by Amitav Ghosh
Unlikely though it may seem today, the nineteenth century was indeed a time when it was assumed, in both fiction and geology, that Nature was moderate and orderly: this was a distinctive mark of a new and “modern” worldview. Chatterjee goes out of his way to berate his contemporary, the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta, for his immoderate portrayals of Nature: “Mr. Datta . . . wants repose. The winds rage their loudest when there is no necessity for the lightest puff. Clouds gather and pour down a deluge, when they need do nothing of the kind; and the sea grows terrible in its wrath, when everybody feels inclined to resent its interference.”
The victory of gradualist views in science was similarly won by characterizing catastrophism as un-modern. In geology, the triumph of gradualist thinking was so complete that Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which posited upheavals of sudden and unimaginable violence, was for decades discounted and derided.
It is worth recalling that these habits of mind held sway until late in the twentieth century, especially among the general public. “As of the mid-1960s,” writes the historian John L. Brooke, “a gradualist model of earth history and evolution . . . reigned supreme.” 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.” As for professional paleontologists, Elizabeth Kolbert notes, they reviled both the theory and its originators, Luis and Walter Alvarez: “‘The Cretaceous extinctions were gradual and the catastrophe theory is wrong,’ . . . [a] paleontologist stated. But ‘simplistic theories will continue to come along to seduce a few scientists and enliven the covers of popular magazines.’”
In other words, gradualism became “a set of blinders” that eventually had to be put aside in favor of a view that recognizes the “twin requirements of uniqueness to mark moments of time as distinctive, and 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. In Flaubert’s novel, for instance, the narrative pivots at a moment when Monsieur Bovary has an accidental encounter with his wife’s soon-to-be lover at the opera, just after an impassioned scene during which she has imagined that the lead singer “was looking at her . . . She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength, as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry 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. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizably modern novel.
Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real.
What this means in practice is that 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.” Within the pages of a novel 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.
If that is true of a small fluke of chance, consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life? For example, a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of weather phenomenon?
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; it is to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house—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.”
7.
So far as I know, climate change was not a factor in the tornado that struck Delhi in 1978. The only thing it has in common with the freakish weather events of today is its extreme improbability. And it appears that we are now in an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normalcy, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes.
The superstorm that struck New York in 2012, Hurricane Sandy, was one such highly improbable phenomenon: the word unprecedented has perhaps never figured so often in the description of a weather event. In his fine study of Hurricane Sandy, the meteorologist Adam Sobel notes that the track of the storm, as it crashed into the east coast of the United States, was without precedent: never before had a hurricane veered sharply westward in the mid-Atlantic. In turning, it also merged with a winter storm, thereby becoming a “mammoth hybrid” and attaining a size unprecedented in scientific memory. The storm surge that it unleashed reached a height that exceeded any in the region’s recorded meteorological history.
Indeed, 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. But has this really been the case throughout human history? 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”? I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth’s unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell’s, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.
It is a fact, in any case, that when early tremors jolted the Italian town of L’Aquila, shortly before the great earthquake of 2009, many townsfolk obeyed the instinct that prompts people who live in earthquake-prone areas to move to open spaces. It was only because of a governmental intervention, intended to prevent panic, that they returned to their homes. As a result, a good number were trapped indoors when the earth-quake occurred.
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”). In Brazil, similarly, when Hurricane Catarina struck the coast in 2004, many people did not take shelter because “they refused to believe that hurricanes were possible in Brazil.”
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.
This, then, is the first of the many ways in which the age of global warming defies both literary ficti
on and contemporary common sense: the weather events of this time have a very high degree of improbability. Indeed, it has even been proposed that this era should be named the “catastrophozoic” (others prefer such phrases as “the long emergency” and “the Penumbral Period”). It is certain in any case that these are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.
Poetry, on the other hand, has long had an intimate relationship with climatic events: as Geoffrey Parker points out, John Milton began to compose Paradise Lost during a winter of extreme cold, and “unpredictable and unforgiving changes in the climate are central to his story. Milton’s fictional world, like the real one in which he lived, was . . . a ‘universe of death’ at the mercy of extremes of heat and cold.” This is a universe very different from that of the contemporary literary novel.
I am, of course, painting with a very broad brush: the novel’s infancy is long past, and the form has changed in many ways over the last two centuries. Yet, to a quite remarkable degree, the literary novel has also remained true to the destiny that was charted for it at birth. Consider that the literary movements of the twentieth century were almost uniformly disdainful of plot and narrative; that an ever-greater emphasis was laid on style and “observation,” whether it be of everyday details, traits of character, or nuances of emotion—which is why teachers of creative writing now exhort their students to “show, don’t tell.”
Yet fortunately, from time to time, there have also been 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.
There is, however, an important difference between the weather events that we are now experiencing and those that occur in surrealist and magical realist novels: improbable though they might be, these events are neither surreal nor magical. To the contrary, these highly improbable occurrences are overwhelmingly, urgently, astoundingly real. The ethical difficulties that might arise in treating them as magical or metaphorical or allegorical are obvious perhaps. But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.
8.
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. No breeze can enter the thickets of this forest; when the air stirs at all it is because of the buzzing of flies and other insects. Underfoot, instead of a carpet of softly decaying foliage, there is a bank of slippery, knee-deep mud, perforated by the sharp points that protrude from mangrove roots. Nor do any vistas present themselves except when you are on one of the hundreds of creeks and channels that wind through the landscape—and even then it is the water alone that opens itself; the forest withdraws behind its muddy ramparts, disclosing nothing.
In the Sundarbans, tigers are everywhere and nowhere. Often when you go ashore, you will find fresh tiger prints in the mud, but of the animal itself you will see nothing: glimpses of tigers are exceedingly uncommon and rarely more than fleeting. Yet you cannot doubt, since the prints are so fresh, that a tiger is somewhere nearby; and you know that it is probably watching you. In this jungle, concealment is so easy for an animal that it could be just a few feet away. If it charged, you would not see it till the last minute, and even if you did, you would not be able to get away; the mud would immobilize you.
Scattered through the forest are red rags, fluttering on branches. These mark the sites where people have been killed by tigers. There are many such killings every year; exactly how many no one knows because the statistics are not reliable. Nor is this anything new; in the nineteenth century, tens of thousands were killed by tigers. Suffice it to say that in some villages every household has lost a member to a tiger; everyone has a story to tell.
In these stories a great deal hinges on the eyes; seeing is one of their central themes; not seeing is another. The tiger is watching you; you are aware of its gaze, as you always are, but you do not see it; you do not lock eyes with it until it launches its charge, and at that moment a shock courses through you and you are immobilized, frozen.
The folk epic of the Sundarbans, Bon Bibir Johuranama (The Miracles of Bon Bibi), comes to a climax in one such moment of mutual beholding, when the tiger demon, Dokkhin Rai, locks eyes with the protagonist, a boy called Dukhey.
It was then from afar, that the demon saw Dukhey . . .
Long had he hungered for this much-awaited prize; in an instant he assumed his tiger disguise.
“How long has it been since human flesh came my way? Now bliss awaits me in the shape of this boy Dukhey.”
On the far mudbank Dukhey caught sight of the beast: “that tiger is the demon and I’m to be his feast.”
Raising its head, the tiger reared its immense back; its jowls filled like sails as it sprang to attack.
The boy’s life took wing, on seeing this fearsome sight.
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; and in that moment of contact you realize that this presence possesses a similar awareness of you, even though it is not human. This mute exchange of gazes is the only communication that is possible between you and this presence—yet communication it undoubtedly is.
But what is it that you are communicating with, at this moment of extreme danger, when your mind is in a state unlike any you’ve ever known before? An analogy that is sometimes offered is that of seeing a ghost, a presence that is not of this world.
In the tiger stories of the Sundarbans, as in my experience of the tornado, there is, as I noted earlier, an irreducible element of mystery. But what I am trying to suggest is perhaps better expressed by a different word, one that recurs frequently in translations of Freud and Heidegger. That word is uncanny—and it is indeed with uncanny accuracy that my experience of the tornado is evoked in the following passage: “In dread, as we say, ‘one feels something uncanny.’ What is this ‘something’ and this ‘one’? We are unable to say what gives ‘one’ that uncanny feeling. ‘One’ just feels it generally.”
It is surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change. Writing of the freakish events and objects of our era, Timothy Morton asks, “Isn’t it the case, that the effect delivered to us in the [unaccustomed] rain, the weird cyclone, the oil slick is something uncanny?” George Marshall writes, “Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, and the high-carbon lifestyles that are changing them, are extremely familiar and yet have now been given a new menace and uncertainty.”
No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors.
Yet now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for the interest in the nonhuman that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade and over a range of disciplines; how else do we account for the renewed attention to panpsychism and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead; and for the rise to prominence of
object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, the new animism, and so on?
Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being?
This possibility is not, by any means, the most important of the many ways in which climate change challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas. It is, however, certainly the most uncanny. For what it suggests—indeed proves—is that nonhuman forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves have always had other participants: it is like finding out that one’s telephone has been tapped for years, or that the neighbors have long been eavesdropping on family discussions.
But in a way it’s worse still, for it would seem that those unseen presences actually played a part in shaping our discussions without our being aware of it. And if these are real possibilities, can we help but suspect that all the time that we imagined ourselves to be thinking about apparently inanimate objects, we were ourselves being “thought” by other entities? 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?
These possibilities have many implications for the subject that primarily concerns me here, literary fiction. I will touch on some of these later, but for now I want to attend only to the aspect of the uncanny.
On the face of it, the novel as a form would seem to be a natural home for the uncanny. After all, have not some of the greatest novelists written uncanny tales? The ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Rabindranath Tagore come immediately to mind.