The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

This, I imagine, was what my forebears experienced on that day when the river rose up to claim their village: they awoke to the recognition of a presence that had molded their lives to the point where they had come to take it as much for granted as the air they breathed.

But, of course, the air too can come to life with sudden and deadly violence—as it did in the Congo in 1988, when a great cloud of carbon dioxide burst forth from Lake Nyos and rolled into the surrounding villages, killing 1,700 people

This is a landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition. I captured some of these in my notes from that time, as, for example, in these lines, written in May 2002: “I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.” Elsewhere, in another note, I wrote, “Here even a child will begin a story about his grandmother with the words: ‘in those days the river wasn’t here and the village was not where it is . . .’”

far wider implications. I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer, although specific in some respects, are also products of something broader and older; that they derive ultimately from 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.

When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. 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:

It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel. There is something confounding about this peculiar feedback loop. It is very difficult, surely, to imagine a conception of seriousness that is blind to potentially life-changing threats.

when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction. A case in point is the work of Arundhati Roy:

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.

In his seminal essay “The Climate of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to

revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of the Anthropocene, in which “humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth.” I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our commonsense understandings

When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire.

This culture is, of course, intimately linked with the wider histories of imperialism and capitalism

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.

The vocabulary of the report is evidence of how unprecedented this disaster was. So unfamiliar was this phenomenon that the papers literally did not know what to call it: at a loss for words they resorted to “cyclone” and “funnel-shaped whirlwind.”

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.

Surely only a writer whose imaginative resources were utterly depleted would fall back on a situation of such extreme improbability?

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

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?

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

Flaubert sounds a strikingly similar note in satirizing the narrative style that entrances the young Emma Rouault: in the novels that were smuggled into her convent, it was “all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions,

The victory of gradualist views in science was similarly won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly imp...

To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence;

those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as “the Gothic,” “the romance,” or “the melodrama,” and have now come to be called “fantasy,” “horror,” and “science fiction.”

appears that we are now in an era that will be defined precisely

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.

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”?

until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a b...

was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were inform...

No such instinct was at 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”).

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.

movements that celebrated the unheard-of and the improbable: surrealism for instance, and most significantly, magical realism, which is replete with events that have no relation to the calculus of probability.

The Sundarbans are nothing like the forests that usually figure in literature. The greenery is dense, tangled, and low; the canopy is not above but around you, constantly clawing at your skin and your clothes.

Many stories of encounters with tigers hinge upon a moment of mutual recognition like this one. To look into the tiger’s eyes is to recognize a presence of which you are already aware;

It is almost as if the mind-altering planet that Stanislaw Lem imagined in Solaris were our own, familiar Earth: what could be more uncanny than this?

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.

followed the example of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), New York, Singapore, and Hong Kong, all of which are sited directly on the ocean.

proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a beachfront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and security, mastery and conquest, has now been incorporated into the very foundations

through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness.

the great old port cities of Europe, like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Lisbon, and Hamburg, are all protected from the open ocean by bays, estuaries, or deltaic river systems.

This being an estuarine region, the relationship between land and water was so porous that the topography of the

the islands were included in her dowry (which also contained a chest of tea: this was the Pandora’s box that introduced the British public to the beverage, thereby setting in motion the vast cycles of trade that would turn nineteenth-century Bombay into the world’s leading opium exporting port).

The appeal of the sites of both Mumbai and New York lay partly in their proximity to deepwater harbors and partly in the strategic advantages they presented: as islands, they were both easier to defend and easier to supply from the metropolis.

A certain precariousness was thus etched upon them from the start by reason of their colonial origins.

Not sure i completely buy this - precolonial, ante-capitalist UrbanisaTion took place by open water too.

devastating the oceanfront neighborhoods that we had flown over so many times while coming in to land at JFK airport.

Erm speaking of bourgeois tendencies...