by Amitav Ghosh
If I have been at pains to speak of resistances rather than insuperable obstacles, it is because these challenges can be, and have been, overcome in many novels: Liz Jensen’s Rapture is a fine example of one such; another is Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful novel Flight Behavior. Both are set in a time that is recognizable as our own, and they both communicate, with marvelous vividness, the uncanniness and improbability, the magnitude and interconnectedness of the transformations that are now under way.
17.
Global warming’s resistance to the arts begins deep underground, in the recesses where organic matter undergoes the transformations that make it possible for us to devour the sun’s energy in fossilized forms. Think of the vocabulary that is associated with these substances: naphtha, bitumen, petroleum, tar, and fossil fuels. No poet or singer could make these syllables fall lightly on the ear. And think of the substances themselves: coal and the sooty residue it leaves on everything it touches; and petroleum—viscous, foul smelling, repellant to all the senses.
Of coal at least it can be said that the manner of its extraction is capable of sustaining stories of class solidarity, courage, and resistance, as in Zola’s Germinal, for instance, and John Sayles’s fine film Matewan.
The very materiality of coal is such as to enable and promote resistance to established orders. The processes through which it is mined and transported to the surface create an unusual degree of autonomy for miners; as Timothy Mitchell observes, “the militancy that formed in these workplaces was typically an effort to defend this autonomy.” It is no coincidence, then, that coal miners were in the front lines of struggles for the expansion of political rights from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, and even afterward. It could even be argued that miners, and therefore the economy of coal itself, were largely responsible for the unprecedented expansion of democratic rights that occurred in the West between 1870 and the First World War.
The materiality of oil is very different from that of coal: its extraction does not require large numbers of workers, and since it can be piped over great distances, it does not need a vast workforce for its transportation and distribution. This is probably why its effects, politically speaking, have been the opposite of those of coal. That this might be the case was well understood by Winston Churchill and other leaders of the British and American political elites, which was why they went to great lengths to promote the large-scale use of oil. This effort gained in urgency after the historic strikes of the 1910s and ’20s, in which miners, and workers who transported and distributed coal, played a major role; indeed, fear of working-class militancy was one of the reasons why a large part of the Marshall Plan’s funds went toward effecting the switch from coal to oil. “The corporatised democracy of postwar Western Europe was to be built,” as Mitchell notes, “on this reorganisation of energy flows.”
For the arts, oil is inscrutable in a way that coal never was: the energy that petrol generates is easy to aestheticize—as in images and narratives of roads and cars—but the substance itself is not. Its sources are mainly hidden from sight, veiled by technology, and its workers are hard to mythologize, being largely invisible. As for the places where oil is extracted, they possess nothing of the raw visual power that is manifest, for example, in the mining photographs of Sebastião Salgado. Oil refineries are usually so heavily fortified that little can be seen of them other than a distant gleam of metal, with tanks, pipelines, derricks, glowing under jets of flame.
One such fortress figures in my first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), a part of which is about the discovery of oil in a fictional emirate called al-Ghazira: “out of the sand, there suddenly arose the barbed-wire fence of the Oiltown. From the other side of the fence, faces stared silently out—Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces.”
Behind these eerie, dislocated enclaves of fenced-in faces and towering derricks lies a history that impinges on every life on this planet. This is true especially in regard to the Arabian peninsula, where oil brought about an encounter with the West that has had consequences that touch upon every aspect of our existence, extending from matters of security to the buildings that surround us and the quality of the air we breathe. Yet the strange reality is that this historic encounter, whose tremors and aftershocks we feel every day, has almost no presence in our imaginative lives, in art, music, dance, or literature.
Long after the publication of The Circle of Reason, I wrote a piece in which I attempted to account for this mysterious absence: “To the principal protagonists in the Oil Encounter (which means, in effect, America and Americans, on the one hand, and the peoples of the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on the other), the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic. It is perhaps the one cultural issue on which the two sides are in complete agreement. . . . Try and imagine a major American writer taking on the Oil Encounter. The idea is literally inconceivable.”
The above passage figures in a review of one of the few works of fiction to address the Oil Encounter, a five-part series of novels by the Jordanian-born writer Abdel Rahman Munif. My review, entitled “Petrofiction,” dealt only with the first two books in the cycle, which were published in English translation as Cities of Salt (Mudun al Malh) and The Trench (Al-ukhdud).
“The truth is,” I wrote in my review, “that we do not yet possess the form that can give the Oil Encounter a literary expression. For this reason alone Cities of Salt . . . ought to be regarded as a work of immense significance. It so happens that the first novel in the cycle is also in many ways a wonderful work of fiction, perhaps even in parts a great one.”
This was written in 1992. I was not aware then that Cities of Salt had been reviewed four years earlier by one of the most influential figures in the American literary firmament: John Updike. His review, when I read it, made a great impression on me: I found that in the process of writing about Munif’s book Updike had also articulated, elegantly and authoritatively, a conception of the novel that was indisputably an accurate summing-up of a great deal of contemporary fiction. Yet it was a conception with which I found myself completely at odds.
The differences between Updike’s views and mine have an important bearing on some of the aspects of the Anthropocene that I have been addressing here, so it is best to let him speak for himself. Here is what he had to say about Cities of Salt: “It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif . . . appears to be . . . insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face or a manner or a developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest; and, this being the first third of a trilogy, what intelligible conflicts and possibilities do emerge remain serenely unresolved. There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which since ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle; ‘Cities of Salt’ is concerned, instead, with men in the aggregate.”
This passage is remarkable, in the first instance, because the conception of the novel that is articulated here is rarely put into words, even though it has come to exercise great sway across much of the world and especially in the Anglosphere. My own disagreement with it hinges upon the phrase that Updike uses to distinguish the novel from the fable and the chronicle: “individual moral adventure.”
But why, I find myself asking, should the defining adventures of the novel be described as “moral,” as opposed to, say, intellectual or political or spiritual? In what sense could it be said that War and Peace is about individual moral adventures? It is certainly true that some threads in the narrative could be described in this way, but they would account for only a small part of the whole. As f
or Tolstoy’s own vision of what he had set out to do, he was emphatic that War and Peace was “not a novel, still less a long poem, and even less a historical chronicle”: his intention was to supersede and incorporate preceding forms—an ambition that can be seen also in Melville’s Moby Dick. To fit these works within the frame of “individual moral adventures” is surely a diminishment of the writers’ intentions.
Clearly, it is in the word moral that the conundrum lies: What exactly does it mean? Is it intended perhaps to incorporate the senses also of the “political,” the “spiritual,” and the “philosophical”? And if so, would not a question arise as to whether a single word can bear so great a burden?
I ask these questions not in order to parse small semantic differences. I believe that Updike had actually put his finger on a very important aspect of contemporary culture. I will return to this later, but for now I’d like to turn to another aspect of Updike’s mapping of the territory of the novel: that which is excluded from it.
Updike draws this boundary line with great clarity: the reason why Cities of Salt does not feel “much like a novel,” he tells us, is that it is concerned not with a sense of individual moral adventures but rather with “men in the aggregate.” In other words, what is banished from the territory of the novel is precisely the collective.
But is it actually the case that novelists have shunned men (or women) in the aggregate? And inasmuch as they have, is it a matter of intention or narrative expediency? Charlotte Brontë’s view, expressed in a letter to a critic, is worth noting: “is not the real experience of each individual very limited?” she asks, “and if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally is he not in danger of being an egotist?”
In a perceptive discussion of Updike’s review, the critic Rob Nixon points out that Munif is “scarcely alone in working with a crowded canvas and with themes of collective transformation”; Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, and many others have also treated “individual character as secondary to collective metamorphosis.”
Indeed, so numerous are the traces of the collective within the novelistic tradition that anyone who chose to look for them would soon be overwhelmed. Such being the case, should Updike’s view be summarily dismissed? My answer is: no—because Updike was, in a certain sense, right. It is a fact that the contemporary novel has become ever more radically centered on the individual psyche while the collective—“men in the aggregate”—has receded, both in the cultural and the fictional imagination. Where I differ from Updike is that I do not think that this turn in contemporary fiction has anything to do with the novel as a form: it is a matter of record that historically many novelists from Tolstoy and Dickens to Steinbeck and Chinua Achebe have written very effectively about “men in the aggregate.” In many parts of the world, they continue to do so even now.
What Updike captures, then, is not by any means an essential element of the novel as a form; his characterization is true rather of a turn that fiction took at a certain time in the countries that were then leading the way to the “Great Acceleration” of the late twentieth century. 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.”
I say it is no coincidence for two reasons. The first is that the acceleration in carbon emissions and the turn away from the collective are both, in one sense, effects of that aspect of modernity that sees time (in Bruno Latour’s words) as “an irreversible arrow, as capitalization, as progress.” I’ve noted before that this idea of a continuous and irreversible forward movement, led by an avant-garde, has been one of the animating forces of the literary and artistic imagination since the start of the twentieth century. A progression of this sort inevitably creates winners and losers, and in the case of twentieth-century fiction, one of the losers was exactly writing of the kind in which the collective had a powerful presence. Fiction of this sort was usually of a realist variety, and it receded because it was consigned to the netherworld of “backwardness.”
But the era of global warming has made audible a new, nonhuman critical voice that forces us to ask whether those old realists were so “used-up” after all. Consider the example of John Steinbeck, never a favorite of the avant-garde, and once famously dismissed by Lionel Trilling as a writer who thought “like a social function, not a novelist.” Yet, if we look back upon Steinbeck now, in full awareness of what is now known about the future of the planet, his work seems far from superseded; quite the contrary. What we see, rather, is a visionary placement of the human within the nonhuman; we see a form, an approach that grapples with climate change avant la lettre.
Around the world too there are many writers—not all of them realists—from whose work neither the aggregate nor the nonhuman have ever been absent. To cite only a few examples from India: in Bengali, there is the work of Adwaita Mallabarman and Mahasweta Devi; in Kannada, Sivarama Karanth; in Oriya, Gopinath Mohanty; in Marathi, Vishwas Patil. Of these writers too I suspect that Updike would have said that their books were not much “like what we call a novel.”
But once again, the last laugh goes to that sly critic, the Anthropocene, which has muddied, and perhaps even reversed, our understanding of what it means to be “advanced.” Were we to adopt the arrow-like time perspective of the moderns, there is a sense in which we might even say of writers like Munif and Karanth that they were actually “ahead” of their peers elsewhere.
Here, then, is another reason why something more than mere chance appears to be at play in the turn that fiction took as emissions were rising in the late twentieth century. It is one of the many turns of that period that give, in retrospect, the uncanny impression that global warming has long been toying with humanity (thus, for example, the three postwar decades, when emissions grew sharply, saw a stabilization of global temperatures). Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.
Inasmuch as contemporary fiction is caught in this thralldom, this is one of the most powerful ways in which global warming resists it: it is as if the gas had run out on a generation accustomed to jet skis, leaving them with the task of reinventing sails and oars.
18.
Mrauk-U is the site of a vast and enchanting complex of Buddhist pagodas and monasteries in western Burma. Once the capital of the Arakan (Rakhine) kingdom, it flourished between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. During that time, it was an important link in the networks of trade that spanned the Indian Ocean. Chinese ceramics and Indian textiles passed through it in quantity; merchants and travelers came from Gujarat, Bengal, East Africa, Yemen, Portugal, and China to sojourn in the city. The wealth they brought in allowed the kingdom’s rulers to honor their religion by embarking on vast building projects. The site they created is smaller than Bagan or Angkor Wat, but it is, in its own way, just as interesting.
Getting to Mrauk-U isn’t easy. The nearest town of any size is Sittwe (formerly Akyab), and from there the journey to the site can take a day or more, depending on the condition of the road. As Mrauk-U approaches, ranges of low hills, of rounded, dome-like shapes appear in the distance; at times, the ridges seem to rise into spires and finials. Such is the effect that the experience of entering the site is like stepping into a zone where the human and nonhuman echo each other with an uncanny resonance; the connection between built form and landscape seems to belong to a dimension other than the visual; it is like that of sympathetic chords in music. The echoes reach into the interiors of the monuments, which, with their openings and pathways, their intricate dappling of light and shadow, and their endless iterations of images, seem to aspire to be forests of stone.
In How Forests Think, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn suggests that “forms”—by which he means much more than
shapes or visual metaphors—are one of the means that enable our surroundings to think through us.
But how, we might ask, can any question of thought arise in the absence of language? Kohn’s answer is that to imagine these possibilities we need to move beyond language. But to what? Merely to ask that question is to become aware of the multiple ways in which we are constantly engaged in patterns of communication that are not linguistic: as, for example, when we try to interpret the nuances of a dog’s bark; or when we listen to patterns of birdcalls; or when we try to figure out what exactly is portended by a sudden change in the sound of the wind as it blows through trees. None of this is any less demanding, or any less informative, than, say, listening to the news on the radio. We do these things all the time—we could not stop doing them if we tried—yet we don’t think of them as communicative acts. Why? Is it perhaps because the shadow of language interposes itself, preventing us from doing so?
It isn’t only the testimony of our ears that is blocked in this way, but also that of our eyes, for we often communicate with animals by means of gestures that require interpretation—as, for example, when I wave my hands to shoo away a crow. Nor does interpretation necessarily demand a sense of hearing or sight. In my garden, there is a vigorously growing vine that regularly attempts to attach itself to a tree, several meters away, by “reaching” out to it with a tendril. This is not done randomly, for the tendrils are always well aimed and they appear at exactly those points where the vine does actually stand a chance of bridging the gap: if this were a human, we would say that she was taking her best shot. This suggests to me that the vine is, in a sense, “interpreting” the stimuli around it, perhaps the shadows that pass over it or the flow of air in its surroundings. Whatever those stimuli might be, the vine’s “reading” of them is clearly accurate enough to allow it to develop an “image” of what it is “reaching” for; something not unlike “heat-imaging” in weapons and robots.
