Novelist Amitav Ghosh examines the inability at the level of literature, history and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change in his new book, his first major non-fiction one since In an Antique Land of 1992.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable , published by Penguin Books imprint Allen Lane, serves as Ghosh’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
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, the author says, adding that this is so one need not only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews.
“When the subject of climatic 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,” he argues.
“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.”
Ghosh says he has been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it is true that this subject figures only obliquely in his 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.”
The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for a novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres.