Cli-Fi From Theory into Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Amitav Ghosh's 'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable' and 'Gun Island'

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CLI-FI FROM THEORY INTO PRACTICE

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF AMITAV GHOSH’S THE GREAT

DERANGEMENT: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE UNTHINKABLE AND

GUN ISLAND

Word count: 19,006

Pipa Billiet

Student number: 01604179

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stef Craps

A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Comparative Modern Literature

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Foreword

In October last year, I had no idea what this year would bring. It turns out, I could never have predicted what was to come in 2020. A year ago, I also felt quite lost in regard to what I would write my master’s dissertation about. For guiding me through the process of writing, and most of all for introducing me to the subject of climate fiction, I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Stef Craps.

I begin this master’s dissertation with a quote from Gun Island. Taken out of context, those words can be interpreted in numerous ways. For me, they suggest the versatility of literature. I like to believe that stories hold the power to make you hope, dream, and wonder, while simultaneously they can direct your gaze towards that which deserves our attention, the world as it is.

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It’s one thing, after all, to tell a child a fairy tale at bedtime; it’s quite another to tell the same story to an adult, in all seriousness.

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1. Introduction

1.1 Literature and climate change

Because the subject of my paper resides within the field of literature studies and ecocriticism, I will start with a brief introduction where I explain the ways in which literature and climate change intersect. Firstly, it is important to call attention to what Amitav Ghosh has labeled “the great derangement”: our inability to imagine climate change and act on what we know, based on scientific findings. Secondly, literature, or rather narratives in general, can inspire new ways to think about climate change. However, the subject appears to come with some interesting challenges in relation to fiction. Numerous theories about climate fiction have been described, and cli-fi as a literary expression has evolved over the years. In the next part I will briefly introduce these notions, yet I will further elaborate on these thoughts throughout the paper.

Scientists have been warning us for the effects of climate change for years. As early as 1979, the First World Climate Conference was held in Geneva, where scientists agreed that climate change was an urgent issue that needed correspondingly urgent attention (Ripple et al. 8). Plentiful warnings followed later with the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris agreement, “as well as scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress” (Ripple et al. 8). Yet there is a clear lack of effective change happening. With all the knowledge we have, the scientific facts provided, the general inaction is all the more surprising. In psychoanalysis, this gap between “what we know and what we feel and do” is called “splitting,” a coping-mechanism which “enables one to know the traumatic truth, yet simultaneously not know it” (Kerridge 364). Amitav Ghosh, who recognizes as well that “the problem does not arise out of a lack of information,” explains this phenomenon, not as a psychological response, but rather as an “imaginative and cultural failure” (The Great

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Derangement1_{8). However it is explained, it is a fact that the amount of action that is taken does}

not meet the minimal requirements to stop or slow down climate change. As a result, one could wonder: can literature do what science cannot - can literature convince people, make them truly imagine, that climate change needs to be considered seriously and urgently?

Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra claim that climate fiction - literature in which climate change is a prominent theme - “complements and informs political and scientific discourses” and that it “[helps] us to internalise what we merely know cognitively” (“The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 245). Research shows that narratives have a greater impact than non-narrative modes of communication, because the experience of reading a narrative “is a powerful means of forming attitudes” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra, “The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 245). In regard to climate change, Mike Hulme also points out the valuable role of storytelling, which according to him “needs elevating alongside that of fact-finding,” considering that “[s]tories are the way that humans make sense of change” (178). According to Rob Nixon, stories can give rise to “new ways of thinking and feeling about the planet we have inherited and the planet we will bequeath” (“The Anthropocene” 16). With a growing belief in the value of climate change stories, those narratives have become more frequent. Climate fiction, or cli-fi, is now considered to be a “rapidly growing literary trend” (Goodbody and Johns-Putra, “The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 230), pertaining to different literary genres including science fiction and the dystopia but also realism and romance (Johns-Putra 267). There seems to be some consensus about the definition of cli-fi, for most consider climate fiction in reference to anthropogenic climate change specifically (e.g. Irr; Goodbody and Johns-Putra, Cli-Fi; Johns-Putra; Leikam and Leyda). Disagreement about

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the extent to which climate change has to be made explicit as a theme, however, is not ruled out. Johns-Putra suggests that a novel, such as The Road, might be “a climate change novel in effect if not in intent” (268).

However, even with an increasing number of cli-fi novels being written and published, climate change apparently remains to be a challenging subject to write about. This is largely due to what Goodbody and Johns-Putra describe as the invisibility or “relative unrepresentability” of climate change (“The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 234). Climate change is a typical example of what Timothy Morton has named “hyperobjects,” which he describes as “entities that are massively distributed in time and space” to such an extent that they cannot be directly perceived by humans, which makes it especially hard to make sense of them (“Victorian Hyperobjects” 489). Nixon’s theory of “slow violence” can tie in with this: the idea refers to climate change as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight,” as opposed to violence as we usually conceive it - “immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space . . . erupting into instant sensational visibility” (Slow Violence 2). In her book Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Barbara Adam also writes about the invisibility of “a large proportion of the processes associated with the most difficult environmental problems” (12). Because climate change appears to be too vast to be easily understood, and therefore difficult to represent in climate fiction, Timothy Clark encourages multi-scalar readings. A text can be read on a personal scale, focused on the narrator’s experience; or one can take into account the national culture that is portrayed, which in the narrative would extend over several decades; a third scale is the hypothetical scale, which includes “the whole earth and its inhabitants,” over a time period of several centuries (T. Clark 157-58). The ability to interpret a text on these different scales can help make sense of climate change, a phenomenon that affects our lives in different ways and on different scales.

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The difficulties that come with writing about and understanding climate change have led to numerous scholarly theories about climate fiction, but also to an evolution within the literary expression itself. The first novels about anthropogenic climate change were published already in the 1970s (Johns-Putra 267). Johns-Putra and Trexler point to the thriller Heat (1977) written by Arthur Herzog as the first cli-fi novel (187). In “The Rise of the Climate Change Novel,” Goodbody and Johns-Putra also mention the sci-fi novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971) by Ursula LeGuin (232). It is apparent that most early examples of climate fiction correlate to the genres of science fiction, the thriller, and the disaster novel. As Goodbody and Johns-Putra put it, the issue was first approached “within the framework of existing popular genres,” and it was later that the subject was discussed in realist novels but also within “alternative forms and narrative strategies” in the hope to find ways to overcome “the challenges of representing climate change” (“The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 229). However, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novels and films are still considered to be the most common or typical climate change narratives (e.g. Boon; Schmitt). Nevertheless, several critics try to encourage new approaches, which they believe would be more effective. Ursula Heise and Courtney Traub (87), for example, maintain that dystopian or apocalyptic narratives have become so common as to lose all power of conviction. Morton upholds that “postponing doom into some hypothetical future” is problematic, rather than effective, because it fails to convince of climate change’s current danger (Hyperobjects 103–04). Caren Irr recognizes in satirical cli-fi the conviction that climate fiction “has too readily restricted itself to a limited set of persons, sites, moods, and effects” and urges writers to reach beyond that specific framework.

An interesting debate is ongoing, also, about the responsibilities and purpose of climate fiction. Without implying which intentions cli-fi writers have or should have, Hulme suggests that fictional narratives and the study thereof “can reveal how and why people engage or disengage with

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different representations of climate change” (178). According to Kerridge, many ecocritics fundamentally aim to “persuade people to care,” while at the same time they seek “to understand the cultural and material interactions at work” (362). Goodbody and Johns-Putra suggest that climate fiction can serve as “a vehicle for reflection on how we want future society to be” (“The Rise of the Climate Change Novel” 245). As ‘climate fiction’ is not a genre label but rather “a topic found in many genres” (Johns-Putra 267), it is evident that it takes on many forms. Kerridge explores several ways in which cli-fi can be expressed, alongside the different feelings it can provoke: science fiction, the dystopia, and apocalyptic narratives can show us possible consequences of climate change which can “shock and scare us deeply”; speculative fiction and literary realism hold the power to warn us for “interim measures that are undesirable in the long term”; realist fiction and poetry can provide a “stark realist representation” by combining different angles that relate to the ecological, as well as the social and the individual perspective; nature writing and nature documentaries can provide “poetic engagement” in regard to disappearing natural environments; global, futuristic perspectives “enable us to ‘see’ climate change” by “reaching beyond the narratives of individual lives”; utopian eco-fiction has the ability to illustrate how “a society founded upon environmental care” could possibly look; and realistic novels are capable of exploring “people’s current reactions and evasions” in relation to climate change (372–73). Of course, as Kerridge also points out, this is not an exhaustive list of the things cli-fi can or aims to achieve.

1.2 From The Great Derangement to Gun Island

1.2.1 Textual framework

In 2016, the Indian American author Amitav Ghosh published a work of nonfiction titled The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. This work of nonfiction, clear and

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provoking, is considered to be an “influential contribution to the global conversation on the many entanglements of climate change” and on the role of literature in imagining climate change (Botelho 34). Ghosh argues that we are unable to fully grasp climate change and its consequences, hence the title of the work, and he explores this matter on the basis of three points of interest: literature, history and politics. Understanding and recognizing the underlying structures revealed by Ghosh, might be a first step toward truly apprehending climate change, the challenges it poses, and the obstacles that need to be overcome. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh also denounces the lack of climate change as a subject of art, and more specifically of literature. Climate change is such a pressing issue at present, that one may be surprised that relatively little is written about it and that it is not reflected in literary imagination more often. Reflecting on his own work, Ghosh believes that the theme does not surface enough in his novels either.

Three years later, in 2019, Ghosh’s most recent novel, Gun Island, was published. This novel is considered to be his most ecocritical novel up to now (e.g. V. Roy). In this paper, I aim to analyse Gun Island on the basis of a comparative study, by exploring the ways in which Ghosh’s ideas as expressed in The Great Derangement, are reflected in Gun Island. It is important to take into account the differences between the two works. On the one hand, either work takes on a different narrative form: The Great Derangement is a work of nonfiction, while Gun Island is a fictional novel; on the other hand is The Great Derangement used as an instrument by Ghosh to clarify his thoughts and theories on the interplay between literature and climate change, while Gun Island could be used as a vehicle to turn words into action, to put that theory into practice. A comparative analysis between The Great Derangement and Gun Island could disclose the ways in which Ghosh has contributed to the debate, both in theory and in practice. Furthermore, it could reveal how the two - his theory and his fictional work - interrelate, and in which ways they carry similar and differing thoughts.

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Furthermore, this analysis might provide further insight into the theoretical ideas scholars have with regard to cli-fi, and the ways in which those ideas can or cannot be constructively implemented in practice.

1.2.2 State of the art

Ghosh is a reputable author, with many critically acclaimed works to his name. John Hawley describes Ghosh as “one of the most important novelists and essayists today” (x). His writing has been translated into over thirty languages and is the subject of many studies and reference works. Several books offer a broad collection of essays and studies on Ghosh’s work (e.g. Choudhury; Hawley; Mondal; Tiwari). Gaurav Desai and Hawley also brought together different essays in their book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh. These essays allow us to understand the extent to which Amitav Ghosh’s work is discussed in a scholarly context. However, like the books mentioned above, this collection of essays - ranging in perspective from history, to ethics and politics, and to genre and form - contains no essays on The Great Derangement or Gun Island, since it dates from before their publishing. In fact, Gun Island, being Ghosh’s most recent work, has hardly been studied yet. In addition, his earlier work is rarely studied from an eco-critical point of view. Nazia Hasan has published an article in 2013 titled “Tracing the Green Streaks in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh: An Eco-critical Reading,” and also The Hungry Tide in particular has been studied from an eco-critical perspective (e.g. Buell; Gurr; Kaur; Prabhu), however most studies centered on the work of Ghosh concentrate on themes such as postcolonialism, migration, imperialism, and historicity (e.g. Arora; Peeters; B. Roy; Su). One of the scholars who does focus on Ghosh’s most recent works and who studies them from an eco-critical point of view, is Ursula Kluwick. In an article published in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Kluwick studies both The Hungry Tide

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and Gun Island, while also drawing on The Great Derangement. In a similar way, Alessandro Vescovi analyses The Hungry Tide in relation to The Great Derangement. However, both scholars focus on distinct elements: Kluwick’s article concentrates specifically on aquatic language and diluvian imagery, while Vescovi centralizes the uncanny and the secular. As of yet, no comprehensive analysis of Gun Island, with The Great Derangement as a starting point, seems to exist.

1.2.3 Structure

Because an extensive and comparative analysis on Ghosh’s two most recent works has not yet been carried out, I will study how Ghosh’s understanding of the interrelation between literature and climate change, as expressed in The Great Derangement, is reflected in his latest novel. First, I will briefly introduce the two works in question, by summarizing the main arguments and the narrative structure. Then, I will analyse Gun Island on the basis of the main oppositions and themes I identified in The Great Derangement. These are the following: probability versus improbability, rationality versus the uncanny, anthropocentrism versus the nonhuman, and also climate justice and scale. Furthermore, I will reflect on the ways in which Gun Island can be considered an effective example of cli-fi, specifically drawing on Stephanie LeMenager’s theory of the “everyday Anthropocene.” Finally, I will conclude what this comparative study can teach us about climate fiction and how it introduces interesting points for possible further research. The analysis of Gun Island will be based predominantly on a close reading of both Gun Island and The Great Derangement. In addition, I will make use of several studies regarding climate fiction, especially those of Adeline Johns-Putra, Timothy Morton, and Timothy Clark, and studies regarding Gun Island. Since the latter is rather limited, I will also draw on literary reviews of both Gun Island and

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The Great Derangement. Furthermore, several interviews with Amitav Ghosh provide useful insights into the author’s conceptual framework, and will thus also be referred to.

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2. Comparative analysis of The Great Derangement and Gun Island

2.1 The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

As already mentioned above, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable was published in July 2016. In this work, Ghosh describes his personal position regarding the debate about the role of literature in imagining climate change. On the basis of three different perspectives - categorized ‘stories’, ‘history’ and ‘politics’ respectively - Ghosh explores the possible causes of modernity’s inability (or even unwillingness) to face climate change. In the next few paragraphs, each chapter will be discussed briefly, to allow for a proper understanding of Ghosh’s main arguments in The Great Derangement.

In the first chapter, titled ‘Stories,’ Ghosh tries to uncover the particular challenges posed by the Anthropocene for literature specifically, but also for contemporary culture in general. The starting point for this undertaking is the idea that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (TGD 9). Ghosh goes so far as to write about an “imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (TGD 8). In this chapter, Ghosh points out that climate change is discussed “almost always in relation to nonfiction,” and that fiction that deals with climate change is often categorized as science fiction (TGD 7). The discrepancy between the urgency of the climate crisis and the meager representation in literature supposedly derives “from the practices and assumptions that guide the arts and humanities” (TGD 9). According to Ghosh, modernity and thus also the contemporary novel2_{are characterized by the favoring of probability,}

rationality, anthropocentrism, individualism and eventually the division between Nature and Culture (TGD 16, 19, 66, 68, 78). This implies the challenge for contemporary writers to represent climate

2_{Ghosh’s argument refers to the realist novel, which will be alluded to in this paper as ‘the novel,’ ‘the}

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change in their fiction, since climate change ostensibly entails all things opposite: an increasing occurrence of ‘improbable’ - or rather unpredictable - natural disasters; the importance of the nonhuman; the significance of the collective; and the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman or the human and the natural world. In addition, the contemporary novel is often limited to a defined time period and a specific setting, while climate change and the Anthropocene are characterized by “vast gaps in time and space” (TGD 63), as pointed out also by Rob Nixon, Timothy Morton and Timothy Clark, among others.

The second and third chapters of The Great Derangement, ‘History’ and ‘Politics’ respectively, also offer interesting perspectives regarding literature’s role in the climate crisis, even though those chapters do not pertain directly to literature. In the second chapter, Ghosh identifies imperialism, next to capitalism, as one of the “principal drivers of climate change” (TGD 87). Asia’s centrality to the climate crisis is used as a guideline for his argument. It is considered as both a victim, and an accomplice in causing climate change. Careful to be nuanced, Ghosh explains how Asia got into that position. To understand the present situation, Ghosh argues, we should look at how historical evolutions have led to certain events, global power relations, and circumstances that have made anthropogenic climate change possible (TGD). In an interview with Stella Levantesi, Ghosh says: “[W]riters tend to frame climate change in relation to the future. I, on the other hand, think about these issues in relation to the past.” (Interview by Stella Levantesi). This relates to literature in two ways. Firstly, these historical evolutions are commonly approached from a Western, often distorted, perspective. A more truthful and comprehensive understanding of our global history will lead to a more accurate and nuanced judgement of the present. One way to achieve this would be to write and read about it from other perspectives. Secondly, historical matters - such as

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imperialism and its consequences - can be included in literary fiction to consider and investigate climate justice, for example.

The third and final chapter deals with politics, power relations, the idea of freedom and political engagement of writers and artists in general. First, Ghosh focuses on art and literature, which according to him underwent a “radical turn” in the twentieth century (TGD 119). In the lead up to that radical turn, the arts became “increasingly self-reflexive,” and “human consciousness, agency, and identity came to be placed at the center of every kind of aesthetic enterprise” (TGD 120). Similarly, politics and political debates revolved around “questions of identity” more and more (TGD 126). This analogous development within both the arts and politics represents, according to Ghosh, “a broader cultural phenomenon,” which is embodied by a focus on the individual (TGD 127). The developments within art have an influence on politics, and vice versa the developments within politics affect the arts. In Ghosh’s words, “novels have come to be seen as narratives of identity,” and politics, likewise, have become “a search for personal authenticity” (TGD 127). With an increased focus on man as an individual, the nonhuman has faded into the background (TGD 119, 129) and climate change has begun to be framed as a moral issue, and is discussed in terms of “the individual conscience” (TGD 133). Ghosh argues that we need “to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped,” because only collective action can evoke significant change (TGD 135). Furthermore, Ghosh reveals how those in power, sometimes under the guise of climate change denialism, are reluctant to commit to resolving this crisis because effective change would entail a redistribution of power. Climate justice is another meaningful theme to which a significant amount of attention is paid in this final chapter. However, rather discouragingly, Ghosh wonders “[if] an abstract idea of fairness [will] be sufficient for people to undertake cuts on this scale, especially in a world where the pursuit of self-interest is conceived of

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as the motor of economy” (TGD 146). Interestingly, Ghosh turns to literature again at the end of this final chapter, with a comparative analysis between Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Lauda-to-Si’ and the Paris Agreement on climate change, both published in 2015.

2.2 Gun Island

Prior to the publication of The Great Derangement, Ghosh had already published a number of books, both fiction and nonfiction. His critically acclaimed debut novel, The Circle of Reason, was published in 1986. After that, he published several other novels, such as The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), The Ibis trilogy (2008, 2011, 2015), and Gun Island (2019). His work of nonfiction includes an ethnography, titled In an Antique Land (1992), a collection of essays Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Imam and the Indian (2002), Incendiary Circumstances (2006), and The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). In several of his novels Nazia Hasan, writing in 2013, recognizes ecocritical perspectives and some hints at environmentalism, but she points toward The Hungry Tide as “the most ecology dominated novel by Ghosh, and perhaps the strongest in voice against the technology driven life style of the contemporary world” (185). The author’s own view somewhat weakens this statement: the main argument in The Great Derangement is that the subject of climate change is lacking in fiction, yet he confesses that climate change “figures only obliquely in [his own] fiction” despite his personal interest and commitment regarding the issue (9).

Notwithstanding, Vaishna Roy insists that The Great Derangement marks “a turning point in [Ghosh’s] creative journey,” considering the more pronounced thematic representation of climate change in this work but also in Gun Island, the next work he published after The Great

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Derangement. With the publication of both The Great Derangement and Gun Island, Ghosh plays an important role by occupying three positions. Firstly, in The Great Derangement, he takes on the role of the critic who raises a particular problem, namely the challenges posed by the Anthropocene for the contemporary writer and the responsibility these writers have to imagine climate change. Secondly, he himself belongs to this group of contemporary writers that fails to address climate change adequately. Finally, he also takes on the role of mediator, by first identifying and addressing the challenges that need to be overcome in The Great Derangement, and by then trying to overcome those challenges as a writer himself in Gun Island.

As the first work written by Ghosh after the publication of The Great Derangement, the novel Gun Island could be seen as a great opportunity for Ghosh to turn words into action. Anasuya claims that Ghosh writing a novel about climate change “seemed a given as soon as he published The Great Derangement.” Brady (Ghosh, The Uncanniness of Climate Change. Interview by Brady) and Khakha, among others, consider Gun Island as a response to The Great Derangement. Kluwick agrees that “Gun Island is a literary reply to his own theoretical deliberations.” I think Alex Clark has described the novel best by introducing his Gun Island book review with the words: “Bengali legend blends with contemporary adventure in a novel finding new ways to write about migration and climate breakdown.” Narrated by Deen Datta, a dealer of rare books, Ghosh’s narrative takes us from a shrine in the Sundarbans, to a conference in Los Angeles and the streets of the sinking city that is Venice. We are introduced to Piya, a marine biologist; Cinta, a renowned academic and old friend of Deen; and Tipu and Rafi, two young men looking for a better life beyond the Sundarbans. An ancient Bengali legend, that of the Gun Merchant, serves as a bridge between these different places and people. It tells the story of the Gun Merchant who was being plagued by the wrath of Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes and poisonous creatures, because he had refused to be

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her devotee. Eventually, according to the legend, the merchant fled to a land where no snakes lived, named ‘Gun Island’.

It is often noted that Gun Island builds on the storyworld of The Hungry Tide (e.g. Anasuya; Kluwick; Prasad 283), or as De Bruyn puts it, Gun Island can be considered to be “an indirect sequel” to The Hungry Tide (14). However, I argue that it could also be read as a fictional sequel to The Great Derangement, considering that the same ideas expressed in his work of nonfiction can be recognized in his most recent novel. Ghosh’s desire to represent similar ideas through a fictional story, besides his work of nonfiction, probably stems from the conviction that fiction, more so than nonfiction, “allows us to look at the world in a different way” (Ghosh in Shapiro et al.). It is what Ghosh said in an interview when he was asked whether stories have the power to achieve something that nonfiction, journalism, and research cannot. In another interview, Ghosh further nuanced this thought by saying that narrative can provide “a way to enter a reality” that is different from your own (The Uncanniness of Climate Change). In this same interview, Brady affirms that “novels allow [one] to spend time in the minds of other people for an extended period of time.” (Ghosh, The Uncanniness of Climate Change). In doing so, literature has the ability to present the reader with a new perspective. Ghosh’s belief in the elemental value of storytelling coincides with the theories of Hulme, Nixon, and Johns-Putra and Goodbody about how narratives can reinforce climate change discourse.

In this chapter, I will analyse the novel Gun Island with Ghosh’s own perspectives as expressed in The Great Derangement as the main frame of reference. I will focus specifically on the following themes, as these are both discussed in The Great Derangement and reflected in Gun Island: probability, rationality, anthropocentrism, climate justice, and scale. Each of these notions poses a significant challenge for the modern novel with regard to imagining climate change. It is

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interesting that Anasuya noted the “turning over of several binaries” in Gun Island, because between The Great Derangement and Gun Island, an almost binary opposition can be detected between the ideas mentioned above and the matter that is being challenged by them in the context of a cli-fi novel. This applies first and foremost to the first three subject matters. The inclination towards ‘the probable,’ that which is described in The Great Derangement as a characteristic feature of the modern novel, contends with the improbable events that increasingly occur as a result of climate change. Modernity’s faith in rationality and science is difficult to reconcile with the uncanny quality of climate change. Finally, anthropocentrism, which is ubiquitous in modern thinking, has made us lose sight of the nonhuman. Climate justice and scale derangement are two further notions that should be taken into account in relation to cli-fi, but neither has a clearly discernible antithesis, as opposed to the first three concepts.

2.3 Comparative analysis

2.3.1 Probability and the challenge to depict the increasing occurrence of "improbable" events

The novel, Ghosh writes, has taken on a form that is unsuitable for reflecting climate change in a credible way (TGD), since the conception of the modern novel coincides with “the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday” (TGD 17). This literary development complies with a more general process, described as “the ‘rationalization’ of modern life” (Moretti qtd. in TGD 19). The fictional world of the novel thus becomes “a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all” (Moretti qtd. TGD 19). In fact, a general understanding has been established that fiction should be even more probable than real life, given the scepticism with which readers read novels. This idea is expressed by Ghosh (TGD 23–24), but it is certainly not a new theory. Mark

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Twain, for example, came to a similar conclusion when he wrote: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” However, this has not always been true. Before, “fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely,” until this changed with the birth of the modern novel (TGD 16). Not only for literature, but also for geology the nineteenth century was a time when general views evolved: nature came to be seen as “moderate and orderly” - a development described by Ghosh as “a distinctive mark of a new and ‘modern’ worldview” (TGD 22). The since then prevailing gradualist view concurs with the tendency to push “catastrophism” to the sidelines (TGD 20). This, of course, is also reflected in literature.

These modern views that entail a focus on rationality, a shunning of the improbable, and a disengagement from catastrophes create a literary world that is not adapted to the characterization of climate change. Climate change is a phenomenon that manifests itself in an increasing occurrence of unpredictable events that most would deem improbable. Ghosh describes the present as “an era that will be defined precisely by events that appear, by our current standards of normalcy, highly improbable: flash floods, hundred-year storms, persistent droughts, spells of unprecedented heat, sudden landslides, raging torrents pouring down from breached glacial lakes, and, yes, freakish tornadoes” (TGD 24). Movements that do “celebrate the unheard-of and the improbable,” such as surrealism and magical realism, cannot be the answer to this predicament, because these seemingly improbable events are “neither surreal nor magical,” rather, they are real and urgent and should be depicted as such (TGD 27).

In Gun Island, Ghosh is not discouraged by the norm of probability. In fact, improbable and unpredictable events are abundantly present in the narrative. Deen Datta, Gun Island’s narrator, describes, among other things, massive wildfires raging in Los Angeles, the appearance of snakes in Venice Beach and spiders in Venice (both species had before not been frequent in those places),

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but also freakish weather events such as hailstorms, tornadoes and twisters in places where they do not usually occur. Some have criticized Ghosh, proclaiming that he has included too many unusual events. Vaishna Roy condemns “the novel’s compulsion to bring together as many uncommon natural phenomena as possible.” Bhaswati Chakravorty concludes that “[n]arrative logic is lost in the need to present as many changes in nature as possible.” Others, however, have a more positive reaction to Ghosh’s inclusion of the improbable. Melanie Finn upholds that “‘Gun Island’ demonstrates Ghosh’s belief that the improbable has a place in serious literary fiction.” Anasuya sees no harm in the inclusion of the improbable either, as she writes that “nothing about the non-realistic parts of his story takes away from the telling of its story about two intertwined issues – human rights (specifically the rights of refugees) and the climate crisis.” Nonetheless, she is puzzled by the “esoteric, surrealistic quality” of the narrative, since she had understood from The Great Derangement that Ghosh advocated for narratives “situated in strictly realistic worlds to drive home the consequences to this world as it is." Anasuya struggles to recognize here that Gun Island is, in fact, situated in a realistic world. Similarly, Vaishna Roy claims to see how Ghosh, in Gun Island, struggles with the question if the use of magical realism with regard to climate fiction invalidates climate change and its urgency. Ramakrishnan even goes so far as to define Gun Island as a surreal novel, Saha calls the novel “a surreal treat.” (Ghosh, Back to the Future. Interview by Saha). Ghosh, however, asserts in several interviews that his novel is a realist novel (Interview by Stella Levantesi; “Gun Island” Is a Surreal Novel), and that these improbable events “need to be recognized for what they are, which is part of the reality we inhabit every day” (The Uncanniness of Climate Change).

There is not much truth in describing Gun Island as an attempt to embrace the improbable, since the occurrence of unprecedented events can no longer be deemed improbable in an era defined by climate change: the improbable has become probable, or, as Ghosh puts it, “the wild has become

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the norm” (TGD 8). On several occasions, Ghosh has commented on the instances in his novel that are deemed “improbable,” by pointing out that they have actually happened in real life. In an interview with Saha, Ghosh recounts the day in 1988 when on the streets of New York, a chunk of masonry fell down in front of him, missing him narrowly because someone had screamed to watch out, in Bengali (Back to the Future). In Gun Island, a similar scene plays out on the streets of Venice. What seems as a far-fetched fictional development, turns out to be based on an equally unlikely, yet very true incident. In several other interviews, Ghosh points out that some of the scenes in Gun Island have played out in real life since he has written Gun Island. Ghosh had already written the part about the wildfires in Los Angeles, when wildfires were raging in California that same year, near the Getty Museum (Cascone; The Uncanniness of Climate Change; “Gun Island” Is a Surreal Novel; Ghosh in Shapiro et al.). In Gun Island, unusual weather events take place in Venice, such as a hailstorm and tornadoes. This would be considered very improbable, almost implausible, yet Ghosh has since received pictures of actual hailstorms and tornadoes happening in Venice (The Uncanniness of Climate Change; “Gun Island” Is a Surreal Novel).

It would therefore make no sense to consider Ghosh’s writing to be an example of surrealism or magical realism. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh writes “from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way [as magical or surreal] . . . [it] would rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling - which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time” (27). While Ghosh focuses on the writer’s point of view, the reader’s responsibility should not be overlooked. These unusual weather events can easily be made light of when interpreted as “improbable” or “surreal,” yet the severity of the climate crisis demands a serious consideration of the depicted events as possible and real. Kluwick points out that the problem does not lie with “the ability of the realist novel to represent the nonhuman, but [rather

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with] a tradition of reading that disregards nonhuman agency unless it is foregrounded in the shape of fantastic monsters.” Similarly, it is often not the writer, but the readers of a book that label it with a certain genre. Ghosh, for example, denounces the fact that fiction that deals with climate change is often relegated to the genre of science fiction, instead of considered as “serious” literature (TGD 7). Margaret Atwood expresses a comparable feeling of discomfort when her novels are read as science fiction: she refuses the genre label because it implies completely made-up elements, while everything she describes in her novels has happened somewhere at some point of time in history (Mead). Atwood therefore prefers the term “speculative fiction.” Ghosh, however, takes it one step further: he regrets when his novel Gun Island is read as speculative fiction, because “it’s about the real world . . . it’s not speculative” (qtd. in East). However unusual they may seem, the events described have either happened or could happen in real life, as is already explained above. Modernity’s tendency to dismiss the improbable becomes apparent also in the novel itself in relation to “the uncanny.”

2.3.2 Rationality and the challenge to depict the uncanny

Although the uncanny was first described by Ernst Jentsch, it is Freud who further developed the notion as a psychological experience. Interestingly, Freud points out that “an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (244). In his essay, Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” (220). In the same vein, Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement: “No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies

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precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from” (30). According to Vescovi, the uncanny is used in The Great Derangement “as a bridge between the rationalistic discourse of the essay and the non-rationalistic appraisal of non-human.” (216).

In Gun Island the uncanny is revealed in the form of dreams, premonitions and that particular feeling that characterizes the uncanny but cannot be put into words. It goes together with a specific language: in Gun Island Ghosh describes, to name a few examples, an unusual “sense of foreboding” (41), “intuitions” (42), a feeling of unsettledness (89), the feeling of a lost one’s “presence” (146), “a prediction” (193), “chance” (201), “a miracle” (212), “an uncanny feeling” (227), “inexplicable forces” (235), “possession” (236), and “awakening” (237). The uncanny transpires throughout the novel, but appears most distinctly with the characters Tipu and Cinta. After Tipu is bitten by a cobra while visiting a shrine in the Sundarbans, he suffers from seizures that seemingly go together with visions and premonitions. He feels that something happened to a dolphin that Piya had been studying for years, he has a vision about the Ethiopian woman who eventually led the refugees to Italy, and he also warns Piya about a massive dolphin beaching. Cinta, after losing her husband and daughter, strongly believes in dreams and visions and all that transcends the known. Throughout the narrative, Cinta often challenges Deen’s deep-rooted ideas about the world. Cinta, Deen and Piya actually characterize “three different stages of belief” (Saha in Ghosh, Back to the Future). Cinta speaks candidly about her belief in the ‘irrational’ and the miraculous, while Piya denies anything miraculous by resolutely explaining these instances away with some rational interpretation; Deen hovers in between, starting to notice certain things but still unsure about how to interpret them. Kluwick also construes this connection between the three characters in terms of scepticism towards the nonhuman (10-11).

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Deen and Piya’s tendency to rationalize the uncanny at every occasion is a straightforward expression of the typically modern, positivist thinking. Deen’s character explicitly identifies with this modern attitude: “I pride myself on being a rational, secular, scientifically minded person. . . . I am not religious and don’t believe in the supernatural.” (Ghosh, Gun Island3_{36). His friend, Cinta,}

calls him “a big rationalist” (GI 45). At one point, Deen states, in relation to something he finds difficult to explain: “I know it has nothing to do with me, that there’s a perfectly natural, scientific explanation.” (GI 234). Piya is less explicit about her stance. She hides behind the label ‘scientist,’ claiming that her job requires her to uncover rationality in everything. Deen recognizes this sentiment in Piya when he writes that “scientists aren’t allowed to say things like that,” referring to Piya’s impression that “she recognized gratitude in one of her dolphins.” (GI 117). The fact remains that “[m]any of the events in the novel that seem magical are dismissed and explained away by its more ‘rational’ minded characters almost immediately” (Anasuya). When Tipu suffers a seizure, and he is rambling on about things the others fail to understand, Deen comforts himself with the thought: “Yes, of course . . . that’s all it is - a delirium - which often sets in after shock.” (GI 90). Another telling example is that when Piya asks Deen “[w]hat are the chances [that you would run into Rafi in Venice]?”, he turns to logic and answers: “I guess Venice isn’t a large city, area-wise, and the population’s only a few hundred thousand, so it’s not all that unlikely.” (GI 202). Piya, when in the final pages a “miracle” is described, cannot refrain from saying that “there’s a scientific explanation for everything that happened there. It was just a series of migratory patterns intersecting in an unusual way.” (GI 309).

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Moreover, both Piya and Deen can show to be annoyed, either with the inability to explain irrational events, or with the suggestion that something inexplicable is happening. Kluwick recognizes this sentiment as a “fear of irrationality” (11). When Deen recounts the time Cinta told him about tarantism and “things that cannot be explained by so-called ‘natural causes’,” he admits that he was “a little shaken by this argument . . . because she had tried to defend what she had said. It seemed unseemly, inappropriate, even rude.” (GI 38–39). When Tipu suffers a seizure and sees snakes everywhere, Deen describes how he “was deeply unsettled” (GI 89). Piya is equally wary of anything deemed inexplicable. When Deen implies that Tipu might have had a vision, he describes how Piya casts him “a sharp, scornful glance” and how she answers him “in a tone of annoyance” (GI 109). Later on, similar scenarios play out. At one point, Piya tells Deen: “I hope you’re not going to tell me he had a vision, or that the dolphins spoke to him in his sleep or something like that: that stuff is really not helpful.” (GI 221). Later, Piya also warns Deen: “If you’re going to say Tipu saw it in a dream or something, please don’t.” (GI 222). This fear for the unknown might be rooted in the idea that “knowledge is power,” which makes the unknown a potential threat to that power.

However, not all characters display the same urgency to rationalize everything. Cinta makes a point of embracing the unknown and attempts to convince Deen to open up to these other experiences. The Italian professor sees great value in her dreams and intuitions, as becomes clear through several occasions: for example, Cinta calls Deen specifically regarding “a dream or a memory” (GI 26); or, when she remembers the day of her husband and daughter’s accident, she also recalls that “that morning the sense of foreboding was unusually strong” (GI 41); Cinta also insists that she can feel “Lucia’s presence” (GI 146). In her personal conviction, Cinta manages to convince Deen to open up. Throughout the narrative the reader can witness an evolution in Deen’s perception of the “irrational.” In Venice, Deen seems to be able to let go of the incessant need to cling to the

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rational. When masonry crashes down in front of him, he describes the incident “as if a warning, or a message, had been delivered to [him]” (GI 170). Later on, he goes so far as to say: “it was as if something or someone had taken possession of us for reasons beyond our understanding.” (GI 205). Anasuya argues that both the rational and the mysterious are put “on a spectrum of emotional experience” and that it is “via this emotional self-awareness, this open-mindedness that [Deen] begins to approach the world.”

This previous part focused specifically on the uncanny as expressed through dreams, visions and the irrational. But in Gun Island the uncanny also relates to the nonhuman, which will be discussed in the following part.

2.3.3 Anthropocentrism and the challenge to depict the nonhuman

The opposition between Cinta’s acknowledgement of the unknown, and Deen and Piya’s state of denial reveals two different worldviews. Because not only does Piya and Deen’s behavior confront us with an almost irrational need to try to find a rational explanation behind everything we cannot understand, it draws our attention to a long-forgotten ability to really see our surroundings, beyond the mere human experience. According to Swanson et al., “[l]iving in a time of planetary catastrophe . . . begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the world around us” (7). Cinta, in Gun Island, expresses a similar conviction when she discusses the difference between “possession” and “awakening”:

To get by [our ancestors] had to depend on the soil, the weather, the animals, neighbours, family and so on . . . Everything they depended on for their livelihood could fight back and resist, no matter whether it was a spouse or a horse, let alone the wind and the weather.

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Merely to survive they needed to assert their presence or they would have been overwhelmed, they would have become shadows of themselves. . . . You and I face no such threat. We live in a world of impersonal systems; we don’t have to impose our presence . . . And since it is not needed, that sense of presence slowly fades, or is lost or forgotten - it’s easier to let the systems take over . . . The world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession. . . . 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 powerless, 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 all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power . . . whatever is happening to you is not “possession”. Rather I would say that it is a risveglio, a kind of awakening. (236)

As mentioned before, Deen undergoes a process of growth in the way he views the world. When Deen opens up for the “irrational,” he also develops an ability to see his surroundings, including the nonhuman. In Venice, Deen stays in Cinta’s apartment, which he describes as “the only space [he] had ever been in that was literally, palpably alive.” (GI 180). Later on, he again describes how “everything around [him] seemed to be alive, even the air” (GI 231). This is the awakening that Cinta is referring to.

A reasoning similar to Cinta’s can be found in The Great Derangement. According to Ghosh, man has “turned away from . . . the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” (TGD 30). Referring to the idea of anthropocentrism, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the view

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or belief that humanity is the central or most important element of existence, esp. as opposed to God or the natural world” (“Anthropocentrism, n.”), Ghosh writes that we have come to attribute “all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being” (TGD 31). Climate change, however, “challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas,” such as anthropocentrism (TGD 31), and has “forced us to recognize that we have never been free of nonhuman constraints” (TGD 119). In an interview with Brady, Ghosh maintains that “the most difficult challenge a writer has in an age of climate change is determining how to give a voice to the non-human.” (The Uncanniness of Climate Change). The realist novel has, in the twentieth century, undergone “a radical turn away from the nonhuman to the human” (TGD 119). ln The Great Derangement, Ghosh writes about a “dream of silencing the nonhuman,” and he describes how “awareness [of nonhuman agency] came to be suppressed” through literary forms (65). Ghosh concludes that “it was exactly in the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human” (TGD 66). In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett also argues to reconsider our conception of the nonhuman, as part of the process in dealing with climate change.

The narrative of Gun Island encompasses the nonhuman, or the idea thereof, in multiple ways. Firstly, the nonhuman is referred to by expressing the vibrant character of the environment, as is done in the passages mentioned above, where Deen notices how his surroundings seem to be “alive” (GI 180, 231). A similar example can be found in Part I of the book, when Deen visits the Sundarbans for the first time: “There was scarcely any creature to be seen but every element of the landscape - forest, water, earth - seemed to be seething with life.” (GI 62). In Part II of Gun Island, Deen describes a spectacle of twisters appearing before them: “The sight was like nothing I had ever seen before; it seemed to belong not on the earth of human experience but in the pages of some

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unworldly fantasy” (276). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh writes about how “the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing.” (5). Ghosh also denounces the idea of anthropocentrism when he states that “the land here [in the Sundarbans] is demonstrably alive . . . it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history . . . it is [itself] a protagonist.” (TGD 6). Secondly, the nonhuman, or recognition of nonhuman agency, is referred to in a more abstract way. At one point, Cinta talks to Deen about “stories [that] could tap into dimensions that were beyond the ordinary, beyond the human even,” and she adds that “[o]nly through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us” (GI 141). Later on, a description of Deen’s thinking hints at the typically modern human-nonhuman divide when he remarks: “This, if any, was a place that would seem to be secure from non-human intrusion: apart from a few ornamental trees and plants there was almost nothing in sight that was not made by human hands.” (GI 166). The most significant passage that refers to the theme of the nonhuman is the one in which Deen revises his personal interpretation of the Merchant legend:

[Manasa Devi] was in effect a negotiator, a translator - or better still a portavoce - as the Italians say, a ‘voice-carrier’ between two species that had no language in common and no shared means of communication. Without her mediation there could be no relationship between animal and human except hatred and aggression . . . if [the Merchant], and others like him, were to disavow her authority then all those unseen boundaries would vanish, and humans - driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest for profit - would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things. (GI 167)

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The legend of Manasa Devi and the Gun Merchant, on the one hand “conceptualizes a conflict between the profit motive and nature,” and on the other hand encourages man to “pay attention . . . to the natural world around [them]” (Ghosh in Shapiro et al.). Ghosh suggests that “this basic conflict was perfectly well-understood by . . . our distant ancestors” (in Shapiro et al.), again implying that we, modern people, have lost sight of this. The idea that our ancestors were closer to nature, and thus in a way to truth, reoccurs in interviews with Ghosh, but also in The Great Derangement. In the interview with Brady, Ghosh states that “our ancestors understood the world perhaps better than we do.” (The Uncanniness of Climate Change). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh denounces how people, for example, started living closer and closer to the water. Ghosh writes: “through much of human history, people regarded the ocean with great wariness” (TGD 37), and he continues: “[b]ut in time, sure enough, there was a collective setting aside of the knowledge that accrues over generations through dwelling in a landscape.” (TGD 55).

A third way in which the nonhuman is brought up, is in relation to animals. Piya, for example, has a strong connection with a dolphin she has been studying for years. Deen describes that connection as follows: “her relationship with Rani was strong enough, and durable enough, to qualify as what humans might regard as an old friendship.” (GI 101). At one point, Tipu and Deen have a conversation about shamans and bauleys. Shamans are described as people who are able to communicate with animals, but also with “trees, and mountains, and ice” (GI 116), and of bauleys, Deen says “[a] bauley is a man who leads people into the jungle, right?” (GI 117). This passage directs the reader’s attention to the (potential) relationship between humans and animals, which opposes the typically modern nature-culture divide. The relationship between human and animal is also brought forward, both in The Great Derangement as in Gun Island, in instances where there is

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eye contact between the two. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh points out the importance of the eyes and the “gaze” in Sundarban tiger stories. The implication of looking an animal in the eyes is that of “mutual recognition” (TGD 29). In Gun Island, Deen describes how eye contact has played a pivotal role in the start of the friendship between Piya and Rani, because it “suggested something more than mere recognition” (101). Later on, a group of dolphins is described:

The sight of frolicking dolphins created a buzz of excitement on the ship and people began to cheer and clap. The mood seemed to communicate itself to the animals, who responded with an extraordinary display of acrobatics, leaping, somersaulting, and even looking us in the eye as they flipped over in mid-air. ‘They’re great old hams, these striped dolphins,’ said Piya with more than a touch of disapproval. ‘They know exactly how to play an audience.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘But wouldn’t that imply that they can understand human feelings?’ ‘It means nothing of the kind,’ said Piya sharply. It’s just something they do.’ (GI 293)

Again, the eye contact is focused on; and again, Piya desperately refuses to openly recognize the nonhuman agency in terms of intelligence.

This stands in contrast with those that live closer to nature, as Ghosh writes how “the people who live in and around the mangrove forests [in the Sundarbans] have never doubted that tigers and many other animals possess intelligence and agency.” (TGD 64). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh describes, as indicated earlier, how modern man increasingly distances itself from the natural world. More specifically, Ghosh explains how the Nature-Culture divide in modernity has led to an alienation from nature on the one hand, and that culture, on the other hand, has generated desires “that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.” (10). As will become apparent in the

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next section, it is often those that do the least harm, those that are closest to nature, that are most vulnerable to the consequences of our modern carbon economy.

2.3.4 Climate justice and representation

Climate justice refers to the inequality both felt and reinforced by climate change. Rob Nixon emphasizes that “unequal human impacts, unequal human agency, and unequal human vulnerabilities” cannot be overlooked, or, as he put it: “We may all be in the Anthropocene but we’re not all in it in the same way.” (“The Anthropocene” 8). Instead of using the term Anthropocene, which refers to a new geological era marked by human impact (Crutzen; Crutzen and Stoermer), some, like Andreas Malm and Jason Moore, prefer the term Capitalocene, as capitalism is often considered to be one of the driving forces behind climate change (TGD 87). Ghosh, however, argues that not only capitalism but also imperialism should be taken into account (TGD 87). In The Great Derangement, Ghosh describes the history of empire and imperialism, and thus of the colonizing powers. By revealing how these inequalities, regarding economic and political power for example, were able to develop, Ghosh acknowledges the need for climate justice. Ghosh writes:

[T]he poor nations of the world are not poor because they were indolent or unwilling; their poverty is itself an effect of the inequities created by the carbon economy; it is the result of systems that were set up by brute force to ensure that poor nations remained always at a disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power. (TGD 110)

“Global inaction on climate change,” Ghosh asserts, does not result from a state of ignorance or denial, rather it is a political strategy to maintain the status quo (TGD 145). An important factor that

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makes such inaction possible, is “the belief that they [the political elites] are not gambling with their own lives” (TGD 148). It is often suggested that those least responsible for climate change are most vulnerable to its effects (e.g. Nixon, “The Anthropocene” 14). Green and Raygorodetsky explain that “[i]ndigenous people living on their traditional lands bear little responsibility for current and future projected consequences of a changing climate . . . [yet] they are likely to suffer the most from direct and indirect climate change due to their close connection to the natural world and their reduced social-ecological resilience - consequence of centuries of oppressive policies imposed on them by dominant non-Indigenous societies.” (239).

In Gun Island, the need for climate justice is brought to light through the narrative that plays out in the Sundarbans, which illustrates the devastating effects that climate change has on the local residents. Already in the beginning of Part I of Gun Island, Ghosh confronts his readers with the reality of rising sea levels, when Nilima tells Deen: “The islands of the Sundarbans are constantly being swallowed up by the sea; they’re disappearing before our eyes.” (19). Later on, Moyna describes how “it seemed as though both land and water were turning against those who lived in the Sundarbans.” (GI 53). Tipu explains why so many leave the Sundarbans in search for a better life:

In these parts, there’s a whole bunch of dirt-poor, illiterate people scratching out a living by fishing or farming or going into the jungle to collect bamboo or honey. Or at least that’s what they used to do. But now the fish catch is down, the land’s turning salty, and you can’t go into the jungle without bribing the forest guards. On top of that every other year you get hit by a storm that blows everything to pieces. So what are people supposed to do? What would anyone do? . . . Even the animals are moving - just ask Piya. (GI 65)

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Likewise, Rafi recounts how his grandfather used to tell him “that things were changing so much, and so fast, that [Rafi] wouldn’t be able to get by [in the Sundarbans] . . . that one day [Rafi] would have no choice but to leave.” (GI 95). All the characters tied to the Sundarbans seem to have their own story related to the impact of climate change. Piya, a marine biologist, notices the effects in her studies: “We’re in a new world now,” she tells Deen, “[n]o one knows where they belong any more, neither humans nor animals.” (GI 106). This portrayal of the Sundarbans is very close to reality: in 2019, Peter Schwartzstein and Arko Datto published an article in National Geographic Magazine about the disappearing forests of the Sundarbans, describing how rising waters, cyclones and storm surges pose an increasing threat to the landscape and the people living there.

The knowledge of those who have been experiencing climate change already, can be very valuable in climate change discourse. In a live conversation between Amitav Ghosh and Adam Sobel, the climate crisis is discussed from different viewpoints. According to Sobel, for a long time the climate crisis was considered to be a scientific problem, while in his opinion it is a political problem. The underlying thought is that scientists have acquired enough data to gain credibility with the public, yet there still remains to be a lack of effective, political action. Ghosh adds to this thought that one would think that the world would act accordingly to what scientific findings “tell” us to do - unfortunately, that has proven to not be the case. Aside from a scientific or a political problem, the climate crisis can also be framed as a social justice problem, as the youth activists have been doing. What Ghosh encourages, looking at climate change from this third viewpoint, is that the voices of others, beside those of scientists, are being heard. Ghosh underlines that “other people have noticed the changes too,” referring to farmers, fishermen and indigenous people, to name a few. Many others share the same belief. Green and Raygorodetsky, for example, underline the indispensable value of indigenous people’s knowledge. Another example is the short film, produced by Extinction

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Rebellion and Amazon Watch, titled “Guardians of Life” (Monson). In this film, earth is represented as a patient with systemic heart failure. Eventually, this “patient” is saved by one of the paramedics who turns out to be indigenous. Sônia Guajajara recognizes the film’s value in that it shows “the key role indigenous people play in defending the forests, the planet, and life itself.” (qtd. in Extinction Rebellion). Q’orianka Kilcher, who plays the lead role, emphasizes the importance of representation: “As an indigenous actress I feel a strong responsibility to use my public platform to help amplify the voices who are seldom heard including all the indigenous defenders around the world” (qtd. in Extinction Rebellion).

The idea of giving indigenous, local communities a voice, is also reflected in the narrative of Gun Island. As the story is told by Deen, one could consider him to be the protagonist; as does Khakha in his review of Gun Island, in which he comments on what he perceives to be “Ghosh’s choice to tell the story from the eyes of a privileged man.” However, one should make the distinction between protagonist and narrator: in an interview with Ramakrishnan, Ghosh points out that Deen is “not the central character. He is the narrator but not the protagonist. He’s just an observer.” (Gun Island Is a Surreal Novel). Through Deen’s journey and acquaintances, a diverse range of voices - that often remain unheard otherwise - is represented. First, there is Deen’s perspective, defined by his background and surroundings; Deen “was born and raised” in Calcutta in India, but now lives and works in Brooklyn, in the United States (GI 3). Deen’s journey brings in a diverse group of figures, from different backgrounds. Nilima Bose, the aunt of a distant relative whom Deen goes to meet to hear about the legend of the Gun Merchant, was “[b]orn into a wealthy Calcutta legal dynasty” (GI 9), but after marrying her husband, she had moved to Lusibari, “a small town on the edge of the Sundarbans,” and she had founded the Babadon Trust, a charitable organization that works with women (GI 10). Thus, Nilima can speak both from a privileged perspective, and as

Cli-Fi From Theory into Practice: A Comparative Analysis of Amitav Ghosh's 'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable' and 'Gun Island'