by Amitav Ghosh
The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us; it is they who confront most directly what Thoreau called “vast, Titanic, inhuman nature.” Nor is it any longer possible to exclude this dynamic even from places that were once renowned for their distinctiveness. Can anyone write about Venice any more without mentioning the aqua alta, when the waters of the lagoon swamp the city’s streets and courtyards? Nor can they ignore the relationship that this has with the fact that one of the languages most frequently heard in Venice is Bengali: the men who run the quaint little vegetable stalls and bake the pizzas and even play the accordion are largely Bangladeshi, many of them displaced by the same phenomenon that now threatens their adopted city—sea-level rise.
Behind all of this lie those continuities and those inconceivably vast forces that have now become impossible to exclude, even from texts.
Here, then, is another form of resistance, a scalar one, that the Anthropocene presents to the techniques that are most closely identified with the novel: its essence consists of phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space.
14.
I would like to return, for a moment, to the images I started with: of apparently inanimate things coming suddenly alive. This, as I said earlier, is one of the uncanniest effects of the Anthropocene, this renewed awareness of the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even perhaps the planet itself.
But such truth as this statement has is only partial: for the fact is that a great number of human beings had never lost this awareness in the first place. In the Sundarbans, for example, the people who live in and around the mangrove forest have never doubted that tigers and many other animals possess intelligence and agency. For the first peoples of the Yukon, even glaciers are endowed with moods and feelings, likes and dislikes. Nor would these conceptions have been unthinkable for a scientist like Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, who attributed elements of consciousness to vegetables and even metals, or for the primatologist Imanishi Kinji who insisted on “the unity of all elements on the planet earth—living and non-living.”
Neither is it the case that we were all equally captive to Cartesian dualism before the awareness of climate change dawned on us: my ancestors were certainly not in its thrall, and even I was never fully acculturated to that view of the world. Indeed, I would venture to say that this is true for most people in the world, even in the West. To the great majority of people everywhere, it has always been perfectly evident that dogs, horses, elephants, chimpanzees, and many other animals possess intelligence and emotions. Did anyone ever really believe, pace Descartes, that animals are automatons? “Surely Descartes never saw an ape” wrote Linnaeus, who found it no easy matter to draw a line between human and animal. Even the most devoted Cartesian will probably have no difficulty in interpreting the emotions of a dog that has backed him up against a wall.
Nowhere is the awareness of nonhuman agency more evident than in traditions of narrative. In the Indian epics—and this is a tradition that remains vibrantly alive to this day—there is a completely matter-of-fact acceptance of the agency of nonhuman beings of many kinds. I refer not only to systems of belief but also to techniques of storytelling: nonhumans provide much of the momentum of the epics; they create the resolutions that allow the narrative to move forward. In the Iliad and the Odyssey too the intervention of gods, animals, and the elements is essential to the machinery of narration. This is true for many other narrative traditions as well, Asian, African, Mediterranean, and so on. The Hebrew Bible is no exception; as the theologian Michael Northcott points out, “At the heart of Judaism is a God who is encountered through Nature and events rather than words or texts. Christianity, by contrast, and then Islam, is a form of religion that is less implicated in the weather, climate and political power and more invested in words and texts.”
But even within Christianity, it was not till the advent of Protestantism perhaps that Man began to dream of achieving his own self-deification by radically isolating himself before an arbitrary God. Yet that dream of silencing the nonhuman has never been completely realized, not even within the very heart of contemporary modernity; indeed, it would seem that one aspect of the agency of nonhumans is their uncanny ability to stay abreast of technology. Even among today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings, whose most intimate familiars are man-made objects like iPads and iPhones, an awareness evidently still lingers that elements of agency are concealed everywhere within our surroundings: why else should the charts of best-selling books and top-grossing films continue to be so heavily weighted in favor of those that feature werewolves, vampires, witches, shape-shifters, extraterrestrials, mutants, and zombies?
So the real mystery in relation to the agency of nonhumans lies not in the renewed recognition of it, but rather in how this awareness came to be suppressed in the first place, at least within the modes of thought and expression that have become dominant over the last couple of centuries. Literary forms have clearly played an important, perhaps critical, part in the process. So, if for a moment, we were to take seriously the premise that I started with—that the Anthropocene has forced us to recognize that there are other, fully aware eyes looking over our shoulders—then the first question to present itself is this: What is the place of the nonhuman in the modern novel?
To attempt an answer is to confront another of the uncanny effects of the Anthropocene: it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human. Inasmuch as the nonhuman was written about at all, it was not within the mansion of serious fiction but rather in the outhouses to which science fiction and fantasy had been banished.
15.
The separation of science fiction from the literary mainstream came about not as the result of a sudden drawing of boundaries but rather through a slow and gradual process. There was, however, one moment that was critical to this process, and it happens to have had a link to a climate-related event.
The seismic event that began on April 5, 1815, on Mount Tambora, three hundred kilometers to the east of Bali, was the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Over the next few weeks, the volcano would send one hundred cubic kilometers of debris shooting into the air. The plume of dust—1.7 million tons of it—soon spread around the globe, obscuring the sun and causing temperatures to plunge by three to six degrees. There followed several years of severe climate disruption; crops failed around the world, and there were famines in Europe and China; the change in temperature may also have triggered a cholera epidemic in India. In many parts of the world, 1816 would come to be known as the “Year without a Summer.”
In May that year, Lord Byron, besieged by scandal, left England and moved to Geneva. He was accompanied by his physician, John Polidori. As it happened, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who had recently eloped together, were also in Geneva at the time, staying at the same hotel. Accompanying them was Mary Godwin’s stepsister, Claire, with whom Byron had had a brief affair in England.
Shelley and Byron met on the afternoon of May 27, and shortly afterward they moved, with their respective parties, to two villas on the shores of Lake Geneva. From there they were able to watch thunderstorms approaching over the mountains. “An almost perpetual rain confines us principally to the house,” Mary Shelley wrote. “One night we enjoyed a finer storm than I had ever before beheld. The lake was lit up, the pines on the Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amid the darkness.”
One day, trapped indoors by incessant rain, Byron suggested that they all write ghost stories. A few days later, he outlined an idea for a story “on the subject of the vampyr
ic aristocrat, August Darvell.” After eight pages, Byron abandoned the story, and his idea was taken up instead by Polidori: it was eventually published as The Vampyre and is now regarded as the first in an ever-fecund stream of fantasy writing.
Mary Shelley too had decided to write a story, and one evening (a stormy one no doubt), the conversation turned to the question of whether “a corpse would be reanimated: galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and endowed with vital warmth.” The next day, she began writing Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, the novel created a sensation: it was reviewed in the best-known journals, by some of the most prominent writers of the time. Sir Walter Scott wrote an enthusiastic review, and he would say later that he preferred it to his own novels. At that time, there does not seem to have been any sense that Frankenstein belonged outside the literary mainstream; only later would it come to be regarded as the first great novel of science fiction.
Although Byron never did write a ghost story, he did compose a poem called “Darkness,” which was imbued with what we might today call “climate despair”:
The world was void,
The populous and the powerful—was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths.
Reflecting on the “wet, ungenial summer” of 1816 and its role in the engendering of these works, Geoffrey Parker writes, “All three works reflect the disorientation and desperation that even a few weeks of abrupt climate change can cause. Since the question today is not whether climate change will strike some part of our planet again, but when, we might re-read Byron’s poem as we choose.”
16.
To ask how science fiction came to be demarcated from the literary mainstream is to summon another question: What is it in the nature of modernity that has led to this separation? A possible answer is suggested by Bruno Latour, who argues that one of the originary impulses of modernity is the project of “partitioning,” or deepening the imaginary gulf between Nature and Culture: the former comes to be relegated exclusively to the sciences and is regarded as being off-limits to the latter.
Yet, to look back at the evolution of literary culture from this vantage point is to recognize that the project of partitioning has always been contested, and never more so than at the inception, and nowhere more vigorously than in places that were in the vanguard of modernity. As proof of this, we have only to think of William Blake, asking of England:
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic mills?
And of Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The World Is Too Much With Us”:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.
Nor was it only in England, but also throughout Europe and North America that partitioning was resisted, under the banners variously of romanticism, pastoralism, transcendentalism, and so on. Poets were always in the forefront of the resistance, in a line that extends from Hölderlin and Rilke to such present-day figures as Gary Snyder and W. S. Merwin.
But being myself a writer of fiction, it is the novel that interests me most, and when we look at the evolution of the form, it becomes evident that its absorption into the project of partitioning was presaged already in the line of Wordsworth’s that I quoted above: “I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn.”
It is with these words that the poet, even as he laments the onrushing intrusion of the age, announces his surrender to the most powerful of its tropes: that which envisages time as an irresistible, irreversible forward movement. This jealous deity, the Time-god of modernity, has the power to decide who will be cast into the shadows of backwardness—the dark tunnel of time “outworn”—and who will be granted the benediction of being ahead of the rest, always en avant. It is this conception of time (which has much in common with both Protestant and secular teleologies, like those of Hegel and Marx) that allows the work of partitioning to proceed within the novel, always aligning itself with the avant-garde as it hurtles forward in its impatience to erase every archaic reminder of Man’s kinship with the nonhuman.
The history of this partitioning is, of course, an epic in itself, offering subplots and characters to suit the tastes of every reader. Here I want to dwell, for a moment, on a plot that completely reverses itself between the eighteenth century and today: the story of the literary tradition’s curious relationship with science.
At the birth of modernity, the relationship between literature and science was very close and was perhaps perfectly exemplified in the figure of the writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who wrote one of the earliest of best sellers, Paul et Virginie. Saint-Pierre regarded himself as primarily a naturalist and saw no conflict between his calling as writer and man of science. It is said of him that when taken to see the cathedral of Chartres, as a boy, he noticed nothing but the jackdaws that were roosting on the towers.
Goethe also famously saw no conflict between his literary and scientific interests, conducting experiments in optics, and propounding theories that remain compelling to this day. Herman Melville too was deeply interested in the study of marine animals and his views on the subject are, of course, expounded at length in Moby Dick. I could cite many other instances ranging from the mathematics of War and Peace to the chemistry of Alice in Wonderland, but there is no need: it is hardly a matter of dispute that Western writers remained deeply engaged with science through the nineteenth century.
Nor was this a one-sided engagement. Naturalists and scientists not only read but also produced some of the most significant literary works of the nineteenth century, such as Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Alfred Russell Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago. Their works, in turn, served as an inspiration to a great number of poets and writers, including Tennyson.
How, then, did the provinces of the imaginative and the scientific come to be so sharply divided from each other? According to Latour the project of partitioning is supported always by a related enterprise: one that he describes as “purification,” the purpose of which is to ensure that Nature remains off-limits to Culture, the knowledge of which is consigned entirely to the sciences. This entails the marking off and suppression of hybrids—and that, of course, is exactly the story of the branding of science fiction, as a genre separate from the literary mainstream. The line that has been drawn between them exists only for the sake of neatness; because the zeitgeist of late modernity could not tolerate Nature-Culture hybrids.
Nor is this pattern likely to change soon. I think it can be safely predicted that as the waters rise around us, the mansion of serious fiction, like the doomed waterfront properties of Mumbai and Miami Beach, will double down on its current sense of itself, building ever higher barricades to keep the waves at bay.
The expulsion of hybrids from the manor house has long troubled 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. And this capitulation has come at a price, for it is literary fiction itself that has been diminished by it. If a list were to be made of the late twentieth-century novelists whose works remain influential today, we would find, I suspect, that many who once bestrode the literary world like colossi are entirely forgotten while writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Bradbury, and Phili
p K. Dick are near the top of the list.
That said, the question remains: Is it the case that science fiction is better equipped to address the Anthropocene than mainstream literary fiction? This might appear obvious to many. After all, there is now a new genre of science fiction called “climate fiction” or cli-fi. But cli-fi is made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future, and that, to me, is exactly the rub. The future is but one aspect of the Anthropocene: this era also includes the recent past, and, most significantly, the present.
In a perceptive essay on science fiction and speculative fiction, Margaret Atwood writes of these genres that they “all draw from the same deep well: those imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world, or on the other side of the threshold that divides the known from the unknown. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large ‘wonder tale’ umbrella.”
This lays out with marvelous clarity some of the ways in which the Anthropocene resists science fiction: it is precisely not an imagined “other” world apart from ours; nor is it located in another “time” or another “dimension.” By no means are the events of the era of global warming akin to the stuff of wonder tales; yet it is also true that in relation to what we think of as normal now, they are in many ways uncanny; and they have indeed opened a doorway into what we might call a “spirit world”—a universe animated by nonhuman voices.