literary fiction and climate change, revisited

Here we have Siddhartha Deb making precisely the same inexplicable error that Amitav Ghosh, whom he quotes, made last year — a mistake on which I commented at the time. The thought sequence goes like this:

1) Declare yourself interested only in “literary” fiction;

2) Define literary fiction as a genre concerned only with the quotidian reality of today;

3) Complain that literary fiction is deficient in imaginative speculation about the realities and possibilities of climate change.

But if you have already conflated “literary fiction” and “fiction” — note how Deb uses the terms interchangeably — and have defined the former as having a “need to keep the fluky and the exceptional out of its bounds, conceding the terrain of improbability — cyclones, tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes — to genre fiction,” then you have ensured the infallibility of your thesis. Because any story that engages with “the fluky and the exceptional” (or, riskily, the future) ipso facto becomes “genre fiction” and therefore outside the bounds of your inquiry.

This self-blinkering leads Deb into some very strange statements:

In the United States too, even well meaning liberal fiction, often falling under the rubric of cli-fi, reveals itself as incapable in grappling with [our steadfast rapaciousness]. This is perhaps because to think of modern life as a failure, and to question the idea of progress, requires an extremism of vision or a terrifying kind of independence. An indie bestseller like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, set in an eco-apocalypse, features rhapsodies on the internet and electricity. Marcel Theroux in Far North includes a paean to modern flight as one of the finest inventions of “our race,” even though the effect of air travel on carbon emissions is quite horrific.

Let me just pause to note that Deb has a rather expansive notion of “the United States,” given that Emily St. John Mandel is Canadian and Marcel Theroux was born in Uganda and educated wholly in England. Setting that aside, Deb’s description of Mandel’s book is farcically inaccurate. It is true that there are characters in the book, some among the handful of people who have survived a plague that killed 99.9% of humanity, who miss the internet and electricity. Does Deb think that in such an world nobody would miss those technologies? Or is it his view that a truly virtuous writer should make a point of suppressing such heretical notions?

Either position is silly. Of course people in such a world would miss technological modernity, for good reasons and bad. At one point we get “an incomplete list” of what’s gone:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one's hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite....

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Again: Does Deb think people in a devastated world wouldn't think this way? Or does it think it wrong to give voice to such memories and reflections?

Does he think that such a list offers nothing but regret?

The central figures of Station Eleven are the members of a group called the Traveling Orchestra. They play classical music and perform plays.

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.

When I first read Station Eleven I had mixed feelings about it, but in the two years since I have thought often about the Traveling Symphony and what it achieved, what it reminded people of, what it made possible. The book offers, especially through the Symphony, a moving and at times profound meditation on the complex relationships that obtain among technology, art, and human flourishing. I’d strongly recommend that Siddhartha Deb read it.

And he should read some Kim Stanley Robinson while he’s at it.

the narrowing world of literary fiction

I've been thinking a good deal about a recent blog post by Adam Roberts, a fine scholar and even better novelist whose work you should know. (Here are some thoughts of mine about his fascinating book New Model Army). In this post he's reflecting on the general tendency among the literati to dismiss science fiction and fantasy and, especially, young adult (YA) novels as being intrinsically less complex and innovative than what we usually call "literary" fiction.

Take the Twilight books. There are lots of ways in which these are very bad books, of course: clumsily written, derivative etc etc. BUT! They speak to and move millions, and I’m uncomfortable simply mocking that. It (the mockery) seems to me symptomatic of an attitude that defines ‘aesthetic merit’ solely in terms of stylistic or formal innovation. These novels are about something important (sex) and they write about it in an ahem penetrating way—sexual desire as a life-changing force that is at the same time something that doesn’t happen; sex as something simultaneously compelling and alarming, that draws you on and scares you away in equal measure. There are no Booker shortlisted novels that are about that. Indeed the post-Chatterley novel has taken it as more-or-less axiomatic that sex is something to be explicitly and lengthily portrayed in writing. The mainstream fiction attitude to sexual representation is ‘adult’ in the several senses of that word. I have no problem with that myself; I'm not advocating prudery, or Victorian sexual morality. I'm suggesting that that’s not actually how sex manifests in the lives of a great many people.

Or take Harry Potter, bigger even than Meyer. Formally conservative and stylistically flat novels, yes—but this series is one of the great representations of school in western culture. Perhaps the greatest. School dominates your life from 5-18; more if you go to college. When you’re 25 and reading fiction, school has been literally two thirds of your existence. It is our gateway to the adult world, our first experience of socialisation outside the family. It’s a massive thing. When do Booker shortlisted novels ever apprehend it? They don’t—the most you will get is a little background of character A’s schooltimes past, by way of fleshing out their characterisation as adults. Because it is as adults that we’re supposed to be interested in. [School is]a massive, global phenomenon. Yet where are the other great novels of school life?

Roberts is a consistently imaginative and provocative thinker, but this post is especially important. What he's showing us is that the typical story we tell about the rise of modern fiction — a story of expanding possibility, of increasing frankness about experiences, especially sexual ones, that our ancestors drew a discreet curtain across — is highly selective and hence distorting. The freedom to treat "adult" issues has led to a neglect in our fiction of experiences deemed to be less than adult. Yet, "Victorian sexual morality" notwithstanding, Charles Dickens could treat school experiences as of equal interest to adult love and loss. (Roberts: "And of course people often denigrate him — compared say, to ‘properly adult’ writers like Eliot or Thackeray — as somehow an immature figure, a child who never quite grew up. Bollocks to that. Feature not bug, people! Feature; not bug.") What if the much-celebrated "openness" of our recent fiction is simultaneously a closing-off?

All that said, I find myself thinking, Is Roberts actually correct about how thoroughly novelists of the past hundred years have neglected these experiences? There's a good deal about school in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, isn't there? And I wonder if to some degree the narrative treatment of school experiences hasn't been offloaded to memoir and autobiography, as in Paul Watkins's lovely Stand Before Your God. But about the neglect of sex as something imagined and sought and feared rather than experienced, I think he must be correct. Thoughts? What have I missed?