Climate change and storytelling

Unpacking Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement"

Preface: I scheduled this post a while ago. Right now, wildfires are running amok across Los Angeles, causing much destruction. More on that in a future post. Readers, I’m safe and out of harm’s way. Ironically, this post is pretty appropriate for what is going on in Southern California today. Cheers and stay safe, wherever you may be.

This is the twelfth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, a book-length essay about why it’s so hard to dramatize the problem of climate change.

This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.

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In Amitav Ghosh’s book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist tackles many issues related to climate change, but most interesting for my purposes (as a writer working on a climate change narrative) is his argument why climate change does not lend itself to Western storytelling conventions.

Ghosh tells a story about how in 1978 he survived a tornado in Delhi—the first tornado to strike Delhi in recorded history (14). Ghosh was particularly haunted by this event, and he wanted to someday include this episode as part of a novel. But he could never make the scene work:

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? (16)

In such fashion, the randomness of a natural disaster, being over-the-top and not linked to a character’s decisions, would never stand the test of literary fiction. That is why disaster movies like Twister and the climate-themed The Day After Tomorrow (the latter based on the very-real possibility that the Gulf Stream might shift away from North America and Europe), are often derided as popcorn pleasures. Can you write a “serious” novel about climate? About long processes that last millions of years? About catastrophe?

Ghosh thinks not, because on the off chance a novel does consider vast events of magnitude and consequence, the novel ceases to be considered “serious.”

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. (61-62)

Ian McEwan’s Solar can only make climate change topics interesting by turning the whole narrative into a joke, a sex farce about a horrible man’s infidelities and machinations.

What, then, is acceptable to satisfy the tenets of Western literary fiction? Ironically, a negative review of a non-Western novel helps Ghosh define the constraints. Ghosh quotes from a John Updike review of the Arab novel Cities of Salt (by Abdul Rahman Munif) that paradoxically pointed out the limitations of the Western narrative conventions:

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.” (76-77, emphasis added)

For Updike, a novel consists of an “individual moral adventure,” and a novel that considers “men in the aggregate” is incompatible with the idea of a novel. This observation points to a larger symptom of our individualistic culture—our characters are masters of their own fate and are never burdened by matters beyond their control. They have positive qualities, flaws of character that contribute to decisions which determine their trajectory, but seemingly random acts of environmental consequences do not burden them. Cities of Salt, rather, tells the story of sudden Arabian prosperity via the oil trade in a collectivist mode. This seems as good a strategy as any to tackle a societal narrative, though it’s easy to see how if the story were to be Westernized (as in, packaged for a Hollywood spectacle), Cities of Salt: The Motion Picture would focus on one character solving a societal issue alone (for example, as was the case in Blood Diamond, regarding the illegal diamond trade in Sierra Leone).

Due to the constraining focus of literary fiction on the individual, Ghosh asks whether other genres might be better suited. Gothic and its successor, horror, are eternally popular and involve supernatural happenings (66-73). Perhaps science fiction, with its focus on apocalyptic changes, such as in the enduring works of Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick, is a genre better equipped to handle the questions of climate change:

After all, there is a now a new genre of science fiction called “climate fiction” or cli-fi. But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. (72)

For Ghosh, cli-fi’s weakness is its reliance on the future, when he believes that climate fiction should be set now, in the present, or even in the early industrial past. Cli-fi thus wrongly distances stories from the present and abstracts them to a time in the future so that readers can dodge their own engagement with the issue.

And yet, the author is still hopeful, despite the harrowing consequences of the process unfolding before our eyes. As Ghosh concludes, “I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes than those that preceded it… and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature” (162).

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Works Cited

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2016).