The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Given the increasing improbability of India’s storms, Ghosh speculates about the impact of a Category 5 storm on the city of Mumbai. He begins by describing a disastrous flood in June 2005, when nearly a meter of rain fell in 14 hours. As a result of industrialization and the city’s growth, several natural waterways and swamps, which would have drained water away from the city, had been paved or clogged. The city’s infrastructure came to a complete standstill as transportation, power, phone, and other important services broke down. In total, over 500 people died, and tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed. In the aftermath of the storm, measures were discussed to prevent similar catastrophes in the future; however, a flood in 2015, 10 years later, had similarly devastating effects.

Given proper notice, authorities in Mumbai may be able to convince people to evacuate before a more severe storm hits. Ghosh notes that evidence from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans suggests that not everyone will evacuate, even if they are informed of the threat. Those choosing to stay and wait out the storm will likely face devastating damage, as the city’s glass skyscrapers and informal settlements are unlikely to withstand extreme winds. Ghosh suggests that the most serious threat is the city’s nuclear power stations, which could explode during a storm, spreading dangerous radiation. He reflects on the reasons why people might choose to live in dangerous areas despite knowing the risks.

Ghosh argues that the development of cities in ecologically fragile locations—like Mumbai and New York—is not just unwise in hindsight. Qing officials in China, for example, warned British colonialists not to build on the island of Hong Kong. For Ghosh, this is another uncanny aspect of the climate crisis: Societies are aware of the risks even as they take them. He argues that all origin stories display an intuitive awareness of humanity’s precarity but that this awareness has disappeared from the modern consciousness. The desire to solve problems in an orderly way has removed the sense of the sublime (a combined sense of wonder and fear) from nature.

Ghosh points to colonial Bengal for evidence of this modern tendency to dismiss intuitive knowledge. In the 19th century, an English meteorologist named Henry Piddington warned the East India Company against building a new port on the river Matla, a name that means “crazed” in Bengali. Piddington warned that the river was vulnerable to dangerous storm surges, but his concerns were dismissed. Just three years after the port was opened, a catastrophic storm hit, and the port and surrounding area were destroyed.

Ghosh returns to the topic of literature to discuss the literary element of setting and the expectation that novels conjure a specific sense of place. He suggests that, like the landscapes described in previous chapters, these settings are constructed out of discontinuities: That is, the novelist builds the illusion of a whole place from disjointed pieces. For novels to be perceived as realistic, the setting must be so specific as to erase all other places from the reader’s mind: Ghosh points to the novels of Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë as examples.

For an extended example of this kind of world building, Ghosh analyzes the Bengali novel A River Called Titash by Adwaita Mallabarman. The novel begins with a description of Bengal’s vast river system and its main tributaries before landing on its setting, a small town on the banks of the river Titash. By describing and then excluding these larger rivers, Mallabarman establishes a clear, unique setting for his novel. Ghosh argues that this narrative strategy—in which inconceivably large forces are hidden so small stories can be told—is incompatible with the challenges of the climate crisis, which take place on a global scale.

Ghosh argues that humans have always been aware of agency and intelligence in the nonhuman world, especially among animals and landscapes. He suggests that Renee Descartes’s proposed division between thinking humans and unthinking animals was never actually accepted by anyone who worked closely with animals. Ghosh points to the active presence of animals and elements in literary traditions from across the world as further evidence of humanity’s awareness of nonhuman agency, arguing that many stories rely on animals and elements as actors to propel narrative and create meaning. He argues that the true mystery of nonhuman agency is how human awareness of it has been suppressed, and he suggests that literary culture has played a part in this suppression. He notes that the rise of human-centered literature corresponds with the rise of human-driven climate change.

Ghosh points to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as both an early work of science fiction and an important marker of the division of science fiction and mainstream literature. He notes that, like many more recent works of science fiction, it also has an important link to the climate crisis. In 1815, volcanic activity in Mount Tambora off the coast of Bali had catastrophic consequences across the globe. Millions of tons of dust and debris were sent into the atmosphere, causing several years of climate disruption. In 1816, known as the Year Without a Summer, a group of writers including Mary Shelley gathered in Geneva; trapped indoors by days of rain, they decided to have a ghost story competition. The result, for Mary Shelley, was Frankenstein, which is now widely regarded as the first science fiction novel. It’s possible to read the novel as an expression of the disorientation caused by climate events.

Ghosh argues that one of the definitive impulses of modern culture is to make and maintain an artificial distinction between nature, which is associated with science, and culture, which is perceived as antithetical to science. However, from the beginning of the modern era, artists have pushed back against this division; he points to the English Romantic poets William Blake and William Wordsworth as evidence. The division between literary culture and science also coincides with the birth of modernity. Ghosh cites 19th-century authors who also worked in scientific fields, like Herman Melville, and scientists who wrote literary works, like Charles Darwin.

Science fiction—as its name implies—combines scientific and literary approaches to the world. For Ghosh, then, the impulse to sequester science fiction as a separate (and less prestigious) genre from mainstream literature arises out of the modernist division between nature and culture. He considers this exclusion unlikely to change soon. Even if it did, assigning greater cultural importance to science fiction would not solve the problem Ghosh lays out in this book. Ghosh challenges the notion that science fiction is better suited to address the climate crisis, arguing that genres like science and speculative fiction, which imagine other worlds, cannot accommodate the reality of climate change in this world. He lists Liz Jensen’s Rapture and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior as two examples of recent novels that successfully address climate change.

Ghosh suggests that literature’s resistance to the climate crisis begins with aesthetics: Words like “petroleum” and “tar” are unpleasant, and the substances themselves have negative sensory connotations. Coal’s redeeming feature, he says, is that coal mining has been a productive space for the exploration of moral issues in literature.

While coal mining features prominently in 19th-century literature, the modern equivalent, petroleum refining, rarely appears in literary fiction. As a notable exception, Ghosh points to Abdel Rahman Munif’s 1984 novel Cities of Salt, which describes the discovery and exploitation of oil in an imaginary kingdom. After praising the novel, Ghosh analyzes a review by American writer and critic John Updike, which he sees as indicative of the state of the modern novel. Updike criticizes City of Salt for lacking a single protagonist with an identifiable character arc, focusing instead on the collective of people around the petroleum zone. Ghosh points to Updike’s review as evidence that modern novels shun stories about collectives (communities, ecosystems, countries) in favor of stories about exceptional individuals. He suggests that this attitude is precisely what has led to the current climate crisis.

Part 1 of the book ends with a description of the city of Mrauk-U, an archeological site in Burma featuring Buddhist pagodas and monasteries. The shapes of the hills and cliffs that surround the city echo those of the pagodas and towers of the city. Ghosh describes this visual harmony as a kind of symphony between built objects and landscape. He points to the city as one piece of evidence that humans are always in communication with nonhuman beings. Other examples of nonverbal communication include when we listen to changes in the wind or shoo off a crow. He suggests that, in the Anthropocene, nonverbal communication with nonhuman beings is increasingly visual, and he argues that this is the reason why visual media like art and television have more successfully addressed the climate crisis. Ghosh points to the history of images in written texts from illuminated manuscripts to graphic novels, suggesting that novelists ought to consider changing the form of the novel to accommodate visual information.