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• 1 2025-02-13T18:34:45+00:00 Water: The Great Derangement 12 plain 2025-05-12T19:35:30+00:00

  I start with a question. How come people aren't spending their days and nights thinking about what is going to happen to their cities as sea levels rise and weather systems drop more water than infrastructure can handle?
  
  In a book that emerged from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in 2015, Amitav Ghosh asks this too. Ghosh embarks on a exploration into what he perceives as our collective imaginative failure in the face of global warming. His central argument posits that future generations may well look back at our current era and deem our inability to fully comprehend and act upon the scale and violence of climate change as a form of profound "derangement". This failure, Ghosh contends, is particularly evident within our cultural and imaginative landscapes.
  
  
  
  Ghosh finds that our collective thinking has been misaligned with the realities of the climate crisis, even though there is nothing more important or urgent:

  "why contemporary culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change.... this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense —for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination." (Ghosh 9)

  For too long, Ghosh argues, art has worked to conceal reality. He imagines future readers and museum-goers, who are living with actual sea-level rise, looking back on our time and noting the striking absence of climate change as a central theme within literary fiction. They would be bewildered but also bothered -- deranged by this omission:

  In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement. (Ghosh 11)

  Marxism has already shown how art is an expression of ideology that conceals and often makes palatable reality. Anne Bermingham's discussion of the way the English tradition of rustic landscape painting accompanied and supported the enclosure movement and the decline of the commons. What we see in paintings as open spaces and vistas is a concealment of the fences that were criss-crossing the country-side:  

  Precisely when the countryside-or at least large portions of it-was becoming unrecognizable, and dramatically marked by historical change , it was offered as the image of the homely, the stable , the ahistorical. (Bermingham 9)

  To understand the reasons for the literary silence/omission about sea-level rise, Ghosh turns to literary history and the centuries-dominant literary mode of realism. Modern, realist literary fiction aims to bring into representation what is probable, and likely, that is, the verisimilar. Ghosh argues that the sheer scale and extreme nature of climate-related events, such as unprecedented superstorms, prolonged droughts, devastating floods, and the alarming rise of sea levels, makes them seem improbable, dramatic, and thus unsuitable to the genre of realism which has historically operated under the assumption of a relatively stable and predictable natural order.
  Ghosh further contends that the underlying principles of modernity itself contribute to this imaginative impasse. The modern emphasis on individualism, the pursuit of freedom from traditional constraints, and the establishment of a perceived separation between humanity and the natural world have fostered a cultural mindset that struggles to fully grasp the interconnectedness of human actions and environmental consequences. This is further exacerbated by the historical "Nature/Culture divide," which relegated the scientific understanding of the natural world to one domain and the humanistic exploration of culture to another, thereby hindering a holistic comprehension of the climate crisis. Even the design of modern cities, Ghosh observes, often reflects this artificial partitioning, further distancing human experience from the realities of the natural environment.
  What imaginaries do we need to start to respond to the concerns of these future citizens of a planet we've destroyed? 
  
  - Monique Tschofen
  
  Sources:
  Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures. Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 2017.

  Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 - 1860. Berkeley u.a: Univ. of California Pr, 1986.