 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. 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.347
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 lands”). 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. It 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 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.362
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.s Consider that the literary movements of the twentieth 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.”374
(Tsunami, Sundarbans, flooding, storms, Mumbai)…Unlike the Andamans, which rise steeply from the sea, the Nicobars are low-lying islands. Being situated close to the quake’s epicenter, they had been very badly hit; many settlements had been razed. I visited a shoreside town called Malacca that had been reduced literally to its foundations: of the houses only the floors were left, and here and there the stump of a wall. It was as though the place had been hit by a bomb that was designed specifically to destroy all things human—for one of the strangest aspects of the scene was that the island’s coconut palms were largely unaffected; they stood serenely amid the rubble, their fronds waving gently in the breeze that was blowing in from the sparkling, sun-drenched sea. I wrote in my notebook: “The damage was limited to a half-mile radius along the shore. In the island’s interior everything is tranquil, peaceful—indeed astonishingly beautiful. There are patches of tall, dark primary forest, beautiful padauk trees, and among these, in little clearings, huts built on stilts. . . . One of the ironies of the situation is that the most upwardly mobile people on the island were living at its edges.” Such was the pattern of settlement here that the indigenous islanders lived mainly in the interior: they were largely unaffected by the tsunami. Those who had settled along the seashore, on the other hand, were mainly people from the mainland, many of whom were educated and middle class: in settling where they had, they had silently expressed their belief that highly improbable events belong not in the real world but in fantasy. In other words, even here, in a place about as far removed as possible from the metropolitan centers that have shaped middle-class lifestyles, the pattern of settlement had come to reflect the uniformitarian expectations that are rooted in the “regularity of bourgeois life.”481
As always in military matters, the protocols of rank were strictly observed: the higher the rank of the officers, the closer their houses were to the water and the better the view that they and their families enjoyed. Such was the design of the base that when the tsunami struck these houses the likelihood of survival was small, and inasmuch as it existed at all, it was in inverse relation to rank: the commander’s house was thus the first to be hit. The sight of the devastated houses was disturbing for reasons beyond the immediate tragedy of the tsunami and the many lives that had been lost there: the design of the base suggested a complacency that was itself a kind of madness. Nor could the siting of these buildings be attributed to the usual improvisatory muddle of Indian patterns of settlement. The base had to have been designed and built by a government agency; the site had clearly been chosen and approved by hardheaded military men and state appointed engineers. It was as if, in being adopted by the state, the bourgeois belief in the regularity of the world had been carried to the point of derangement. A special place ought to be reserved in hell, I thought to myself, for planners who build with such reckless disregard for their surroundings. Not long afterward, while flying into New York’s John F. Kennedy airport, I looked out of the window and spotted Far Rockaway and Long Beach, the thickly populated Long Island neighborhoods that separate the airport from the Atlantic Ocean. Looking down on them from above, it was clear that those long rows of apartment blocks were sitting upon what had once been barrier islands, and that in the event of a major storm surge they would be swamped (as indeed they were when Hurricane Sandy hit the area in 2012). Yet it was clear also that these neighborhoods had not sprung up haphazardly; the sanction of the state was evident in the ordered geometry of their streets. Only then did it strike me that the location of that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms.497
These cities, all brought into being by processes of colonization, are now among those that are most directly threatened by climate change.527
Altogether two hundred kilometers of road were submerged; some motorists drowned in their cars because short-circuited electrical systems would not allow them to open doors and windows. Thousands of scooters, motorcycles, cars, and buses were abandoned on the water-logged roads. At around 5 p.m. cellular networks failed; most landlines stopped working too. Soon much of the city’s power supply was also cut off (although not before several people had been electrocuted): parts of the city would remain without power for several days. Two million people, including many schoolchildren, were stranded, with no means of reaching home; a hundred and fifty thousand commuters were jammed into the city’s two major railway stations. Those without money were unable to withdraw cash because ATM services had been knocked out as well. Road, rail, and air services would remain cut off for two days. Over five hundred people died: many were washed away in the floods; some were killed in a landslide. Two thousand residential buildings were partially or completely destroyed; more than ninety thousand shops, schools, health care centers, and other buildings suffered damage. While Mumbai’s poor, especially the inhabitants of some of its informal settlements, were among the worst affected, the rich and famous were not spared either. The most powerful politician in the city had to be rescued from his home in a fishing boat;647
Through all of this the people of Mumbai showed great generosity and resilience, sharing food and water and opening up their homes to strangers. Yet, as one observer notes, on July 26, 2005, it became “clear to many million people in Mumbai that life may never be quite the same again. An exceptional rainstorm finally put to rest the long prevailing myth of Mumbai’s indestructible resilience to all kinds of shocks, including that of the partition.” In the aftermath of the deluge, many recommendations were made by civic bodies, NGOs, and even the courts. But ten years later, when another downpour occurred on June 10, 2015, it turned out that few of the recommended measures had been implemented: even though the volume of rainfall was only a third of that of the deluge of 2005, many parts of the city were again swamped by floodwaters.658
Mumbai has been lucky not to have been hit by a major storm in more than a century; perhaps for that reason the possibility appears not to have been taken adequately into account in planning for disasters. Moreover, here, “as in most megacities, disaster management is focused on post-disaster response.”672
Unlike Chennai and Mumbai, Kolkata is not situated beside the sea. However, much of its surface area is below sea level, and the city is subject to regular flooding: like everyone who has lived in Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect, which is why it came as a shock to me when I learned, from a World Bank report, that Kolkata is one of the global megacities that is most at risk from climate change; equally shocking was the discovery that my family’s house, where my mother and sister live, is right next to one of the city’s most threatened neighborhoods. The report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: what can I do to protect my family and loved ones now that I know what lies ahead? My mother is elderly and increasingly frail; there is no telling how she would fare if the house were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to become unavailable for any length of time.745 Bottom of Form
After much thought I decided to talk to my mother about moving. I tried to introduce the subject tactfully, but it made little difference: she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Nor could I blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report. It was a fine day, cool and sunlit; I dropped the subject. But the experience did make me recognize something that I would otherwise have been loath to admit: contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion. This is indeed the condition of the vast majority of human beings, which is why very few of us will be able to adapt to global warming if it is left to us, as individuals, to make the necessary changes; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy. If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic? Yet, to look around the world today is to recognize that with some notable exceptions, like Holland and China, there exist very few polities or public institutions that are capable of implementing, or even contemplating, a managed retreat from vulnerable locations. For most governments and politicians, as for most of us as individuals, to leave the places that are linked to our memories and attachments, to abandon the homes that have given our lives roots, stability, and meaning, is nothing short of unthinkable.753
But in time, sure enough, there was a collective setting aside of the knowledge that accrues over generations through dwelling in a landscape. People began to move closer and closer to the water. How did this come about? The same question arises also in relation to the coast around Fukushima, where stone tablets had been placed along the shoreline in the Middle Ages to serve as tsunami warnings; future generations were explicitly told “Do not build your homes below this point!” The Japanese are certainly no more inattentive to the words of their ancestors than any other people: yet not only did they build exactly where they had been warned not to, they actually situated a nuclear plant there. This too is an aspect of the uncanny in the history of our relations with our environments. It is not as if we had not been warned; it is not as if we were ignorant of the risks. An awareness of the precariousness of human existence is to be found in every culture: it is reflected in biblical and Quranic images of the Apocalypse, in the figuring of the Fimbulwinter in Norse mythology, in tales of pralaya in Sanskrit literature, and so on. It was the literary imagination, most of all, that was everywhere informed by this awareness. Why then did these intuitions withdraw, not just from the minds of the founders of colonial cities, but also from the forefront of the literary imagination? Even in the West, the earth did not come to be regarded as moderate and orderly until long after the advent of modernity: for poets and writers, it was not until the late nineteenth century that Nature lost the power to evoke that form of terror and awe that was associated with the “sublime.” But the practical men who ran colonies and founded cities had evidently acquired their indifference to the destructive powers of the earth much earlier. How did this come about? How did a state of consciousness come into being such that millions of people would move to such dangerously exposed locations? The chronology of the founding of these cities creates an almost irresistible temptation to point to the European Enlightenment’s predatory hubris in relation to the earth and its resources. But this would tell us very little about the thinking of the men who built and planned that base in the Nicobars: if hubris and predation had anything to do with their choice of site, it was at a great remove. Between them and the cartographers and surveyors of an earlier era there was, I think, a much more immediate link: a habit of mind that proceeded by creating discontinuities; that is to say, they were trained to break problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable.775
The discontinuities that I have pointed to here have a bearing also on the ways in which worlds are created within novels. A “setting” is what allows most stories to unfold; its relation to the action is as close as that of a stage to a play. When we read Middlemarch or Buddenbrooks or Waterland, or the great Bengali novel A River Called Titash, we enter into their settings until they begin to seem real to us; we ourselves become emplaced within them. This exactly is why “a sense of place” is famously one of the great conjurations of the novel as a form.823
In novels discontinuities of space are accompanied also by discontinuities of time: a setting usually requires a “period”; it is actualized within a certain time horizon. Unlike epics, which often range over eons and epochs, novels rarely extend beyond a few generations. The longue durée is not the territory of the novel. It is through the imposition of these boundaries, in time and space, that the world of a novel is created: like the margins of a page, these borders render places into texts, so that they can be read. The process is beautifully illustrated in the opening pages of A River Called Titash. Published in 1956, this remarkable novel was the only work of fiction published by Adwaita Mallabarman, who belonged to an impoverished caste of Dalit fisherfolk. The novel is set in rural Bengal, in a village on the shores of a fictional river, Titash. Bengal is, as I have said, a land of titanic rivers. Mallabarman gestures toward the vastness of the landscape with these words: “The bosom of Bengal is draped with rivers and their tributaries, twisted and intertwined like tangled locks, streaked with the white of foamy waves.” But almost at once he begins to detach the setting of his novel from the larger landscape: all rivers are not the same, he tells us, some are like “a frenzied sculptor at work, destroying and creating restlessly in crazed joy, riding the high-flying swing of fearsome energy—here is one kind of art.” And then, in a striking passage, the writer announces his own intentions and premises: “There is another kind of art. . . . The practitioner of this art cannot depict Mahakaal (Shiva the Destroyer) in his cosmic dance of creation and destruction—the awesome vision of tangled brown hair tumbling out of the coiled mass will not come from this artist’s brush. The artist has come away from the rivers Padma, Meghna, and Dhaleswari to find a home beside Titash. “The pictures this artist draws please the heart. Little villages dot the edges of the water. Behind these villages are stretches of farmland.” This is how the reader learns that the Titash, although it is a part of a landscape of immense waterways, is itself a small, relatively gentle river: “No cities or large towns ever grew up on its banks. Merchant boats with giant sails do not travel its waters. Its name is not in the pages of geography books.” In this way, through a series of successive exclusions, Mallabarman creates a space that will submit to the techniques of a modern novel: the rest of the landscape is pushed farther and farther into the background until at last we have a setting that can carry a narrative. The setting becomes, in a sense, a self-contained ecosystem, with the river as the sustainer both of life and of the narrative. The impetus of the novel, and its poignancy, come from the Titash itself: it is the river’s slow drying up that directs the lives of the characters. The Titash is, of course, but one strand of the “tangled locks” of an immense network of rivers and its flow is necessarily ruled by the dynamics of the landscape. But it is precisely by excluding those inconceivably large forces, and by telescoping the changes into the duration of a limited-time horizon, that the novel becomes narratable.834
Novels, on the other hand, conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delimited horizon of a novel—when they intrude, the temptation to lapse into satire, as in Ian McEwan’s Solar, becomes almost irresistible. But the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities, animated by forces that are nothing if not inconceivably vast. The waters that are invading the Sundarbans are also swamping Miami Beach; deserts are advancing in China as well as Peru; wildfires are intensifying in Australia as well as Texas and Canada. There was never a time, of course, when the forces of weather and geology did not have a bearing on our lives—but neither has there ever been a time when they have pressed themselves on us with such relentless directness.866
The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us; it is they who confront most directly what Thoreau called “vast, Titanic, inhuman nature.” Nor is it any longer possible to exclude this dynamic even from places that were once renowned for their distinctiveness.882
Behind all of this lie those continuities and those inconceivably vast forces that have now become impossible to exclude, even from texts. Here, then, is another form of resistance, a scalar one, that the Anthropocene presents to the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel: its essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.888
The Anthropocene has forced us to recognize that there are other, fully aware eyes looking over our shoulders—then the first question to present itself is this: What is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel? To attempt an answer is to confront another of the uncanny effects of the Anthropocene: it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human. Inasmuch as the nonhuman was written about at all, it was not within the mansion of serious fiction but rather in the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished.924
To ask how science fiction came to be demarcated from the literary mainstream is to summon another question: What is it in the nature of modernity that has led to this separation? A possible answer is suggested by Bruno Latour, who argues that one of the originary impulses of modernity is the project of “partitioning,” or deepening the imaginary gulf between Nature and Culture: the former comes to be relegated exclusively to the sciences and is regarded as being off-limits to the latter.964
Nor was it only in England, but also throughout Europe and North America that partitioning was resisted, under the banners variously of romanticism, pastoralism, transcendentalism, and so on. Poets were always in the forefront of the resistance, in a line that extends from Hölderlin and Rilke to such present-day figures as Gary Snyder and W. S. Merwin. But being myself a writer of fiction, it is the novel that interests me most, and when we look at the evolution of the form, it becomes evident that its absorption into the project of partitioning was presaged already in the line of Wordsworth’s that I quoted979
Western writers remained deeply engaged with science through the nineteenth century. Nor was this a one-sided engagement. Naturalists and scientists not only read but also produced some of the most significant literary works of the nineteenth century, such as Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago. Their works, in turn, served as an inspiration to a great number of poets and writers, including Tennyson. How, then, did the provinces of the imaginative and the scientific come to be so sharply divided from each other? According to Latour the project of partitioning is supported always by a related enterprise: one that he describes as “purification,” the purpose of which is to ensure that Nature remains off-limits to Culture, the knowledge of which is consigned entirely to the sciences. This entails the marking off and suppression of hybrids—and that, of course, is exactly the story of the branding of science fiction, as a genre separate from the literary mainstream. The line that has been drawn between them exists only for the sake of neatness; because the zeitgeist of late modernity could not tolerate Nature-Culture hybrids. Nor is this pattern1000 …
But climate fiction or cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present.1019
This lays out with marvelous clarity some of the ways in which the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not an imagined “other” world apart from ours; nor is it located in another “time” or another “dimension.” By no means are the events of the era of global warming akin to the stuff of wonder tales; yet it is also true that in relation to what we think of as normal now, they are in many ways uncanny; and they have indeed opened a doorway into what we might call a “spirit world”—a universe animated by nonhuman voices. If I have been at pains to speak of resistances rather than insuperable obstacles, it is because these challenges can be, and have been, overcome in many novels: Liz Jensen’s Rapture is a fine example of one such; another is Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful novel Flight Behavior. Both are set in a time that is recognizable as our own, and they both communicate, with marvelous vividness, the uncanniness and improbability, the magnitude and interconnectedness of the transformations that are now under way. 17.1024
This effort gained in urgency after the historic strikes of the 1910s and ’20s, in which miners, and workers who transported and distributed coal, played a major role; indeed, fear of working-class militancy was one of the reasons why a large part of the Marshall Plan’s funds went toward effecting the switch from coal to oil. “The corporatised democracy of postwar Western Europe was to be built,” as Mitchell notes, “on this reorganisation of energy flows.” For the arts, oil is inscrutable in a way that coal never was: the energy that petrol generates is easy to aestheticize—as in images and narratives of roads and cars—but the substance itself is not. Its sources are mainly hidden from sight, veiled by technology, and its workers are hard to mythologize, being largely invisible. As for the places where oil is extracted, they possess nothing of the raw visual power that is manifest, for example, in the mining photographs of Sebastião Salgado. Oil refineries are usually so heavily fortified that little can be seen of them other than a distant gleam of metal, with tanks, pipelines, derricks, glowing under jets of flame.1048
Long after the publication of The Circle of Reason, I wrote a piece in which I attempted to account for this mysterious absence: “To the principal protagonists in the Oil Encounter (which means, in effect, America and Americans, on the one hand, and the peoples of the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on the other), the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic. It is perhaps the one cultural issue on which the two sides are in complete agreement. . . . Try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable.” The above passage figures in a review of one of the few works of fiction to address the Oil Encounter, a five-part series of novels by the Jordanian-born writer Abdel Rahman Munif.1065 Here is what he had to say about Cities of Salt: “It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif . . . appears to be . . . insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest; and, this being the first third of a trilogy, what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved. There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which since ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle; ‘Cities of Salt’ is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate.”1080
My own disagreement with it hinges upon the phrase that Updike uses to distinguish the novel from the fable and the chronicle: “individual moral adventure.”1089
Updike draws this boundary line with great clarity: the reason why Cities of Salt does