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The most Impressive Book on Environment |
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by Ananya Singh | 17-11-2018 13:31
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IdI like to recommend the book "The Great Derangement" by the acclaimed Indian Novelist Amitav Ghosh. It examines our collective inability to spot the elephant in the room, namely "to grasp the scale and violence of the climate change". The book is composed of three parts, Part I deals with the stories, Part II is History and Part III is titled Politics. In Part One, ‘Stories’, Ghosh critiques the limitations of the ‘literary novel’, which aims to exhibit the vagaries of ‘individual moral adventure’. The turn inwards in modern fiction mirrored the turn towards commodity fetishism. As realist literary fiction has explored the complex inflections of human experience, it has assumed the existence of a stable climate and an unlimited flow of resources to fuel the bourgeois regularities inscribed in its narratives. Ghosh contends that the contemporary novel, using narrow scales of time and space that rarely exceed more than a human lifespan, is not only neglectful of climate change but is partly complicit in the dissociation of the mind from the vulnerability of its corporeal situation, since it rarely allows the climate to violently intrude upon the habitual routines and ordinary concerns it prefers to portray. He therefore calls for a heightened imaginary response to climate change, although one can question whether fiction can do much to remedy political and economic intransigence – perhaps if enough people read it? Part Two, ‘History’, unintentionally exemplifies the historicised mind caught in a world that keeps historicising itself: a situation in which history is constantly made obsolete but remains the faulty technology on which human beings depend to make things make sense. The historicised mind automatically concedes priority to history and stipulates the pre-eminence of historical knowledge and periodisation. Hence, Ghosh’s ample use of terms such as ‘arc’, ‘trajectory’, ‘pattern’ and ‘process’. His attempt to comprehend climate change by necessity aligns with every other effort to do so: one must outline a historical narrative of how we came to be where we are – without history’s categories, remember, the historicised mind couldn’t make sense of anything. In Part Three, ‘Politics’, Ghosh condemns the narrow bandwidth of political concern. Riven by quarrels over identity, squabbling over the sincerity of individual moral performance, holding personal liberty in the highest regard, contemporary politics has little to no capacity to properly address ‘the commonweal’: to engage in collective action for the sake of survival. Bluster, denial and grandstanding obstruct the wrenching political and moral transformations required, and which continue to be delayed. Lurking behind phantasies of untrammelled individual agency, climate change is eroding conceptions of unassailable human dominion over the earth and forcing us to dispense with the possibility of universally achieving the accoutrements of bourgeois life. This conception of human flourishing into which we have been beguiled is consuming itself. Yet the ‘masters of mankind’ (as Adam Smith called them), following their ‘vile maxim’ of self-enrichment, have long abrogated their responsibility to enact real change. Human existence is set up to contribute to the fossil economy, hence to perpetuate ecological malfunction. The horizon of future possibility recedes.
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2 Comments
Hello Joon, thank you very much for your time and kind feedback ! :D
Posted 21-11-2018 01:43
Hello Ananya, thanks for introducing 'The Great Derangement' to us
Divided into 3 chapters, it truly tells us about how to adapt ourselves and get ready for such problems that are mentioned in the book.
Keep up with your work :)
Posted 20-11-2018 23:37