Summary
12. There certainly is something reckless about the way major cities were situated close to the water, and how there was a setting aside of the knowledge of generations that knew where and where not to set a city. After all, we humans do know the risk; human history and myth is saturated with an understanding of the precariousness of life on Earth. Ghosh wonders how we got to this place, and posits one answer is that there is a habit of mind that breaks “problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (‘externalities’) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand” (56).
Ghosh gives the example of the siting of Bengal to illustrate his point, pointing to the warnings of Henry Piddington, an Englishman in Calcutta, about the lack of wisdom in locating a proposed port—Port Canning—on the Matla River. No one listened, and the port was built and then nearly destroyed by a storm three years later; now it is just a small outpost.
13. Ghosh turns to setting, or the sense of place, that is so crucial to the modern novel. Settings are particular to themselves and connections to other places naturally recede. Discontinuities of space are also accompanied by discontinuities of time; settings require a period or an era, rarely stretching beyond a few generations (unlike epics).
He uses a 1956 novel, A River Called Titash, to show how an author takes a setting and turns it into a self-contained ecosystem, with the “river as sustainer both of life and the narrative” (61). This is different than, say, the Chinese folk epic The Journey to the West (16th century), which covers vast expanses of time.
“Serious fiction,” then, does not usually incorporate thousands of years, but this is problematic since the large, epic forces of weather and geology do have a bearing on our lives—now more than ever. The “dynamic” is inescapable, but the novels of the Anthropocene long expelled those “forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps of time and space” (63).
14. Ghosh returns to the uncanny sense of the nonhuman becoming alive, explaining how the ancient epics did bring in nonhuman agency, and how they even drove much of the narrative. Yet this was suppressed in the creation of the modern novel, and Ghosh claims that during the period of human activity changing the earth’s atmosphere “the literary imagination became radically centered on the human” (66).
15. The fabled “ghost story” gathering of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley in which Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) came about because of the eruption on April 5th, 1815 of Mount Tambura near Bali, still the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history. It threw the world into a climate “event,” and 1816 was the “Year Without a Summer” in many parts of the world. One scholar, Geoffrey Parker, says of the literary works that came out of this gathering, “All three works reflect the disorientation an desperation that even a few weeks of abrupt climate change can cause” (68).
16. So how did science fiction become partitioned from the literary mainstream? One scholar’s answer is that modernism sought to divorce Nature and Culture, but that does not seem accurate when one looks at, say, Romanticism, pastoralism, Transcendentalism, which grappled with the two.
In order to parse this out, Ghosh focuses on literature’s relationship with science. At the birth of modernity they were very close, with writers deeply engaged in science and naturalists and scientists bringing narrative into their work (like Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle). But a move toward “purification” gained stream, and science fiction could not be allowed to remain in its hybrid form because of the desire for partitioning, neatness, order.
The question remains, then, if science fiction is better situated to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction. There is the new genre of “cli-fi,” but Ghosh points out that they’re mostly stories set in the future and the climate crisis includes the past and the present. The Anthropocene actually resists science fiction, because it is not in an imagined other world or another time or dimension.
17. Ghosh turns to coal and oil, the latter replacing the former, and provides information as to how coal is a labor-intensive extractive process that requires a large workforce and resulted in labor unrest and activism while oil was, and is, much easier to attain. Oil workers are “hard to mythologize, being largely invisible. As for the places where oil is extracted, they possess nothing of the raw visual power” (75). Yet the invisibility does not mean that oil and its history doesn’t “[impinge] on every life on this planet” (75), and it is odd to Ghosh that it “has almost no presence in our imaginative lives, in art, music, dance, or literature” (75).
Ghosh had reviewed a novel years back about oil—Cities of Salt by Abdul Rahman Munif—and lauded it as being important for taking on the “Oil Encounter.” Famed author John Updike also reviewed the book, and did not like it, saying it failed to bring in “individual moral adventure” (77). Ghosh disagrees with Updike that “individual moral adventure” needs to be part of the novel at all; why can’t it have political spiritual, or intellectual adventure? What does “moral” even mean?
Updike’s review also claimed Cities of Salt was problematic because it was too concerned with “men in the aggregate” (78). Ghosh explains that fiction has indeed tried to banish the collective, and wonders if it is intentional or a matter of expediency. Certainly the modern novel does seem to be more “radically centered on the individual psyche” (78), and Ghosh dates this to the same time as powerful countries in the world led the way to the “Great Acceleration” of the 20th century. The great irony is that global warming is a collective catastrophe at the same time as the “collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike” (80).
18. Ghosh describes Mrauk-U, a complex of Buddhist monasteries and pagodas in western Burma. It was the capital of the Arakan kingdom, flourished between the 14-17th centuries, and was a link in global networks of trade. It is ruins now, and hard to get to. There the “human and nonhuman echo each other with an uncanny resonance” (81), the landscape and the buildings “communicating” with each other.
Such communication between human and nonhuman is in images, not language, and is perhaps a better way to think about communication in the Anthropocene. It is observable, and not surprising, that television and film and the visual arts have thus far addressed climate change in more direct and meaningful ways than literature.
Hopefully, Ghosh writes, the Anthropocene’s resistance to language itself will be overcome by a new hybrid language-image form and “the act of reading will change once again, as it has many times before” (84).
Analysis
In these final chapters of “Stories,” Ghosh discusses the divide between science fiction and “serious” fiction (also known as literary fiction). The latter novels do not feature grand, sweeping, epic narratives that span centuries and generations; rather, they “conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness” (61). They do not deal with “forces of unthinkable magnitude” (63) and they rarely include nonhuman forces. The main focus is undeniably the human, for it is only in science fiction, a supposed lesser genre, are nonhuman forces given center stage.
Ghosh returns to the narrative of the development of the modern novel, explaining that while at the very beginning of modernity science and literature had a close relationship (he uses the example of Charles Darwin’s writing), eventually literature could not countenance “Man’s kinship with the nonhuman” (70) and others markers of the “backward” or the “primitive,” so science fiction was partitioned off from literary fiction. Even if poetry sometimes resisted the separation of Nature and Culture, serious literature could not. This was very troubling to “many who were thus relegated to the status of genre writers, and rightly so, for nothing could be more puzzling than the strange conceit that science fiction deals with material that is somehow contaminated; nothing could better express the completeness of the literary mainstream’s capitulation to the project of partitioning” (71-72). Ghosh poses the question of whether or not science fiction is “better equipped to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction” (72) and even though he acknowledges that there is a new sub-genre of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, ultimately it is insufficient because most of those novels are set in the future and he believes they must deal with the now.
Not all literary critics agree with this assessment. Ericka Hoagland writes in her review of the work, “What is missing in this otherwise thorough chapter is a clearer demonstration of Ghosh’s contention that twentieth-century fiction—outside of the realms of science fiction and fantasy—has proven so unequal to the task of representation and investigation with respect to climate change. Put more plainly, his argument lacks evidence; but then again, that is precisely his point, which renders his argument a bit circular.” Writing for Electric Lit, Megan Fernandes acknowledges that “Ghosh points out some well mapped neoliberal myths about the dangers of personal authenticity, sincerity, and interiority in novels that do not spend enough time talking about “men in the aggregate” and furthermore, he suggests that if politics can be defined as a collective survival, then what is missing from contemporary fiction is exactly that: the collective” but believes this is a difficult argument to digest since contemporary fiction, especially to a newer writer such as myself, feels so varied, experimental, and heterogenous, but perhaps what Ghosh was suggesting is that even if there were a plethora of novels dedicated to a present day representation of “men in the aggregate” representing a specifically atmospheric climate change disaster, that it would still somehow fail to move or alter the popular literary imagination.”
Ursula Heise also found herself frustrated by Ghosh, wondering, “it remains unclear why this neglect on the part of a certain kind of literary establishment should be a matter of intrinsic aesthetic concern. If science fiction, for example, satisfactorily addresses the challenges of narrating the Anthropocene, why should we care whether the mainstream novel does or not? None of the constraints that Ghosh so lucidly analyzes in conventional novels handicap science fiction,” and adds, “Indeed, science fiction distinguishes itself generically from the novel not just by its dual focus on nature and culture, but by perpetuating many of the conventions of epic in the age of the novel.” She suggests that Ghosh is unable to take some of the developments within science fiction seriously, and that his “deep investment in history and anthropology may keep him from fully appreciating the import of more speculative approaches to the present and future that are visible in current science fiction.” Finally, Jesse Oaks finds Ghosh’s views “perplexing” and chides him for the fact that “while at times he seems to critique the literary history of exclusivity that holds realism as the canonical basis of the novel, his own criteria for what substantive engagement with climate change in fiction would look like replay that exclusion, suggesting that only realist novels set in the historical present can fulfill the obligation of rendering the crisis both present and real. And yet, his opening example of our predicament comes from Star Wars…”
One of the last points of this section centers on a review writer John Updike did of a novel about the oil industry, Cities of Salt. Updike was not a fan of the work, writing that it did not seem like a novel, that it dealt too much with men in a collective sense, that there is “almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure” (77) that is so central to the novel. While Ghosh respects Updike as a writer, he takes umbrage with Updike’s limited—and limiting—view of the form. Why does the novel have to be “moral,” and what does that mean? And why must the contemporary novel banish men in the aggregate for the individual psyche? He references Guy Debord to help explicate this statement, noting “It is certainly no coincidence that these were the very places where, as Guy Debord observed, the reigning economic system was not only founded on isolation, it was also ‘designed to produce isolation’” (79). Thus, capitalism, bourgeois life, and the modern novel represented and propped each other up.
