Summary
1. Ghosh begins with the famous scene from Star Wars in which Han Solo and crew realize they are not on an asteroid but are instead inside a sleeping monster. He states that only for a relatively brief moment in time will humans be able to think “planets and asteroids are inert” (3).
2. He turns to his ancestors, ecological refugees before the term was even invented. They were from what is now Bangladesh. His father often told the story of how they had to escape when the great river suddenly changed course. Today, Ghosh often thinks of how his ancestors were untethered from their homelands by an elemental force. He says “recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge” (4), which can be silent but does require something more than mere comprehension. There is something there that has been there before, that flashes us “the presence of its lost other” (5). This was what his ancestors must have felt when they saw the river rise up, and what people today feel when the energy that surrounds us and flows under us manifests itself.
Ghosh explains that he became aware of “the urgent proximity of nonhuman presences” (5) when he was writing years back about the Sundarbans, the massive mangrove forest in the Bengal Delta. The landscape is dynamic and changeable and Ghosh remembers feeling like it was indelibly alive. It might not have impressed him as a recognition if he had not already had that “prior awareness” (6) implanted in him by childhood memories, relatives’ stories, and other events in his life.
Yet when it comes to translating these feelings, these instances of recognition, into fiction, it is easier said than done. Ghosh claims that climate change poses challenges for the contemporary writer, particularly due to “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” (7).
3. Perusing literary journals and book reviews, climate change usually appears in nonfiction. Ghosh asks why this is the case, wondering if it is too wild, but then realizing that the wild is now the norm. It also cannot derive from the fact that there is not enough information about what is happening, for certainly there is. Even with Ghosh’s own work, he admits that climate change features only obliquely.
4. This is the Anthropocene, the era in which humans “have become geological agents, changing the most basic processes of the earth” (9). This is a challenge to the arts, humanities, commonsense understandings, and the contemporary culture in general. The challenge comes from the technical language that is used to discuss climate change, but also the practices and assumptions of the humanities themselves. This is a crisis of culture and of the imagination.
Culture has responded to other ecological calamities, and to many other crises, so why is climate change so resistant? Why is it banished from serious fiction, and what does this mean about culture in general?
In the future, people will look back at this moment and find practically nothing in literature that speaks to what is happening, and they will have to conclude that art and literature were concealing the realities of their plight. This is nothing less than, Ghosh posits, a Great Derangement.
5. In 1978 Ghosh was studying for his M.A. at Delhi University when an incredibly odd weather phenomena struck—a cyclone. He managed to find a safe place and was actually in the eye of the storm for a moment. The reports that came out in the aftermath about the death and destruction quite literally did not know what to call the event at first, and only later were able to name it as a cyclone. Ghosh cannot forget when he was in the eerie, silent eye of the storm and experienced that “species like visual contact, of beholding and being beheld” (14).
6. For years Ghosh ruminated on the event and how he managed to be in that place at that time. Nothing ordinary could explain it, so he reached for the extraordinary and the inexplicable. Those did not do it justice either, and while novelists often mine their own lives for their work, he did not. No cyclone appeared in his novels.
He asks himself why that is the case; after all, he thinks about it often and still has the news clippings. Certainly novels are often filled with strange things, but he concludes that if he had seen that in a novel written by someone else, it would come across as improbable.
Improbable is not the opposite of probable, but is a “gradient in a continuum of probability” (16). Importantly, probability and the modern novel were birthed at the same time among the same people.
Before the modern novel, stories were full of the strange and unlikely and exceptional. As the form progressed, it began to conceal those “exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative” (17), which the literary theorist Franco Moretti calls “fillers.” They keep the narrative under control, provide regularity, create a sense of the everyday. The unheard-of is pushed into the background, the improbable banished and the everyday inserted.
Ghosh looks at the work of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to illustrate his point, as the novelist criticized older forms of Indian literature such as epics and stories and Islamic dastaans to argue for sketches of everyday Bengali life. He exemplifies the desire for the mimetic ambition of detailed descriptions of what daily life was like.
Moretti explains that this happened during a time of statistics and probability and was compatible with bourgeois life; the fillers turned the novel into a “calm passion” (19) and reflected the rationalization of modern life, which was present in the economy and administration and then percolated into free time, leisure, private life, entertainment, etc. Fillers rationalize the universe.
This happened in the sciences as well, where the gradualist approach took over the catastrophist accounting of Earth’s history. The idea that Nature does not take leaps is, of course, not true, and the gradualists and the catastrophists had to settle on “both and neither.” However, this agreement is more recent, and until then, gradualists consolidated their victory by insisting that it had rendered other forms of knowledge obsolete—i.e., claiming that their intellectual adversaries were primitive or fantastical, akin to people who believed in ghosts or demons.
Ghosh wonders how Nature ever came to be associated with words like “commonplace” or “moderate,” but admits that it was certainly the case for a long time. Today the terms evoke incredulity when associated with Nature, but during the 19th century, the Holocene, Nature was indeed seen to be moderate and orderly, a hallmark of the new and “modern” worldview. Catastrophism was decidedly unmodern; an example was that continental drift was for many decades derided as absurd. Gradualism was thus nothing less than a “set of blinders” (23) that had to be pushed past.
With the modern novel, certainly “distinctive moments” were important, and authors could not fully seek to take on the “Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety” (23). But unlike gradualist scientists, novelists never had to “confront the centrality of the impossible” (23). The scaffolding of events was still crucial, and ultimately the irony is that the gestures that create reality are actually concealing the real.
If one introduces something seen as wildly improbable, a fluke of chance, they veer their work into the realm of the Gothic, romance, melodrama, and now fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
7. While the cyclone Ghosh experienced was not due to climate change, Hurricane Sandy was. Yet it was essentially so improbable that officials underestimated the threat and delayed emergency measures.
Many people argue that humans cannot effectively deal with rare events, but Ghosh posits that they used to be able to view things as catastrophists but this was “gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism” (25). No longer is any physical place free from catastrophe or improbable events.
While poetry was and is better able to deal with such events, fiction remains deliberately prosaic and does not take on these unordinary events. It has not been a totally stagnant form, but is largely unchanged from the “destiny that was charted for it at birth” (27).
Ghosh concludes that while magical realism and surrealism have infused the novel with some improbable events, ultimately what is happening now to our world is both improbable but completely and undeniably real. To treat the events as magical or surreal would be to deny the fact that they are happening here and now.
Analysis
Novelist Amitav Ghosh is best known for fictional works such as The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), but he also made a name for himself as a compelling and urgent voice on the matter of climate change. The Great Derangement grew out of a series of talks and is thus rather loosely structured, but in weaving together questions of fiction, history, and politics, this slim volume packs an undeniable and at times uncomfortable punch.
Ghosh’s main thesis in the first section of the text, “Stories,” is that serious fiction is unwilling to take on climate change as a real, substantive subject or theme. There are plenty of dystopian novels set far in the future, or novels that bring in a supernatural threat such as ghosts or monsters, or novels that imbue their events with a tinge of the uncanny or the magical, but there are few that set their plot in the current moment or near future in which climate change is irrevocably changing innumerable aspects of life on earth. Ghosh admits that he did not do this himself in his novels, even though he personally experienced a wildly improbable but increasingly commonplace extreme weather phenomenon.
What Ghosh endeavors to explain is that novelists consciously or unconsciously avoid talking about climate change and all of its weirdness mostly because of the conditions and characteristics of the modern novel. The modern novel as it coalesced in the 19th century was concerned with “the banishing of the impossible and the insertion of the everyday” (17). It was flush with “fillers,” or descriptions of everyday life, and those fillers were important because, as Ghosh quotes literary scholar Franco Moretti, “they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life. Fillers turn the novel into a ‘calm passion’"(19).
Just as the novel was supposed to be orderly, 19th and early 20th century Science claimed that “Nature was moderate and orderly” (22). Gradualist views of slow change had displaced catastrophism, which was now seen as un-modern, as smacking of primitive and hysterical backwardness. The refrain of “Nature does not make leaps” was applicable to the novel, which did not bring in wildly unlikely or fluke events.
This is in contrast, of course, with the ancient and pre-modern myths and stories. Works like the Bible, the Greek myths, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and the Decameron embraced the nonhuman and the uncanny, leapt “blithely from one exceptional event to another” (16), spanned generations, and rarely had anything that could be considered a filler. Ghosh references the 19th century Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who articulated the nascent desire for a more “modern” novel that would do more or less the opposite of the epics. Works of fiction, Chatterjee argued, should avoid “mere narrative” and focus on “sketches of character and Bengali life” (18). What has changed is that “instead of being told what happened” the reader learns “what was observed” (19).
To conclude, while Ghosh understands why this happened and reads these novels and writes these novels, he suggests that the novel must evolve and must realize that the events occurring right now because of climate change are “neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real” (27). And, as he explains in the LARB interview, it is important for those artists writing about climate change not to approach it so obtusely: “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."
