The Great Derangement ‘The Randy Land Melvin R BerPARTI Stories‘Who ean forget those moments when something that seems Inanimate turns out tobe vitally, even dangerous live? As, for example, when an arabesque inthe pattern oft carpet is ‘revealed tobe a dog's tall, which, if tepped wpon, could lead ‘toanipped ankle? Or when we reach for an innocext looking vine and find it to bea worm ora snake? When a harulssly rifting lg turns out to be crocodile? Iewasa shockof hisknd, imagine that themaiersof The ‘Empire Strikes Back had in mind when they conceired ofthe scene in which Han Solo ands the Millennium Falecnon what he takes to be an asteroid—but only to discover that he has centered the gullet of sleeping space monster. ‘Torecallthat memorable scene now, more than :hlrty-fve years after the making ofthe film isto recognize its impossi- bility. Fr IFever there were a Han Solo, i the nearor distant futur, his assumptions about interplanetary objects are cer tain co be very diferent from those that prevailed in Califor- ‘la at the time when the film wat made, The humans of the urure willsuely understand, owing what they presumably will know about the history oftheir forebears on Earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, ida significant number of thelrkind believe tha planets and, steroids are inert -My ancestors were ecological refugees long before the term “wa invented. ‘They were from what is now Bangladesh, and their village -wat on the shore of the Padma River, one of the mightiest wa-hela. he story, ae my father tld, was this: one yi the mi-tosthe grea river suddenly changed course, the village; only 2 Few of the inhabitants had mat ‘nel to escape to higher ground, It was this catastrophe that had unmoored our forebears; in its wake they began to move westward and didnot stop until the yar 186, when they set ted once again on the banks ofa rive, the Ganges, in Biba. “Migstheard thi story ona nostalgic family trp, = we wer: Journeying down the Padma River inasteamboat. Iwasa child ‘then, and a5! ooked into those swirling waters Imagined 3 great storm, with coconut palms bending over backward unt their fronds lashed the ground; | envisioned women and chit dren racing through howling winds as the waters rose behind ‘them. [thought ofmy ancestorsstting huddled onan outcrop, looking on as their dwellings were washed away To this day when I think ofthe circumstances that have shaped my life, [emember the elemental force that unteth- cred my ancestors (rom their homeland and launched them, fon the series of journeys that preceded, and made possible, ‘ay own travels. When ITook into my pas the rver seems to meet my eyes staring back, a ft.ak, Do you recognize me wherever you are? Recognition famously passage from ignorancetaknow! ‘edge To recogni, then, isnot the same an initial intodve- tion, Nor does recognition requte an exchange of words: more ‘often than not we recognize mutely. And to recognize is by no ‘means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehen: soa need play no patina moment of recognition, ‘The most important element ofthe word recognition thus lis ints frst syllable, which harks back to something prior analready existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorancetoknowledge:amomentof recognition occut ‘when a prior awareness Dashes before ws, effecting an instant aa | change in our understanding of that whichis beheld. Yee this fash cannot appear spontaneously, it cannot disclose itself except in the prevence of is lott other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, isnot of the same kind as the discovery of comething new arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself ‘This Limagine, was what my forebears experienced on thet day when the river ose upto claim their village: they awoke tothe recognition afa presence that had molded thei lives to the point where they had cometo take it as much for grantec asthe alr chey breathed. But, of course, che air too can come tolife with sudden and deadly violence~as it dd in the Con ‘goin 1988, when a great cloud of carbon dioxide bute forek fom Lake Nyos and rolled into the surrounding villages, Kill fing 1700 people and an untold numberof animals. But more often it does so with a quiet insstence—as the inhabitants of New Delhi and Bejing know all to well—when inflamed Tangs ane sinuses prove once again that theres nodiference ‘between the without and the witha; between using and be- ing used, These too ate moments of recognition, in which i Took into the t: _gers eyes i to recognize a presence of which you are already wate; and in that moment of contact you realize that this pretence postesses similar awareness oF you, even though it {8 not human, This mate exchange of gazes i the only com: ‘munication that i posible between you and this presence— yet communication itundoubredly is But what i it that you are communicating with, at this ‘moment of extreme danger, when your mind Is in a state un ke any you've ever known before? An analogy that is some‘times offered is that of seeing a ghost a presence that isnot ‘of this worl In the tiger stories of the Sundarbans, asin my experience ‘of te tomado, there is, as I noted earlier, an irrecucbleele- -ment of mystery. But what lam trying to suggestis perhaps ‘ereeexpreesed bya diferent word, one that ecursFrequentiy ‘intranslationsof Freud and Heidegger. That words uneanny— ‘and tit indeed with uncanny accuracy that my experience of ‘the tomnado is evoked in the following passage: “n dread, as ‘sweaty one fecasomethinguncanny Whatiathic'omething' ‘and this ‘one? We are unable to say what gives ‘oe’ that un- ‘any feling ‘One’ jus feels it generally” tis surely no coincidence that the word uncanny has be ‘gun tobe used, with ever greater frequency in reletion to cl- mate change. Writing of the freakish events and objects of| ‘our era, Timothy Morcon ass, "Isnt it the cas, thatthe eect delivered to usin the [unaccustomed rain, the werd cyclone, ‘the ol slick ie something wncanny?” George Marshall wits, “Climate change is inherently uncanny: Weather conditions, ‘and he high-carbon lifestyles that ate changing them, areex- ‘tremely familie and yet have now been given a new menace ‘and ancerainty ‘Noother word comescloseto expresingthestrangeness of ‘wha: isunfolding around us. Forchese changes arenot merely strange inthe sense of being unknown or alien; their uncan- nines lies precisely in the Fat that in these encounters we recogulae something we had turned away from: that isto say, ‘the presence and proximity of nonhuman interloctors ‘et now our gaze seems tobe turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating a our doore seem to have stirred a sense of recognition an awareness that humane were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by “beings of all sorts who share elements ofthat which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capacities of will thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for theinterest in the nonhuman thathasbeen burgeoning in the humanities ovr the last decade and overarange of dscplins; how else do we account forthe renewed attention to panpsy~ chism and the metaphysics of Alfed Noreh Whitehead; and. or the rise to prominence of object-oriented ontology, actor- ‘network theory, the new animism, and soon? ‘Can the timing ofthis renewei recognition be mere coin idence, ois the synchronicity sn indication that there are tntties in the word ike forests, that ar lly capable of in- ferting themselves into ovr processes of thought? And ifthat ‘were so, could it not clo be sald thatthe earth has itself inter- vvened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism thatarrogatesllintelligence andagencyto the human while denying them t> every other kind of being? “This possibility ie not, by any means the most important ofthe many ways in which climate change challenges andre futes Enlightenment ideas. Is, noweve, certainly the most that non ‘uncanny. For what it suggests—indeed proves: human forces have the ability to intervene directly inhuman, ‘thought. And to be alerted to each interventions is also to ‘become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves, have always had other participant: tig ike nding out that one's telephone has been tapped for yeas, or thatthe neigh bors have long been eavesdropping on family discussions ‘But in away ¢'3 worse stl, it would seem that those ‘unseen presences actually played a part in shaping our dis- cussions without our bing awate oft. And if these are ral possibilities, an we help but suspect that al the time that we Jmagined ourselves tobe thinking about apparent inanimate objects, we were ourselves belng"thought” by ther entities? Itisalmostasifthe mind-alterieg planet that Stanislaw Lemlmagined in Solaris were our own, Familiar Earth: what could Ihe more sineanny than thie? ‘These possbilitioshave many implications fo the subject that primarily concerns me here literary fiction will touch ‘on some ofthese later, but for now I want te atend only to the aspect ofthe uncanny. (On the face of it the novel asa form would seem to bea natural home for the uncanny. Afterall have not some ofthe greatest novelists written uncanny tals? The ghost stories of Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Rabindranth Tagore come Immediately to mind. ‘Burthe environmental uncanny ienot the same asthe wn: canniness ofthe supernatural: it i diferent precicely because ltperainstononhuman forcesand beings. Theghoets of liter: ary fiction arenot human either ofcourse but hey ate certain: Iy represented as projections of humans who were once alive But animals like the Sundarbans tiger, and fieakish weather ‘events lke the Delhi tornado, hve no human referents a al ‘There is an additional element ofthe uncanny in events triggered by climate change. one that didnot igure in my ex: petienceoftheDelhi tornado, Thisisthat the Feakish weather vents of today despive their radically nonhuman nature, are nonetheless animated by cumulative human sctione.[n that sense, the events etn metion by global warming havea more Intimate connection with bumans than did the climatic phe- ‘nomena ofthe past—thisis because we haveallcontebuted Insome measure, greator small, co thei making, They ate the nnysterious work of cur own hands returning to haunt usin ‘unthinkable shapes and forms. Allofthismakesclimatechange events pecallly resistant to the customary frames that literature has spplied to "Na- ‘ute’: they ar too powerful, too grotesque toodangerous, and ‘too accusatory tobe writen about ina lyri, or elegiac, or (io rinnsicnnpronaiea aoe ns re romantic vein. Indeed in that these events are not entirely of "Nature (whatever that might be), they confound the very idea of Nature writing” or ecological writing: they are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of out relationship withthe nonhuman, "More than a quarter century ha passed since Bill MeKib- ben wrote, "We ive ina post-nacural world” But did "Nature" in this sense ever exist? Or was ferathe the deifcation ofthe hhuman that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that nonhuman agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ‘ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events ofthis era 9. ‘In the inal par of my novel The Hungry Tide, there isa scene in which cyclone sends gigantic storm surge into the Sun