Cli-fi
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/04/06/can-the-novel-handle-a-subject-as-cataclysmic-as-climate-change
Cli-fi
The tallest story
Can the novel handle a subject as cataclysmic as climate change?
Writers are coming to appreciate the theme’s urgency—and its narrative possibilities
The literary novel has a problem with time. Novels are one of the ways in which a culture thinks about the challenges it faces, but frequently the form looks to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into the future. The Victorian novel pondered the rapidly industrialising economy and shifting class structures of the age. Yet many of the great books of the period, from “Middlemarch” to “A Tale of Two Cities”, employed historical settings. Today’s novelists often turn to the two world wars, or even more remote eras, for their subjects.
Books & arts
The
Economist April 6th 2019
Cli-fi
The tallest story
Can the novel handle a subject as
cataclysmic as climate change?
THE LITERARY
novel has a problem with scale. For centuries it has principally focused on the
stuff of everyday life. It doesn't generally concern itself with the cataclysmic
or tectonic. Compare Homer's "Odyssey" with James Joyce's
"Ulysses": whereas the epic incorporates gods, slaughters and the
fate of nations, the novel celebrates the intimate and quotidian.
The literary novel has a problem with time. Novels are one of
the ways in which a culture thinks about the challenges it faces, but
frequently the form looks to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into
the future. The Victorian novel pondered the rapidly industrializing economy and
shifting class structures of the age. Yet many of the great books of the
period, from "Middle march" to "A Tale of Two Cities", employed
historical settings. Today's novelists often turn to the two world wars, or even
more remote eras, for their subjects.
These tendencies are a handicap in the age of climate change,
a crisis which is both current and to come. The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh recognized
this drawback in "The Great Derangement", a collection of essays
published in 2016. In a piece ostensibly about environmental catastrophe, Mr Ghosh
pondered the cultural role of the novel. Climate change, he argued, seems just
too capacious, uncertain and abstract a subject to be addressed by a form with
an innate fear of the unknowable and provisional-ie, of the future. And if the
novel cannot confront the biggest danger to humanity, can it retain its
relevance?
Time is a factor in more ways than one. Particularly since
Modernism, which saw Joyce and Virginia Woolf anatomize the minutiae of life,
literary time has been circumscribed. Whether it is Mrs Dalloway's day or the
longer arc of the Bildungsroman, there is generally an inherent limit on the temporal
horizons of serious novels: the length of a character's life. Novelistic time is
tightly bounded, as well as being sequestered in the past. The leap forward
needed to envisage the climate's trajectory requires more elastic parameters.
Not all fiction is hobbled in this way. What Mr Ghosh
snobbishly calls the "generic outhouses" - speculative and science fiction-have
tried to 'tackle climate change head-on. These genre boundaries
are blurry
and contested: J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned World" (1962), a sci-fi
novel that was among the first to deal with climate- related fears, has been
reassessed and reclassified as the author's reputation evolved. But the
literary novel has long defined itself in opposition to other genres, and the future
and its risks have been tainted by association. At least, they were until
recently.
Not waving but drowning.
As the
divide between literary and other types of fiction has become increasingly porous,
so the literary establishment has begun to recognize the imaginative possibilities
of climate change. Cormac Mc-Carthy's "The Road" (2006), in which a
father and son traverse an ashen landscape after an unnamed apocalypse, was an
early turning point. The book served as a bridge between the fears of one
generation, which involved mushroom clouds and mutually assured destruction,
and those of the next, which are of melting ice caps and wildfires.
Mr McCarthy wrote "The Road" after becoming a
father in his 50s. Gazing over a Texan landscape with his son, he imagined the
hills scorched black, depredations the boy would see but he would not. The
story can be interpreted as a message from Mr McCarthy to his child, as a
metaphor for a universal anxiety about leaving offspring to fend for themselves,
and as a dramatization of a horror that humans have despoiled the Earth. The
book draws attention to the fact that novels are in a sense always about the
future, because that is when they will be read. It was a breakthrough for
writers keen to engage with the climate. Novelists including Ian McEwan and
Margaret Atwood have done so.
Now the genre that Mr McCarthy helped galvanize, sometimes
known as "cli-fi", is gathering pace. His impulse to tell stories for
future generations animates two recent examples. In "The End We Start
From", Megan Hunter evokes "An unprecedented flood. London.
Uninhabitable. A list of boroughs, like the shipping forecast, their names
suddenly as perfect and tender as the names of children." The anonymous narrator
shepherds her baby son, Z, through this flooded Britain in search of safety and
the boy's father. The narrative is interlaced with passages from mythological
sources, closing the circle between the destructive floods of the cli-fi future
and the watery origin stories of many religions. Similarly, Louise Erdrich's
"Future Home of the Living God" purports to be written by a woman to
her unborn child, preparing it for the world it will inhabit. A thermometer
ticks upwards like a primed bomb; the novel ends with a lyrical passage in
which the narrator recalls the snows of her youth. "Next winter it rained.
The cold was mild and refreshing. But only rain. That was the year we lost
winter."
Some dystopias combine the spectre of climate carnage with
other fears. John Lanchester's "The Wall" imagines a future in which
Britain's coastlines have been replaced by the titular wall, built to hold back
both the rising tides and the "Others"- boat-borne hordes seeking
refuge. The migrant crisis and Brexit contribute to a bleak vision of paranoid
insularity. In Omar EI Akkad's "American War", meanwhile, swathes of
late-21st-century America are under water. Florida has vanished; a second civil
war erupts over fossil-fuel usage.
Literary novelists have begun to appreciate that climate
change is not just an urgent subject but a font of drama and plots. All too
soon the theme may revert from the territory of science fiction to the realm of
old-fashioned realism .•
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