The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

The second chapter in this section introduces Ghosh’s personal connection to the climate crisis: His ancestors once lived in a village on the banks of a river in what is now Bangladesh, but they were forced to relocate after the path of the river changed, washing the village away. Ghosh considers his ancestors to be climate refugees, and he imagines the climactic moment when they finally recognized the power of the river they’d lived on for so long. He believes that this family history with environmental disaster informs his own experience of the climate crisis.

While researching the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest located in the Bengal Delta, Ghosh was made intimately aware of the active presence of nonhuman forces like rivers and silt in shaping the forest. Because of his family history with violent rivers, Ghosh understood this awareness of the nonhuman to be a recognition of an existing knowledge, rather than the emergence of new knowledge. However, Ghosh struggled to translate this understanding of the nonhuman into his writing. As a result, he has come to believe that writers struggle to address climate change because of long-established literary conventions. 

Ghosh argues that, relative to the severity of the problem, the climate crisis is rarely featured in modern literary fiction. He suggests that major literary magazines like the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books don’t consider fiction about the climate crisis to be serious literature, often relegating such works to subgenres like science fiction or fantasy. Ghosh argues that the effect of this unconscious bias is to diminish the threat of climate change, even though writers have a social duty to amplify serious issues. He suggests that, given the existential threat posed by climate change, there should be far more fiction from far more writers addressing the topic. If writers are unable to address the most pressing topic of our time, Ghosh argues, then they will have failed, and that failure should be attributed to the climate crisis.

Ghosh identifies writers who address climate change in their nonfiction but not their fiction. He adds himself to this list and suggests that the fault lies not with the authors but with the topic: The climate crisis is uniquely resistant to the conventions of modern literary fiction.

Ghosh defines the Anthropocene, our current geological era, as one in which human activity has an active and pervasive impact on ecological systems. In his view, it is not only technology that creates this impact but also contemporary culture and “commonsense understandings” of the world (9). As we begin to recognize the negative impact of human activity on the environment, Ghosh suggests, we should also consider the ways in which art and culture contribute to this harm. He argues that cultural forces such as movies and literature generate desires for things like vehicles, vacations, and homes and that the production of these commodities directly contributes to the climate crisis. Literary culture has a concrete impact on the climate crisis, despite the relative lack of literary fiction on the topic. Ghosh argues that writers must seriously consider the ways in which modern literary culture is complicit in the climate crisis.

Ghosh imagines a future in which coastal cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok are rendered uninhabitable by climate change. He speculates that future readers and historians will search 21st-century literature for evidence of the climate crisis and contemporary attempts to resolve it. Finding none, these future historians may conclude that the early years of the 21st century were dedicated to obscuring the truth of climate change, branding these years the “Great Derangement.”

In 1978, while working on his MA at Delhi University, Ghosh accidentally put himself in the way of the first tornado to hit the region in modern history. While on his way home from the library, Ghosh spontaneously decided to visit a friend; when a storm broke out, he left the friend’s house for home via a route he rarely used. This route took Ghosh directly into the path of the tornado, which ultimately killed 30 people and injured over 700. He later learned that the eye of the storm passed directly over his hiding spot. He reflects on the aptness of the tornado as a metaphor and the feeling that the storm was watching him as he watched it. Ghosh reflects on the rarity of this series of events: The tornado was the first in Delhi’s recorded history, and he only experienced it firsthand because he spontaneously decided to visit a friend. It was the randomness of this experience, rather than the violence of the storm, that caused the tornado to lodge in Ghosh’s memory as a foundational event.

For years after the tornado, Ghosh struggled to write about his experience in the tornado. Although other sorts of storms appear in his work, he has never written a tornado into his novels. He speculates that this is because the reality of his experience was so improbable as to seem impossible and thus like lazy writing. He defines improbability not as the opposite of probability, but rather as one point on a continuum of probability. He shows that the mathematical concept of probability is in fact intricately connected to the birth of the modern novel. Before the modern novel, Ghosh argues, storytelling focused on extraordinary events, which were connected by narrative tags describing chronology. Modern novels, on the other hand, rely on details and characters rather than events. The novelty of novels was precisely this movement away from extraordinary events toward everyday occurrences. Ghosh points to the work of 19th-century Bengali critic and writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as evidence of this intentional literary change from “mere narrative” to “sketches of character and pictures” of life (18).

These literary changes were driven by the same desires that led to the 19th-century rise of the field of statistics, which is guided by ideas about probability and improbability. As the lives of the middle class became increasingly regular and predictable, the novel emerged as a literary form that highlighted the patterns of everyday life rather than life’s unpleasant and unexpected dramas. Simultaneously, a consensus seemed to form about how Earth’s geological structures, such as mountains, canyons, and caves, were formed. Whereas some scientists had argued that these structures were the caused by sudden violent events (like earthquakes), geologists in the 19th century agreed that they were more likely the result of slow, gradual processes. The literary form of the novel, which focuses on everyday details, reflects this 19th century belief in slow processes.

Modern geologists believe that geological structures were formed through a combination of sudden, violent events and slow, gradual processes. Ghosh argues, however, that the modern novel cannot update and is by its very nature unable to accommodate explosive, improbable events such as climate change. He suggests that the inclusion of climate-change-driven natural disasters in modern novels risks the relegation of the text to less respected subgenres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Ghosh argues that we live in a world defined by the improbability of common events: In the first decades of the 21st century, storms, droughts, and heatwaves have occurred with a frequency and intensity that would have seemed improbable at any other point in history—a trend that scientists predict will only intensify in the decades to come. The 2012 Superstorm Sandy, which devastated New York City, was especially dangerous because it defied officials’ expectations of storms in the Northeast. Because the storm was so improbable, officials underestimated the threat and delayed emergency response, aggravating the effects of the storm. Ghosh argues that human beings are instinctually aware of the unpredictability of nature but that the rise of rationalist thinking convinced us that the world is predictable and orderly. In an era of climate crisis, however, the environment is increasingly unpredictable.

Ghosh argues that because weather patterns in the era of climate crisis are improbable, they are not easily integrated into modern literary fiction, which insists on realism. He points to John Milton’s Paradise Lost as an example of poetry that actively responds to environmental change and to the genres of surrealism and magical realism as spaces for fictional exploration of the topic. However, he concludes that treating the climate crisis as magical or surreal obscures the urgency of the problem. 

The Sundarbans, a network of forested wetlands in Bangladesh, are filled with tigers. While researching the region, Ghosh heard several stories about deadly tiger encounters. Most of these stories center around sight: knowing that the tiger is watching the human, locking eyes during the encounter, or seeing only a glimpse before it disappears. Ghosh argues that these moments of mutual recognition—in which humans realize that the tigers have an awareness of them, too—are a kind of interspecies communication.

In many of these stories, the tigers are described as ghost-like; Ghosh argues that the more appropriate description would be “uncanny,” a term that describes things that are frightening yet familiar or frightening in their familiarity. He suggests that the uncanniness of locking eyes with a tiger comes in the recognition (that is, re-awareness) of communication with nonhuman beings, something we consider to be impossible in the modern world. He suggests that environmental crises driven by climate change are equally uncanny because of our awareness that they are caused by human action. The recognition of human complicity in these improbable weather events makes them especially scary.

Ghosh describes a research trip to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands following the catastrophic 2004 tsunami. While visiting a seaside town called Malacca, which had been practically destroyed, Ghosh noted that Indigenous communities, which built their settlements inland, were generally spared from the tsunami’s destruction. The people living on the coast were relatively wealthy mainlanders who, Ghosh argues, had put their trust in probability, statistics, and aesthetics, which indicated the coast was a safe and desirable place to live.

Similarly, housing at the island’s air force base was hierarchical, with high-ranking officers and their families living closest to the ocean. When the storm hit, the highest-ranking officers were the most affected. Ghosh points to this phenomenon as an example of the derangement of modern society’s belief in regularity and order. He suggests that society’s association of beachfront property with affluence and status is evidence of a colonial mindset. He argues that New York, Charleston, and Mumbai were built to support colonialism and imperialism and that these cities are no longer advantageously placed for the new reality of climate change.