the eminent Indian novelist's 2016 book about literary fiction's failure to address the enormity of climate change and environmental damage
This extended essay is both huge in scope - giving detailed attention to topics from the Victorian view of nature as reflected in Madame Bovary to the Chinese industrial revolution of the 11th century, to the forecast effects of sea-level rise on Mumbai and New York - and very narrow in its ultimate focus, which is the culture of "literary fiction", i.e. the Booker-and-broadsheet-review sort, more so than the experimental oddities popular in vocal circles of GR. If you enjoy seeing the results of a polymathic mind at work - even if you aren't especially into books about environmental issues and/or have reservations about litfic - this would be a satisfying novella-length read.
Literary Fiction
Last year, I became frustrated whilst involved in frequent discussion about litfic, how utterly separate it seemed from the topic I was reading most about in non-fiction, climate change. (And Richard Powers' reported novel-in-progress, about trees, was nowhere near publication.) So this book came along at just the right time. However, because Ghosh is himself so enmeshed in the litfic fraternity, he doesn't have, or rather doesn't transmit, a sense of how small a field it is in sales and readership terms, or in the eyes of the many readers who have other preferences, and oddly never even alludes (for his focus on literary is implicitly related to cultural prestige) never alludes to the more experimental and highbrow, as if litfic were the apex and not seen as a dull middlebrow by some who prefer more obscure or trashier works, or both. (On Goodreads, various readers of experimental fiction mingle in the best-reviewer rankings with readers of popular genre novels; litfic has always seemed to less prominent on here and more the province of the newspapers).
I also thought he neglected to address the partisanship, over a century old, about political and issue-led fiction versus the aesthetic, artistic and amusing. (There are frequent skirmishes over the topic on Goodreads, framing it as an either/or; a false dichotomy in my view, many of the most interesting novels managing to incorporate both.) However, it was refreshing that Ghosh did not delineate everything in the same old terms - because he is calling for both more realism about the issue of climate change in literary fiction and for greater attention to the fantastical and non-human, as is found in folktales from times when human life was more directly subject to nature. It felt as invigorating as a new paradigm. But because his argument is quite subtle, it could quite easily read to the art-for-art's sake team as entirely a denigration of their viewpoint. That isn't helped by his rather sweeping, example-free statements about Modernism and its focus on language and human internality, and less on politics, as being even more pronounced than those of recent litfic. These rang hollow to me because, since I became aware of Ghosh's book nearly a year ago, by far the best example of serious fiction I've read which fulfils its suggested remit is the section 'Time Passes' in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a holiday home is abandoned for years, encroached upon by animals and plants, whilst its upper-class intellectual owners are affected by the First World War. It shows that the experimental may be an easier place to introduce the non-human and the slipperiness of a material reality once assumed to be secure than is yet another realist novel about infidelity in Hampstead.
For the benefit of those who view issues in fiction as oppositional to aesthetics, Ghosh could have emphasised more that contemporary literary fiction frequently features other sociopolitical topics, especially class and wealth divisions between people, and experiences of war, but that climate change, and nature as a force to which humans are subject (other than via common serious diseases such as cancer) is distinctively missing. (A point which, as I read The Great Derangement, I realised was the source of my frustration mentioned above.) Experimental fiction may be less inclined to foreground "issues", but they are often present in the background, perhaps in characters' living conditions.
Yet when one is hanging out in [online] crowds in which literary fiction is the favoured form, Ghosh's critique of its neglect of a major issue of our time and of imminent times, and especially of how this indicts its claim to seriousness when other topics are addressed over and over, is absolutely relevant; I wanted to nag some people to read this book even before I'd looked at anything more than the Amazon preview.
A common response to mentioning the lack of reference to climate change in litfic - whether among people I know, or among BTL Guardian commenters - is to just read SF instead FFS. (Here is a good recent article about climate change in fiction including SF.) The neglect of the issue is seen by some friends as merely one symptom of litfic's backwaterish irrelevancy and dullness outside the newspapers-and-prizes merry-go-round. It is indeed a form with a far smaller audience and a diminishing contribution to the wider cultural conversation compared with what it had in, for example, the 1950s and 1960s. Its genre-snobbishness (although this I see far more among GR hardcore-experimentalist circles now, as litfic readers, writers and critics who grew up on comics hit their 40s and gain significant influence) looks particularly archaic and ridiculous when compared with film. Among cineastes, it's form and presentation that counts towards respect, no topics circumscribed, and there is plenty of arthouse SF. (Perhaps proportionally more than experimental speculative fiction in book form?) Yet literary fiction does still count as both measure of and signal to what does or should really matter to the broadsheet-inclined audience, which includes the political classes and other significant decision makers. If Ghosh thinks the near-absence of climate change in literary fiction is symptomatic of society's unwillingness to face up to the future and the effects of its own actions - noting that future settings are as uncharacteristic of litfic, just as much as historical fiction is a staple of prize longlists - I would say that, as other forms have addressed it more, it is perhaps more related to the neglect of it, and to general short-termism and unwillingness to seriously contemplate what will happen, among the comfortable chattering classes. (My view may be skewed because, over the past year, I have returned to reading more about the environment than I had for over a decade, but it does seem as if there are more serious stories getting more public attention now than there used to be, even a couple of years ago.) Ghosh notes that in 2015, two highly significant international documents about climate change appeared: the Paris Agreement, and the papal encyclical Laudato si' - whilst the Booker longlist was entirely devoid of the subject. (I would argue that the following year's [book:The North Water|25666046], however, does address human despoliation of the environment in a historical setting.) Anna's excellent review of this book explains other reasons why literary fiction matters specifically in covering this topic, including its artistic approach.
Ghosh sees the situation of "serious fiction" as flowing from Enlightenment and C19th views of nature, in which nature was (surprisingly to us now) seen as stable, ordered and subject to only gradual change. (An opposition of catastrophism versus gradualism, in which the former was seen as primitive, existed in geology from Lyell's time, and was still around among 1980s doubters of the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction.) This sense of stability in nature mirrored the increasing stability of western bourgeois life as industrial society grew up and medicine advanced, such stable lives being seen as ideal subject matter: Emma Bovary's love of melodramatic romances and foolish rejection such stability, being quoted in support. (However, this idea was there in the novel at least a couple of hundred years earlier, with Don Quixote, written when modernity was emerging, but life (including Cervantes' own) was still highly turbulent. Is that because it's a bourgeois idea? Because a certain leaning towards the 'prosaic' is inherent in the novel?) And given the reservations many people I know have about the middlebrow, middle-classness of literary fiction, this aspect of the critique, of the subgenre being too concerned with stable bourgeouis life, was an easy sell.
Between 2012-2016, when the online social justice movement was at its height, among my frustrations with it was the total neglect of environmental issues in favour of aggressive minutiae of identity politics. Ghosh agrees; however, he seems not to have noticed that the idea of 'speciesism' was, recently, slowly gaining ground in some quarters of it, and the way this ties in with the rise of veganism. (As a Guardian reader, my current impression from the paper is that about 30-40% of people are now vegan, not, what, 1-2%... that's how prominent it's becoming. And that another 10% are trying obsessively to avoid buying plastic.) One of the book's big questions - how will people in a future, climate-changed world view literature of the C20th and early C21st? - parallels the social-justice reading of older fiction. Assuming that book distribution, leisure time and literature study are still as plentiful as today (I really don't think it will be in 150 years, and probably sooner), I would think that, as with slavery and casual racism and sexism in books from our past, some readers will see resource profligacy and obliviousness to this to be defining features of these novels, reasons why they should be consigned to the sidelines, whereas many others will see them as unfortunate, with plenty else to enjoy in the stories regardless. (And surely some will wish they were living in times of such everyday luxury - a decadence cult.)
Asia & Climate Change
Ghosh critiques the idea that Asian countries are entirely [future] victims of climate change, in a complex argument. He mentions that western environmentalists, such as Naomi Klein, neglect to mention imperialism as a cause of climate change alongside capitalism itself. Or rather, of the particular patterns of climate change which are occurring now. Essentially, he considers that imperialism may have delayed significant climate change, but that colonial powers are still significantly responsible for global environmental changes as they are experienced.
Major Asian countries had industrial expansions and extractive industries that are little known to the average Westerner. I managed to do a whole history degree - albeit not very recently - without having heard of the Chinese industrial revolution of the C11th; it led to significant deforestation and, once coal was discovered, its adoption as a fuel in some areas. However, as the deposits were not very accessible with medieval technology, topography meant that large-scale fossil-fuel based indistrialisation didn't begin in medieval China, and instead had to wait until Europeans started it in the C18th.
Most accounts of the history of oil trace its initial drilling to the C19th USA; however, many countries used oil on a smal scale where local deposits (little understood) were available; and the Burmese had been using oil with the widest-spread trading network Ghosh suggests that nineteenth century Burma would have been the world's first petrostate if it had not been crushed by British colonial wars. India, for a while, developed a formidable shipbuilding industry and copied British-built steamships. However, the Empire stymied this by banning Indian-built ships from its ports. So, had history progressed only slightly differently, global industry would have had rather a different distribution - and carbon emissions would have been much higher, much earlier. (Ghosh considers there to have been two significant eras for emissions: the West in the early twentieth century, and Asia in the 1980s onwards, the latter although it was not so densely industrialised, had a huge impact due to sheer human numbers.)
A signficant difference from the West was that in major Asian countries, there was always greater opposition to industrialisation from religion (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism) and from public intellectuals. Nineteenth century novels may sometimes lament the coming of the railways and the changes they wrought to the countryside, but no-one truly influential spoke up against industrialisation itself as opposed to, say, conditions in factories. However, as colonial powers packed up and went home, political leaders became keen to start trying to catch up with the West; Gandhi, before his assassination, was accused of trying to hold India back - and Chinese Communism pushed religious belief to one side in favour of punishing regimes of agricultural and industrial progress.
Ghosh considers that on balance, the West still owes the rest of the world, including Asia, for damage wrought by climate change, but that Asia in particular is not purely a victim.
A Dystopian Future
Ghosh has a particularly gloomy view of the future. (Is that why he's frustratingly blase about the issue of individual action versus collective action, assuming they are an either/or, and that readers aren't going to be rolling their eyes at his international arts lifestyle living - and evidently flyinh quite frequently between - New York and India? I posted more about this subject here.)
The outright collapsitarian vision - whilst alarming to some - has a strong element of freedom to it, and for physically tough people with certain viewpoints, it may even be invigorating. But the world envisaged here, dominated by the politics of the armed lifeboat has no such primitivist, libertarian appeal. Delineating plausible and pessimistic reasoning for military planners' careful study of climate change, he considers how climate change and the instability it will wreak to be an excuse for increasing authoritarian militarisation, especially of countries that are likely destinations for millions of refugees from regions stricken by famine and unbearable heat. The countries where the refugees originate may, in turn, have punitive policies of their own, introduced to appease Western powers. The poor everywhere, but especially those in the Global South, end up worse off than ever. (I think this increased authoritarianism is, very sadly, more plausible in densely populated countries like Britain, whereas the US is more spread out and contains many recalcitrant armed citizens - it does seem more likely to fragment and collapse.) There even appears to be an implication that some actors in the deep state may not want to do much to mitigate climate change, precisely because they see global turbulence as an opportunity to strengthen their stranglehold, which is considerably more depressing than, as usual, assuming they only care about making money in the short term. Ghosh tries to end the book on a sudden hopeful note, that current youngsters and the literature they have yet to write, may help to create a better world than that. He also has high hopes for world religions becoming ready-made pressure groups for lowering carbon emissions (no mention of the Catholic neglect of population as an issue). I was reminded of Mark Lynas' Six Degrees and his description of the illogically optimistic conclusions many authors add to their environmental books because they feel they should. With a little more creative vision, and more words, that conclusion could have sounded more convincing and inspiring to action - as otherwise it doesn't sound like Amitav Ghosh wants to join Dark Mountain just yet.
There may be a few flaws in this book, but it's an original and interesting melange of topics. The issue it addresses with literary fiction may seem minor to some - especially those who don't read much litfic - but some of us, at least, had been frustrated by it already. Ghosh is saying something that needed to be said: how can this subgenre claim such seriousness and weight and relevance when it has its head in the sand? However, will many dedicated readers of literary fiction actually take a break from novels to read this critique?
(read and reviewed July 2017; the review, comment thread - and dozens of quotes and status updates - on Goodreads.)
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