If there can be nothing new under the sun, then there cannot be an exponential increase in global heating; or a massive increase in the number and duration of droughts within a generation; or an addition of several meters to sea levels within the space of a few decades; or the notion that a single species could bring all this about. The scientists certainly didn’t believe it — at first. And they are continually surprised by each new, ever-more-improbable set of data about the global climate. So unsurprisingly, the rest of us can’t “wrap our heads around” the rate and magnitude of climate change. Ghosh cites author Adam Sobel as claiming that Hurricane Sandy became such a disaster precisely because “the essential improbability of the phenomenon led [officials] to underestimate the threat and thus delay emergency measures.”* And the idea of large swaths of the earth becoming uninhabitable within the lifetime of people now living . . . well, it’s alarmist. It’s absurd. It’s fantastical. Which means that, even if you aren’t a “climate denier,” still, on some level, you the fiction reader (and citizen) really can’t believe what is happening in fact.
Consequently, if you are a fiction writer who wishes to write about such things, your work will be relegated to the category of “genre fiction” — sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, [whatever]punk, etc. — meaning that it will not be taken seriously as “literary fiction.” In other words, the deeply ingrained habits of thought of bourgeois culture are still dominant. If a novelist writes about the climate crisis — even if it is a realist novel about what is happening before our very eyes in the present — they are writing “speculative fiction.” But, as Ghosh notes: . . . 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. . . . 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 . . . He calls for the literary world to take “speculative fiction” more seriously. But he also notes that there is, in fact, climate fiction set in the present day (he cites Liz Jensen’s novel Rapture and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior; one could add Jenny Offill’s recent Weather). And, as Ghosh points out, all of these premises are appropriate to the actual historical state of the world at present. To a certain extent, this is a discussion of genre-policing, which is a matter of influence, gatekeeping, and resources. But it’s also about our imagination: what we can admit to it or from it, and what we cannot. The corollary of “nobody would believe it if you put it in a novel” is “it can’t happen here.” But we damn well better believe it’s happening here — and everywhere. How does all this relate to a B-grade epic from the 5th century? Well, in order to understand the Dionysiaca, one has to enter a world in which prodigies and wonders happen on a regular basis; in which desires and habits are thwarted by seemingly random “acts of god”(s) on a regular basis; and in which things can be said that would not be taken seriously “IRL.” So, perhaps the epics and wonder tales of years gone by and the climate science of today have more in common than we think. Perhaps letting one’s imagination “run wild” is the only way to “wrap your head around” the present, let alone figure out what to do with it. As Ghosh puts it, "if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents" (literal and metaphorical) caused by climate chaos, "then they will have failed -- and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis." Indeed, it may take relatively new literary forms to do so; the models and inspiration for such forms are at least as likely to come from premodern as from postmodern literature. Io Bakhos! ____________________ * This dynamic is the premise for Nathaniel Rich’s novel Odds Against Tomorrow, possible the most fully-realized work of cli-fi.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |