Nat Rich and Amitav Ghosh chat on stage at the New York Public Library on Sept 10, 2019 in NYC about cli-fi novels in a world gone insane. 90 minute VIDEO FEED HERE
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2019/09/10/amitav-ghosh?nref=121031
TRANSCRIPT: slightly edited for clarity and amplification and gentle criticism.
A few quick program notes. Tonight's conversation will last about 90 minutes. After which our speakers will take a few questions from the audience, perhaps 3 or 4, relayed via notecards to Nat Rich. [If you have a question, please write it on the note card and staff will come by to collect them if you could pass your cards down the aisle, that will help enormously.]
Please welcome Amitav Ghosh,63, (the Brooklyn-based author of the new cli-fi novel GUN ISLAND) and Nathaniel Rich, 45, (the New York City native now based in New Orleans and author of the cli-fi novel ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW and the nonfiction essay book LOSING EARTH.)
NAT RICH: Thank you. It's really ‑‑ are the mics okay? It's really a thrill to be here with you all in this stunning room with Amitav Ghosh to celebrate his new novel. It's an honor for me and a special thrill as I was telling Amitav, in my introduction to literature at my Yale University class, sandwiched between I think ‑‑ I read his novel THE SHADOW LINES so I'm having this minor out of body experience now and thinking back on my younger self then. But I thought it would be worth beginning with this one short paragraph from the new novel which I asked Amitav to read but he assigned me to do it instead. I'm sure he has a better reading voice than I do but I thought this would be a good way in.
''This is a conversation between the main character, Dean, and Chinta, who is an Italian grand dam art historian and Dean is talking about a legend. Features prominently in the novel and says, I don't see how a legend could reach out into the future, after all it's just a story. She stopped me with a rap on the knuckles. You must never use that phrase, Deano, she said slowly and deliberately. In the 17th century no one would have said if something was just a story as we moderns do. At that time people recognized that stories could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even. They knew that only through stories was it possible to enter the most inward mysteries of our existence were nothing that was really important could be proven to exist like love or loyalty or even the faculty that makes us turn around when we feel the gaze of a stranger or an animal. Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us. It is they that allow the past to reach out to us.
I felt this was a very ‑‑ this spoke to me and to the heart of the novel and also to the engagement with climate change and the way that you written about climate change and I wonder if you could begin by I guess telling us what you ‑‑ what that quote means to you and then as a way to get into what this book is.
>> Certainly. Well, first of all let me thank you all for being here tonight. My thanks to the New York public library for arranging this. And thank you, Nathaniel, for being here. I have been reading you for years of your fictions, one of the earliest climate fiction books written. And your art has been such an important contribution to the subject. It's a real pleasure to be with you here today.
>> Thank you.
>> Well, you know, I think the way that I approach these issues, I think of my book as being a book about our reality. The reality of the moment that we live in. The moment that we inhibit. And I think the real question here is why this reality for so many of us or so many writers is occluded. That they can't see the ways in which this reality is unfolding around us, you know? I think perhaps because of the part of the world that I'm from, it has something to do with it because the reality is so pressing, especially in bengal, you know? So I think for me, I mean ‑‑ for younger writers like yourself, you know, as you did in your novel, often it's about the future. How these impacts are sort of forming our future. You know for me, really, I think about these issues in relation to the past. I think it's for me climate change is not something discreet. It's not something that's happened only within the last 30 years. It's something which has a very long history which reaches very deep into our past. And it's within that context that I want to ‑‑ that I think of it and it's within that context that these stories come to me and certainly this story.
>> And one of the most striking things to me about the novel is that it's both very much set in the current day. You can ‑‑ there is almost the equivalent of headlines throughout the book about the migration crisis, various ecological disasters and weather events. And at the same time it's deeply rooted in the past and not just the recent past, but the ancient past. There is myth. There is the 17th century and the little ice age of that period plays a prominent role. And all of the characters themselves seem haunted by their past and there is even a phrase that recurs about ‑‑ I don't want to paraphrase, the solution will come from the past. What is ‑‑
>> Yes. ‑‑ actually, inscribed on the floor of the Santa Maria in Venus which means from the past salvation comes. I mean that case I suppose it's meteorically a reference to the virgin Mary and the womb and so on. I find it very suggestive idea that we live in a time when there is so much kind of ‑‑ how shall I say techno fantasy. But somehow we will escape to Mars or something. Whereas right there it's saying to you, no, if there is a solution it comes from the beginning of the end. I mean, the end is an end. Yes, absolutely. I see our present predicament as not being in anyway separate from 400 years or 500 years I would say in which really human beings but most of all Europeans, human beings of European origin have transformed the earth. If you think of the 17th ‑‑ many of you may know that the last major episode of climactic variation was in the 17th ‑‑ it was a longer period but peaked in the 17th century when there was the little ice age. Now it turns out that one of the reasons why there was this little ice age was that ‑‑ was because of the mega death of Native Americans. Native Americans from going to be a fairly extensive population dwindled by 95%. So across the two Americas, huge tracts of land that had once been cultivated, reverted to forest and be there sequestering a huge amount of carbon and that brought on what is called the little ice age. So, you know, I think there is a very distinct history, there is a very clear history that links essentially the European expansion starting from 1492 onwards with our present day. We see it in the history of commodities. We see it in the history of colonialism and the history of anticolonialism. I don't think it's in anyway a coincidence that really the great spike that we see in green house gases starting in 1979 started after the decolonization.
>> Since your book is published together and can't assume that many people in the room has read this wonderful new novel. So how would you describe it as an intellectual caper, intellectual international caper on one level. It's probably the most sort of pro saying way of describing it. Have you yet learned to talk about the book on the day of its publication. It's a different intellectual process than actually writing it.
>> That is a very different process. I think for me what the book is trying to explore in some way is the reality of our time and the ‑‑ this reality that we are living in is deeply and profoundly uncanny. You know, I think it's impossible as in terms of any kind of literary approach to this to this moment in time. To dispense with the uncanny. We have to ‑‑ we have to embrace the uncanny. The uncanny defines exactly this moment. And since writing the book, I had such strange experiences. There is a chapter in the book which is set in Los Angeles and there is a fire advancing toward the museum. And this actually happened. You may have read last year that there was a fire advancing toward the Getty museum. I wrote that chapter several months before the fires. You know it was so weird. Just as I was reading about it and watching the coverage on television to see this happening because it's already happened in your head. And the same way you remember there are these tornadoes in the venetian lagoon and suddenly the tornadoes did happen and friends tent me pictures of them. And then an epic hailstorm in Venice. That also happened in the last few months.
So it's just the uncanniness of the world for all of us who are writing about these events it's constantly instantiated, isn't it?
>> You wrote about publishing the hungry tide, a previous novel and having cyclones much like the ones you wrote about and developed as soon as ‑‑ after publication and ‑‑ or a silent after 2004‑‑ cyclone after 2004 and that hit home for me as well because I published a novel, odds against tomorrow set in New York and about a hurricane hitting New York and causing widespread flooding and as I was writing it, it was very important for me ‑‑ it was set in the near future which I will never do again. Setting a novel as a constant panic attack that something you are writing about might happen. And in this case my worst fear was that indeed a hurricane would hit New York. It's important to me that all of the science and the data and the predictions were all accurate. So I read all of the government reports on the next time a hurricane hits New York and a certain path. And so I was fearful ‑‑ it took me five or six years to write the novel and every hurricane season I was fearful that hurricane would come and fulfill. And sure enough after the book was put to bed but before it was published, Sandy hit. And my immediate fear was a deeply selfish fear that the book would have to be trashed basically because of this horrible tragedy. They ended up not ‑‑ they ended up publishing it anyway.
What it did was totally altered the framework. The way it was received I think and read, I think without Sandy, it would have been seen as a fantasy novel. Instead afterwards the number one question I would get, is this your book about Sandy. I have to say it took me six years to write it. I think it speaks to your point we are living in this uncanny time when things that used to be seen or written off as science fiction premises are actually ordinary and almost so ordinary that it's hard to even write about them in fiction. This is something that you write about in the great derangement about this way that writing on this subject, writing about these incredible transformations that are happening now has often been sort of written off by ‑‑ I don't know how you would characterize it, the literary establishment as genre, essentially. In a way that I think you say a real failing of the imagination and the seriousness of the critical establishment itself.
>> Absolutely. And I think that's ‑‑ it's the imprint ‑‑ it's the imprint of history on the western fictional tradition. Because really if you think of the 19th century tradition of the novel, it emerges in a period of climatic stability. Today, when you read about those heroines that were fainting in the heat and then suddenly you see that England is hotter than India, sort of wonder, where this has ended up. But there you are. We are not in that period of stable climate any more. We are in a time when everything is really so weirdly unpredictable really.
>> One of the most striking arguments in the great derangement which I should say is came out of a series of lectures you gave at University of Chicago and is published in book form as an excellent sort of not only a primer on climate change and literature lack thereof on climate change and history, but really makes ‑‑ it really goes places that a lot of I think serious writers have failed to go. One of the most striking points is that the novel itself, besides the conventions of the novel as we know it which is to say the realistic contemporary novel, besides those conventions seeming antagonistic or hostel to a serious discussion of climate change of these radical transformations that are happening, those conventions themselves are a product of carbon dioxide emissions. I wonder if you could go into that a little bit.
>> Absolutely. Those kinds of ‑‑ well, let's take for example one of the most important aspects of fiction which is the idea of the setting. You know, the sense of place, the sense of a setting and so on. Now I think if we look at the realities of the world that we live in today, it's really impossible to write about settings in quite the same way. For one thing, the settings have completely changed. The populations have changed. The geographies have changed. And most of all we live at a time when really it's not just people moving. We also know that entire ecosystems are moving. And we know most of all that all of these changes are happening because of extended global impacts. So any attempt that we have today to approach these issues has to dispense with a 19th century idea of the setting. Actually, it's interesting even if you look back on the ways in which these settings work, I really feel that John Steinbeck was the great climate novelist because really the grapes of wrath, the first chapter is a magnificent rift on climate.
What's so interesting is that if today you have to be a Steinbeck writing about the same sort of phenomenon and in a way I'm writing about the same kind of phenomenon, but you couldn't do it using the Oklahoma die elect as Steinbeck ‑‑ dialect as Steinbeck did. You would have to use Spanish. Then you see this deep fracture entering into our literary universe. How do you deal with this kind of what I would call an Anthropocene of language which is not the stable monolingual reality of the past.
>> To take a step back, it strikes me that the new novel, Gun Island, is one of ‑‑ I can think of a few other examples of a novelist writing a very provocative essay bemoaning the state of letters and then as sort of an entry to then writing his or her best example of it or what they feel is missing, I think, of I guess Jonathan Franzen's essay a chance to dream, but it goes back to Sobello and filth Roth at the beginning of their careers. In your case you are 11 or 12 books in when you wrote the very provocative book and then you set about to try to write the novel that you felt hadn't been written. That seems to put an enormous amount of pressure on yourself. So I'm curious just from a writing standpoint if you felt daunted by that? Or did you try to put out of your mind this argument that you were making in your essays when you sat down with your novelist.
>> You are right. I mean, at the end of the great derangement, I thought, what the hell have I done. I sort of dug my own grave. How do I respond to this? But after I finished book the great derangement. One day my head filled with these ideas. As you know, this does happen, you know. You are sitting at your desk and suddenly you see a story unfolding in front of you. And once I started writing it, it just came pouring out. It came out much faster than anything else I have ever done. Yes, it was in way sort of a scary to simply because of having written the great derangement, but I have to say that you are one of the very few people who have asked me this question.
>> Really?
>> Yeah. Because not everybody puts the two and two together.
>> Really? That's interesting.
>> But again, I must say that in writing this book at the end of the writing, I felt that I had done everything I felt had to be done, you know? To write about the reality of our time which is that to address the uncanny aspects of it. To address the global aspects of it? To address the sort of multilingual aspects of it. To address movement. So in that sense I felt that I was rising to the challenge.
>> Did you feel ‑‑ I mean, you write so much in great derangement about literary convention. Did you feel conscious in Gun Island of breaking convention to that maybe you hadn't broke in previous novels? Did you feel you were somehow breaking the rules of what in any sense of what contemporary fiction has been?
>> Yes, I did feel that. I feel that it's also going to be ‑‑ I mean, for many ‑‑ let's say conventional readers, the book will be strange simply because of so much of it is about very grounded realities. I should explain that one of the issues the book deals with at great length is the Mediterranean migration crises I spent a long time in Italy traveling to refugee camps and migrant camps and interviewing migrants and refugees and talking to them about their understanding of what they were doing and what was going on in the world. And actually they had very sophisticated understandings of the world at large. At the same time, there is ‑‑ there are these uncanny aspects of it and most of all there is a tradition in it which even people in India don't know about. These legends ‑‑
>> So explain the central legend of the book and is it an actual legend.
>> Yes, it's very much a legend. So this is a very ancient legend probably going back millennia, probably rooted in the endogenous people of Ben ‑‑ bengal. Two figures one is the goddess of snakes and the other is a figure called the merchant. The merchant in Bengali. So what happens is that the goddess wants the merchant to worship her. And he won't. He sort of ‑‑ he refuses because he has his other God and so on. So she pursues him with these calamities and catastrophes and chases him and all his children are killed by snakes. And she pursues him until he escapes from bengal and travels overseas and comes back. And what is so interesting to me about this legend is that it conceptualizes the essential aspect of our climate reality if you would like, is what we owe to the world, what we owe to other beings in this world and the conflict between that and profit. So in such a clear way this is conceptualized in this whole series of legends.
So in some strange way, you know, it's uncanny really to think that two millennia ago our ancestors intuitive this deep conflict that arises within the human consciousness.
>> And there is also a point that you make in your essays that felt alive to me in your book was the difficulty that contemporary novel has in telling stories about groups and collective experience and yet although this is really the story of this rare books dealer who gets caught up in trying to solve this legend and trying to find ‑‑ and seen parallels between this legend and what's happening in his own life and haunted by snakes and spiders along the way, there is also this sense of a collective ‑‑ I suppose it comes out most in the stories of the migrants which he becomes involved with that and I wondered if you struggled or with how to achieve this sense of a collective experience in the pages of the novel?
>> That's a very interesting question, Nathaniel. Novels are about characters. And almost by definition in the novel you can't have too many characters. You could, but you make it difficult for the reader. So the whole problem in the novel ‑‑ in the form of the novel is how do you write with a few characters while conjuring up behind each character a phalanx of other ‑‑ phalanx of others. If I'm able to do that at all in this book is because of the other books that I've written. This problem arises I think most dramatically when you are writing about war, you know, when you write about military scenes or battle scenes. Because again, you to relate ‑‑ a scene involving hundreds of thousands of people through two or three characters.
It was because I had done that stuff before, I suppose, that I was able to approach it because it can be very daunting.
>> ‑‑
>> That's right. I think the conventions of the novel tend to push us more and more toward the inferiorities, issues to inferiority, toward a sense of self and certain kind of characterization and it's hard to break out of those.
>> Yeah, and I think you talk about very forcefully in your essays about the failure of contemporary fiction to really engage with climate change. And I think that's true in a couple of fronts and you write about how it fails to ‑‑ you talk about the difficulty of writing about for instance of your weather events and collective experience, but there is also a separate failure of the literature which has puzzled me which is the failure to write about the way that these vast public crises, public crises are touching our own inner lives. And that's not necessarily a task that may be climate activists would be concerned about, but I do think that it's something that is reshaping the way we see our lives. To give one example, the main ‑‑ one of the main figures in Losing Earth was essentially the original climate activist who discovers the issue. He is an environmental activist in the 70s. Veteran of the clean air wars and he discovers climate change as it were in 1979 sitting in his office reading a government pamphlet report. One of his first thoughts then in 1979, once he understands what the problem is and the scope of it, is to his wife who is seven months pregnant and their unborn child and he begins to think right away, is it the right thing to do to have a child in this world when we know what we are up against? And that was so powerful to me because I think that's the kind of conversation that many of us are having more and more. I had just had my first child when I started working on that book and my second child ‑‑ oh, my ‑‑ I'm published. My second child was born when the novel was published. Don't tell him. When it was published, and I ‑‑ of course it's something we think about and it's the first thing that would come up when I would speak about the book on tour was it would be a younger person saying I don't want to have children because of this. Or an older parent ‑‑ an older ‑‑ a want to be grandparent saying my children won't have children because of this. And that is sort of ‑‑ that's only like the tip of the iceberg of all of the ways that I think this touches our lives about if you are a thinking person or a responsibility person or you think yourself as such every time you book a flight or drive in a car or turn on the lights. There is some kind of anxiety or pain that settles in. That anxiety and that way of re‑evaluating sort of ones life and few ‑‑ one's life and future is very much the province of what I think is a serious novel could write about. In other words, how does this public crisis touch our private lives.
I feel that very few writers have serious writers have taken that on. That is a sense of uncanny. I think it's related to that that you were saying. I wondered why ‑‑ have my theories for why that is. I'm curious to know if you see it that way and what you think.
>> I think you are touching on something that's very, very important because ‑‑ look, most novels are written by people who are readers and most readers come out of a certain milieu and within that milieu there are ideas of progress which go back to the 18th century, to ‑‑ and so on. What we are facing at this moment is really the death of this idea of progress. And that's something that is very hard for us to cope with. That's very ‑‑ because it's so deeply rooted in the way that stories are told and the ways which magazine articles are written. It's completely fundamental to all of that. And then again you think about the other aspect of this idea of progress. For example, the other day I stumbled upon this verse by Tennyson and Tennyson was the most important 19th century poet in a way. I mean, I had to learn Tennyson in school in England. And in this verse he says, man can move ‑‑ man moves upward through the death ‑‑ through the withering of the ape and the tiger. So essentially what he was thinking of there is that it's the death of these brute beasts of these other creatures and these brutes and not forget brutes at one point includes people like me. People of other races. That is what perms him to move upward. And you think also one of the most famous lines of American poetry, slipped the surly bonds of earth. It's essentially the same idea. That earth is surly, it's ugly, it's contemptible. And you slip it and move upwards. This is exactly the ideology of Elon Musk. Or whoever you like. And that is so deep in the contemporary imagination that it's really impossible to move beyond that. So you just ask yourself. I mean, what is that that state of mind where the people think of earth is a our only home as surly and ugly and worthy of contempt?
I think this ultimately is the reason why it's so hard for contemporary writers to come back to this idea. That the earth is not surly. Your earthly bonds are not surly. There is something very powerful in them.
>> And I feel that we entered ‑‑ we entered this era now where it's most agonizing I suppose in the political discourse when you see climate change listed on the buffet of sort of debate topics. Now at least it's listed. That's a new phenomenon this year. The idea ‑‑ and this is something that you written about and spoken about, but it's almost a form of marginalization to talk about climate change as just another issue like health care and gun violence. And failure to understand that it is in fact the connective tissue between just about every question of economics or public health or immigration, foreign trade, you name it. Certainly racial inequality and economic inequality and all of the rest. And so it almost seems now that if you are writing ‑‑ so as agonizing as it is when you see it siphoned away in news coverage and political coverage it's just another issue, it's sort of more aggravating to see that in fiction and the idea of writing a novel in 2019, say, and not feeling in some way that we are in this new world, which is not to say every novel has to talk about weather or mention climate or anything else, but it almost seems like if you are writing a novel two years after the Hiroshima and you were just writing a happy domestic ‑‑ it's almost like you living in some sort of fantasy world. That if you are doing it as a form of satire, perhaps, but it seems now that only way to write honestly about this time, realistically is for it to be shadowed in some way by this fear of what's ‑‑ of what we've done and what we are continuing to do and what's coming for us.
>> That's a very good point. The really interesting thing is that it's not that writing isn't there. Many people, you know, are writing about this. They constantly send me manuscripts so I know that.
>> Are there any you would like to promote?
>> The problem is really with the wider ecosystem of the literary universe. You might write a really wonderful novel about in which climate figures, but the moment climate enters into it becomes classified as science fiction or fantasy and the serious review will not review it. And that's the weird moment that we are in. That our high seriousness don't regard this as serious. They regard it as being equivalent to extra‑terrestrials. Or something like that.
You have to say it's not just the writers. It's not just the imagination. It's actually our institutions that are living in some kind of weird past. Inhabiting a past of fantasy.
>> And I would like ‑‑ if you permit. There is another passage that this brings to mind. I think it's another conversation between the two characters. It becomes impossible to avoid a simple conclusion that world of today presents all of the symptoms of demonic possession. I guess, what, you can't be serious. In what sense does it possess of demonic possession. Look around you. Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a livable place if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea or by creatures like that spider. Everybody knows and yet we are powerful even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will. We see shocking and monstrous things happening around us and we avert our eyes. We surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power. And I think possession, I never thought of it in those terms before, but it does feel like that complete with all of the curses.
>> Doesn't it. Look, in every suddenly within Indian traditions people always ‑‑ it's always said that end of the world will come about when humans become demons and what is a demon? A demon is ultimately really a metaphor for greed. And today that is what it is. We are all machines of consumption. Machines of greed. And we are consuming everything that sustains us. I think Chinta is saying this in metaphorical terms. I think it is really possible to think of today's ‑‑ the world we are in as being a world of a kind of weird bewitchment.
>> And so I would pose to you the question that I feel like I have always get when it comes to the subject, what is the role of the novelist in this world? I mean, is it simply ‑‑ one thing that I think I was invited to this conference of humanists and scientists at the university conference and the scientists all said, oh, thank you for writing about this because we can't explain in our jargon or our certainty thresholds how bad this is. We need more novelists to write about that. And on one hand I thought, that's a nice compliment and they are right. Scientists aren't good writers for the most part. No offense. And yet I think it's also not the job of the novelist to be the communicator of the science. That to think of it in that way is sort of a deep downgrading of what fiction can be. And in some ways reflects a kind of failure to understand how fiction works. And I think if you are writing ‑‑ I mean, I always think that climate activism, climate environmental policy needs better propaganda. I agree. They need better messaging and we need more of it, all of the rest, but I don't think the novelist is the propagandist they are looking for. Once a novel starts writing to advance some kind of a talking point or political doctrine, the work suffers and so where do you see the writer fitting in there?
>> I completely agree. I think anyone who set out to write a novel in order to change people's minds is just diluted. I mean, all of those facts haven't changed someone's minds, how is the novel going to change their mind? I mean it's absolutely absurd. I see my climate scientist friends always saying this is a crisis of story telling and so on and I think ‑‑ you have no idea. How many stories change very few minds.
The way I look at it is that my duty ‑‑ my sort of primary ‑‑ I spent my whole life writing novels and I have done so on the understanding that, what I'm doing is trying to truthfully reflect the realities of the world I live in. So it's under that imperative that I feel I must write. Not under the imperative of trying to convert people or create propaganda which in any case be infectious if you started to do it.
The second thing I must say is that I think when a scientist says to you, oh, I'm so glad you are telling the story, it's a double‑edged sword. They want you to ‑‑ sword. They want you to tell the story that they have one of the real disasters of what's happened with climate change is that it's become framed as a technological scientific issue. Because almost all of the discourse that you or I read about it, comes out of universities. It's credentialed discourse. But scientists are not the only people who noticed the climate is changing. You talk to farmers and fishermen anywhere in the world. They will tell you the same thing. There is that potential discourse but that potential discourse really applies within a sort of small sphere.
Similarly, I this I scientists always talk about how this is part of a much broader set of impacts. At the same time they never make the connection with historical, with history and with politics. So I do think that for all imaginative lives. And I do think that is where really it's very important for us not to flinch from that. Not to feel that science and only science can speak for nature. And unfortunately I think that's what happens to many of really even the better best novelists when they come to writing about the natural world. For example, you know, it's so interesting ‑‑ Richard powers book, we were talking about it before, one of the most important books written in recent types called over story. The reason it's so important is that powers goes to the heart of literary challenge of our times. Which is how do you give voice to the non‑human? And he takes his craft as far as he can go. You can see him working through the science. You can see him working through all of that. And it's interesting that ‑‑ I watched the YouTube videos where he ‑‑ interviews of his and he says I wished I were an animist so I can go beyond the science but he can't. That's the thing. For him in the end science and only science speaks for the natural world.
You go to any fisherman or hunter or anybody and for them there is something in nature which is beyond that. There is an excess, there is something extra and that exactly is the uncanny.
>> Yeah, and I think there is also a moral complexity to it that is totally unexamined not only in the politics but in the literature. I mean, the example that comes to mind is where I live in southern Louisiana is the world's largest currently the site of the largest geo engineering project. An effort that ‑‑ to rebuild the coast that's been lost over the last century because of human intervention basically in various forms. And so there is ‑‑ they don't talk about it as the world's biggest climate change infrastructure project in Louisiana for obvious reasons but that is what it is. And the way it works is to divert the Mississippi River and have this sediment rich water flood the estuaries and marshes that have been depleted and over time that will rebuild land and yet the people who are most opposed to this are the local fishermen who live there. And the people who from the state capital seem to have most to gain to have this land that otherwise would be washed away in the next couple of decades preserved. Of course, their argument is, well, you will destroy our industry because you have all of this fresh water flooding that's brackish marshes. Forget the fact that brackish marshes 20 years ago were land or were fresh water, the fact of the matter is they ‑‑ their lives are threatened in the short term. It's not so easy to say they are wrong from a utilitarian argument. You will say we should sacrifice these people to save this larger group. Try to go to a fisherman in Delacroix and tell him that. And there is something noble I think about their efforts. And that's a kind of ‑‑ there is a moral ethical quandary there. And this place where climate change is a theater of such quandaries. What to do about the co‑worker who can't work in the plant any more, the cliché version.
These are questions that haven't begun to be even really debated politically but you would hope that this kind of morally complex territory would be plumed a little more deeply by fiction where there is a real ability and power to do so through story telling and narrative and empathy and all of the rest.
>> Absolutely. I think we can't forget for example what you mentioned is remember the gas tragedy. A significant number of union leaders didn't want union carbide to leave because it was after all the meal ticket. I think we can't forget the extreme fragility of poverty. People living really on the edge. They are so helpless. And I think you are completely right. It's exactly that that has to figure in our writing on this.
>> Before we finish up, there is an incredible manuscripts or books here as part of this special collection. One of which I refuse to pronounce in a public forum but I would ask you to describe the meaning in your novel and ‑‑
>> Well, I should explain a large part of the novel actually ‑‑ the setting is Venice. And the central ‑‑ the narrater of the book is a rare books dealer and Venice is a special place in the history of publishing especially because ‑‑ aldine press lived there. He invented my favorite type.
>> I meant to check.
>> Yes, yes. Bembo and invented the semicolon, italics. The paper back. He is an astonishing figure. And he printed this very strange text. And it's very interesting because it is really about giving voice to the non‑human. It's about a dreamer who dreams a dream, you know which all kinds of voices come alive. So somehow it was just absolutely at the center of everything that I was trying to do in this book. And, well, it turns out the NYPL has an edition of the it. Published by the aldine press 1499. It's an astonishing condition and it's right here. So don't go without having a look. It also has two other texts published by the aldine press. One of which is one of the prototypical paper backs. I mean, it's not a paper back but a small ‑‑ a pocket edition.
>> And were you familiar with this work before writing ‑‑ conducting research on this novel? Or something that came ‑‑
>> I knew about it before. But in the context of working on this book because it's a kind of mirror off the Bengali legend, of this whole legendary structure of how humans relate to the non‑human.
>> And then I suppose my last question since we have a little more time, do you feel now wedded to the subject? You talked about this great derangement in the sense forcing your hand or confining you in a certain way and I wondered if you felt, can you escape climate change in some form in the future of fiction that is something that you feel like you said your peace now with these two books?
>> Oh, no. This reality that's around us is so pressing. You can't escape it. Actually, a couple of months ago I was talking to ‑‑ and she again is deeply informed and deeply interested in climate change and she said that once you know about this stuff, you can never escape it. It's always there in your head. So you are always thinking about it. And so I think it will always be in my head no matter what I do and what I write.
>> I sometimes wonder if the great ‑‑ the great climate novel could be a novel that doesn't mention climate change, weather, if it could ‑‑ if there is a way to write about this because so much of the language that we use to describe these phenomena seems scientific or technological or cliché or even the word climate change is a bankrupt phrase. I feel ‑‑ do you feel some responsibility as a novelist to think of a better term parenthetically and I should have thought of something better than climate change by now.
>> It's such a fucked up term, I think we have to move away from that shit ‑‑ we have to move away from exactly those clichéd bullshit aspects of it and try to think of ‑‑ you know, what are the distinctively novelistic ways which we can approach this, and I would say that's what I'm trying to do in Gun Island, really.
>> I think it achieves that marvelously.
Let's see, I will open this up here to questions submitted by audience members from the floor. I'm just going to pick these 4 at random. I think they were pre‑vetted, maybe not. If scientists can't change minds on climate and novelists can't, who can?
>> Well, I think Greta Toonberg is one person who certainly changed a lot of minds. I do think that in the last year I see some sort of major change occurring. Greta thurnburg, the extinct rebellion, the sunrise movement. All of them have done ‑‑ I mean, really I had just boundless admiration for these young people and what they are doing.
>> Yeah, I think it's striking to me that ‑‑ and this is something that happened as you said in the last year so something that I couldn't really write ‑‑ I couldn't write about in the original article but I could write about it in the book which is that I think people are aware there is a surge of attention and interest and political action on the climate change, but I think what's often missed is the fact that message, the language is profoundly different from what we have been hearing for 40 years. Essentially since the birth of climate activism, the message formulated by Rafe Pomerance and his colleagues is as of 1979, we have the science. We know what we need to do. We better act soon before it's too late. We would be foolish not to act. And that's basically been the line. The distillation of sort of environmental activism on the subject.
For the next 40 years you hear it in inconvenient truth. The pitch increases over time. Instead of we would be foolish not to act. We would be crazy not to act and this is insane and the new people, the sunrise movement I think they acknowledge that. It's insane not to act, but the emphasis is on a different kind of message. It's a personal message. It says I'm afraid for my future. I'm afraid to have children. You usually elder class, ruling class, is stealing away our future is something that thurnburg said. You are killing us. It's a very ‑‑ it's a much more ‑‑ it's a raw and more emotional more passionate way of speaking about it and I think it's a more honest way of thinking about it. And I think it ‑‑ the first example that I could find of that kind of language which is to say a moral argument I think you see and this gets back to the points that you make wonderfully in gun island and in your essays is that comes from the island nations. People of color, extremely poor countries who in the easterly 2000s started to ‑‑ thoughts said is that ‑‑ 2,000s, this is a form of genocide. The nations at these summits are wealthier and more powerful but we have something they don't have which is a moral claim. Moral high ground and you see it in the popes and cyclical as well.
>> I think the unelected Catholic Pope's voice has been very important. But you know, one thing we shouldn't lose sight of is that at the same time that we see these very hopeful signs, extinction, rebellion and so on, we can't ignore the fact that the world has actually passed in the grip of ‑‑ what shall we say, people with a completely different idea. Same kind ‑‑ the same sort of people now across the world. And I think it's a mistake to imagine that these people don't have their own solution to climate change. And their solution is exactly what you said. It's extermination. What we are seeing work out in front of us is actually an exterminationist approach to this issue.
>> The questioner was hoping for more hopeful answer.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: You have said and this is to you DR GHOSH in your nonfiction essay from 2016 TERMS OF DERANGEMENT that there is very little good ''climate change fiction''.... but what is your view of so‑called cli-fi novels by Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff Vandermeer?"
NAT RICH turns to Dr Ghosh and says: "Cli-fi was the first term I heard after I published my cli-fi novel ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW in 2013. Some guy in Taiwan, whose name I have forgotten, Dan Bloom, I think, coined the term as a literary activist in 2011."
AMITAV GHOSH: "I think many of the people that are classified as writers of cli-fi novels are very fine writers, absolutely. But I think as soon as a novel or a movie is categorized in that way, people,or least some people, like me, won't take it seriously. Others do take it seriosuly, I acknowledge that. But I myself as a serious literary fiction novelist, I think of cli-fi as ''fantasy.'' And as always being dystopian and in the distant future (although many people tell me I am wrong about this and that cli-fi can take place in the present and be about the here and now as GUN ISLAND is, and does not have to be dystopian and can lso be utopian as KSR's cli-fi novel ''NEW YORK 2140'' is. So I think what is really important is not how any particular climate-themed novel is classified, either as as the hyphenated sci-fi or the equally hyphenated cli-fi. Take a great literary writer like myself or the even better writer Richard Powers ...we were not writing about some fantastic universe or about the distant dystopian future or about dystopia or about the end of the world. We are writing about today."
>> Briefly, the significance of the title, geographically or otherwise. It's a good answer to this one. Of Gun Island.
>> The significance of the title? I'm afraid I can't tell you because ‑‑ it's a spoiler. It's a spoilers in that's true. Sorry.
>> You have to read the book to see, but I can tell you ‑‑s in very clever. I will say that much. So sunrise activist, John. How you amplify the stories of youth climate activists and will you be present to join the strike on September 20th.
>> I am actually going to be in Seattle that day and I have every intention of going to see what's happening in Seattle. I happened to be in Seattle during the occupy movement as well and I can see that there is a sort of ‑‑ some sort of connection. So absolutely. I think this is a great thing that you are doing and, you know, more power to you.
>> To the overwhelming sense of instability fostered by climate change demand that you create a new literary language one based ‑‑ one based on ‑‑ less on the declarative sentence. Sort of talked around that in a way. Did you feel like you had to create a new literary language to write about this subject?
>> That's an interesting question, the declarative sentence. I do think that you have to grapple with the ways in which our sentences work because our sentences always are the human subject. So there is ‑‑ there is certainly a very important question there. But you know, the realities that we are dealing with, I think it's reductive to reduce ‑‑ to call them always ‑‑ to talk always about climate change. Because for example, these migrants and refugees who I spoke to in Italy, it was very interesting to me that even though many of them would often who are telling me the story of their lives would talk about events that seemed like climate events. None of them are really ‑‑ would describe them as a climate refugee. They were very resistant to that term.
>> Why were they resistant?
>> You know, because just as in the same way hand ‑‑ was rent ‑‑ resistant to calling her a refugee. People who make that journey do so in the sense of urgency. They don't do it out of the sense of being out of a sense of victimhood necessarily. But with what was very interesting to me about these journeys is that they actually made possible by technology. Most of all by communications technology I mean every aspect of the journeys is dependent on technology. And actually one thing that people don't really realize is that the reach of the internet and especially social media in countries like Bangladesh or Kenya or Nigeria is much greater than it is in the U.S.
>> I was struck by that in the novel there is a character who talks about sort of question on why would you try this risky voyage across the sea. Talks about seeing cell phone on a cell phone images of the west basically. And wealth and saying, well, gee, why do I need to keep growing rice when I can go somewhere where this exists. Is that something that people talk about?
>> Absolutely. Absolutely the case. You know, social media especially what's up which is in use in south Asia, a young boy who is laboring on the rice feel sees images sent by his neighbor who somehow made it to Berlin and the neighbor will send attractive pictures of him standing next to some fancy car. So, you know, it triggers patterns of desire. All sorts of ‑‑ so what I'm trying to say here is of course a lot of this movement is about climate. But a lot of it is also about a general acceleration. Climate itself, I mean, the climate crisis itself is the result of this acceleration. It's not the cause, it's the result. And so is the migration. So it's not just ‑‑ you know it's not the climate is doing all of this. It's the acceleration that's done all of this.
>> And there is a book you talked about the little ice age and write about it and there is a book, a new book this year by Phillip Blom. It's about the little ice age and the these sis is essentially ‑‑ thank you. The these sis is essential ‑‑ thesis it's a tour of all of the horrors of the climatic changes wrought. But the thesis is that the changes themselves not only would have been caused by human deforestation and all of that, but create itself ‑‑ created what we think of the enlightenment or the enlightenment ideals and then essential the modern existence was created by climatic changes which is sort of a per verse ‑‑ almost seems that way faded to suffering the ramifications of that.
>> I wouldn't say it's modern existence so much as the discovery of the Americas. You know, that was really it. Suddenly Europeans found a place which they could completely control which they could exterminate at will. And really the great paradox is that ‑‑ and so‑called enlightenment grows precisely out of this. We see it working itself through Hobbs, through Descartes, and it's a very important moment in the sense that suddenly it is possible to imagine that the human is absolutely triumphant. I think the key figure in all of this is Francis Bacon who formulates two ideas at the same time this completely mechanistic idea of the universe and secondly the many headed hydra, that threatened the enlightenment man and the many headed hydra is essential the brute, on one hand the animal and on the other hand the non‑white human.
>> The connection of greater rooting of the understanding of the connection between climate change and colonialism and also the role of Asia and all of this not only in where the future is headed as it develops but how we even got here to begin with. And the history of carbon dioxide use.
I think we pay attention to climate change as news. The big stories about hurricanes and melting glaciers and it doesn't seem to lead to action. Can the news media learn something from fiction to find angles that touch us differently and lead to action?
>> That's a very good question. You know, I was in New Delhi recently in the middle of one of those really appalling heat waves and I was talking to some journalist and I asked them have you written about this heat wave we are in and they all said, how do you write about a heat wave? It's a real question. How do you write about the heat wave? I think that's really ‑‑ look, journalists are hard press and they don't have much time. How can we leave it to them to invent the narratives? We novelists have to do it for them.
>> And I agree and yet I think there is a really profound journalistic failure as well to write about this subject. I think part of it has to do with the way the industry is organized around beats and sections and of course it's the way we get our daily news and what stories are important on any given day or week. But there is a strange blindness in stories about immigration. Whenever I see a story about an immigration crisis or migration crisis, and they don't mention climate, at least somewhere in there as a factor, it seems dishonest in the same way stories about public health or the economic inequality or any of these other areas which climate connects very intimately there seems to be a shying away I from making those connections and a kind of sallowing of the news. Even some publications that do a great job of covering climate and have dedicated climate reporters still seem to have stories about these other subjects that don't even wade into how climate might be affected. I wonder if that has to do with might have to do a certain kind of scientific and not quite a literacy but a fear of engaging in subjects that seem scientific if you are reporting a story about a heat wave or farm.
>> Yeah, I think that must have something to do with it. But you mentioned the 17th century, little ice age. I think one of the things we do know now ‑‑ I mean, anyone who looks at the history of the little ice age can see that just as scientists speak about climate sensitivity, how sensitive climate is to certain inputs, similarly we can talk about social sensitivity, you know? And I think the social sensitivity is much, much greater than we imagined. If you think how those 17th century societies broke up and the horrors that unfolded, and I think that's in effect what we are seeing unfolding around us today who would have said ten years ago that the arrival of ‑‑ actually in gross terms a small number of refugees would completely upend the political order of Europe and America. You look at Britain which was for hundreds of years the most stable society that you could imagine. And you look at it now, a complete shambles. And why? They are afraid of a tiny number of ‑‑ that settle there had.
I think when we see, this we must realize that this crisis is not in the future. This crisis is unfolding around us as we see. And in a sense every day we look at the news and we feel deranged and it is actually the climate crisis.
NAT RICH: ''Thank you all for joining us. Sorry to not get to all of the questions you submitted.''
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: You have said and this is to you DR GHOSH in your nonfiction essay from 2016 TERMS OF DERANGEMENT that there is very little good ''climate change fiction''.... but what is your view of so‑called cli-fi novels by Kim Stanley Robinson and Jeff Vandermeer?"
NAT RICH turns to Dr Ghosh and says: "Cli-fi was the first term I heard after I published my cli-fi novel ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW in 2013. Some guy in Taiwan, whose name I have forgotten, Dan Bloom, I think, coined the term as a literary activist in 2011."
AMITAV GHOSH: "I think many of the people that are classified as writers of cli-fi novels are very fine writers, absolutely. But I think as soon as a novel or a movie is categorized in that way, people,or least some people, like me, won't take it seriously. Others do take it seriosuly, I acknowledge that. But I myself as a serious literary fiction novelist, I think of cli-fi as ''fantasy.'' And as always being dystopian and in the distant future (although many people tell me I am wrong about this and that cli-fi can take place in the present and be about the here and now as GUN ISLAND is, and does not have to be dystopian and can lso be utopian as KSR's cli-fi novel ''NEW YORK 2140'' is. So I think what is really important is not how any particular climate-themed novel is classified, either as as the hyphenated sci-fi or the equally hyphenated cli-fi. Take a great literary writer like myself or the even better writer Richard Powers ...we were not writing about some fantastic universe or about the distant dystopian future or about dystopia or about the end of the world. We are writing about today."
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