The Subject Too Big for Fiction
Is there any subject that fiction cannot address? From its beginnings as a form, the novel has dealt with love and hate, war and peace, courage and cowardice, boredom and catastrophe. Yet there is far more in heaven and earth than any human can convey. In the view of the writer Amitav Ghosh, one subject especially threatens to elude fiction’s comprehension. “The climate crisis,” he writes in his book-length 2016 essay, The Great Derangement, “is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” Across his many novels and nonfiction books, Ghosh has been attempting to correct this shortcoming. He has become a leading theorist of the relationship between global climate change and culture, arguing that the sparsity of the former in fiction owes to a “grid of literary forms and conventions” that coalesced just as “carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth.” Contemporary writing, he believes, is not up to the challenge of depicting forces so great and impersonal that they seem to actively confound attempts at storytelling. It …
