Unthinkable Realities: Climate Disruption in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement

Abstract

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Ghosh)Amitav Ghosh challenges the limitations of modern realist novels in addressing the urgency of climate change. Ghosh critiques the novel’s historical entanglement with bourgeois individualism, colonial modernity, and statistical plausibility. These factors collectively constrain its capacity to portray the forces of the Anthropocene. He contends that conventional narratives, constrained by explanations at the human scale of plausibility and the agency of a principal protagonist or antagonist, do not accommodate these “unthinkable” aspects of climate disruption events. The realist novel, meanwhile, cannot “fit” catastrophism. The idea of large-scale, sudden environmental catastrophes that occur outside of gradualist or human-centered contexts is important to address. Amitav Ghosh’s work suggests a profound dissonance between the traditional architecture of the novel and the urgent demand for newer forms of narrative in response to climate change. The paper explores, from an ecocritical perspective, how Ghosh’s thesis has the potential to shift the onus of a reconceptualized narrative-as-background that accounts for thinking environmentally and embracing catastrophic planetary crises. Amitav Ghosh vents his spleen by demonstrating the historical and formal constraints of the novel, as if deliberately seeking to confine literature’s ability to respond to what the Anthropocene represents for it.