by Thomas Schwarz
I. The “natural fantastic” in the poetics of the Anthropocene
In The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh discusses the question how to create art facing the challenges of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene (6, 9). If art and literature were to remain in “modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight”, our era would become known as the “time of the Great Derangement” (11). To counteract this trend, Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island examines the biopolitical consequences of climate change, with an emphasis on forced migration from the Indian Sundarbans to Venice.
Ghosh’s essay stresses that “global warming” threatens “low-lying areas like the Sundarbans” (7). In his perception, the land there is “demonstrably alive” (6). This corresponds to James Lovelock’s description of the “planetary ecosystem”, or Gaia, as “alive” (6). In Facing Gaia, Bruno Latour turns against the “obsession of the Moderns with deanimating the world” (72). Latour insists on the “agency” of the Earth to retroact “to the collective actions of humans” (86). He defines “the Anthropocene as the multiform reaction of the Earth to our enterprises” (238). Viewed this way, Gaia must “appear as a threat”, to make us “tragically conscious” of “the New Climate Regime” (244).
For Ghosh, the “earth of the Anthropocene” is a world “animated by forces” which are active on a planetary scale so that the waters that are invading the Sundarbans are also causing “sea level rise” in Venice (Derangement 63). He explains that the Anthropocene reverses “the temporal order of modernity”, because “those at the margins are now the first to experience the future” (62-63). The “biopolitical mission” of modern nation-states is to keep “climate refugees” away (143-144). A key term for Ghosh’s poetics of the Anthropocene is the “environmental uncanny” as a quality of “nonhuman forces and beings”. He assumes that “freakish weather events” are “animated by cumulative human actions” (32). Ghosh explains that one of the “uncanniest effects of the Anthropocene” is the confrontation with “inanimate things coming suddenly alive”. This may lead humans to the “awareness” that they share “agency” with the planet (63).
According to Roger Caillois, the “fantastic” disrupts a universe ordered by the laws of nature (349). The sudden appearance of the natural fantastic, be it a stone or a landscape, an animal or a plant, may seize our imagination by producing an “inexplicable confusion in the natural order,” as if “issued from some unknown universe” by a “threatening form of organization” (353). Against this background, I would like to suggest reading Ghosh’s novel Gun Island as fantastic literature.[1]
II. Climate change and migration in Ghosh’s Gun Island
In his 2019 novel Gun Island, Ghosh puts his poetics into literary practice. Its protagonist is a New York based “dealer in rare books and Asian antiquities” from Calcutta by the name of Dr. Dinanath Datta (3). He prides himself for being a “scientifically minded person” who does not believe “in the supernatural” (35). Datta sets out for a “strange journey” (3), flying to Calcutta for research on the story of Bonduki Sadagar, the Gun Merchant (3, 5). Initially he thinks that this is just a “wonder tale about fantastic places and people” (137). The legend is, however, tied to a real shrine in the Sundarbans, “the frontier where commerce and wilderness look each other directly in the eye” and where the “war between profit and Nature” is fought (8) – a space of ‘primitive accumulation’. In November 1970, the “Bhola cyclone” killed up to half a million people in this border region between India and Bangladesh (13). Local lore has it that one village however was miraculously protected by Manasa Devi, “the goddess of snakes” and “poisonous creatures” (14, cf. 5).
Datta reconstructs the legend of Bonduki Sadagar, a merchant who had fled overseas to escape the “persecution of Manasa Devi” (5). The story pits its “human protagonist” against “more powerful forces” (6). Tradition has it that the Gun Merchant was a “rich trader who had angered Manasa Devi by refusing to become her devotee” (16). His house was “invaded by swarms of snakes and scorpions” who killed his family (56). The Gun Merchant fled to a place called “Gun Island” or “Bonduk-dwip” (16, cf. 55, 75). There, however, he was bitten by a “poisonous spider” (17, 171). Finally, he agreed to build a shrine for Manasa Devi in Bengal (17). In exchange, the goddess supported his journey home by sending “all manner of creatures, of the sea and sky”. On a historical timeline, Bonduki Sadagar’s temple was probably built in the 17th century (21-22).
Following in Sadagar’s footsteps, Datta travels to the Sundarbans for a survey of the “historical monument” (18). Approaching the temple means walking across more than 200 meters of mud pierced by “mangrove spores” (65). Datta falls and feels as if his “body were being reclaimed by the primeval ooze.” (67) At the shrine, a king cobra almost kills Datta’s travel guide Tipu (77). For weeks, Datta is haunted by dreams: It was as if some fearsome “living thing” from the mud, viruses or bacteria, had entered his body (103). Face to these fantastic powers, Datta’s rationalistic worldview begins to crack. While he knows that “bacteria are a big part” of the human body (110), there is a possibility that they have taken possession of him (111). In Donna Haraway’s words, the protagonist of the novel ends up in a “Multispecies Muddle” (31-32).
Datta joins a conference in Los Angeles, where a historian gives a talk about “Climate and the Apocalypse in the Seventeenth Century” (Ghosh, Gun Island 121). He declares that this was a period of “severe climatic disruption”, described as the “Little Ice Age” (122). Temperatures may have fallen “because of the reforestation of vast tracts of land following on the genocide of Amerindian people after the European conquest of the Americas” (122). The historian suggests that mankind “started down the path that has brought us to where we are now” in the 17th century (124). The real proponents of the proposal – that the Anthropocene began in 1610 – are Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin (175, 177). Ghosh refers to them in in his book Parables for a Planet in Crisis (43, 269). Therefore, the historian of the novel may be regarded as a narrative anomaly, a metaleptic intrusion of the author into the fictional matrix. His audience is dominated by climate deniers, who ridicule the historian, but ironically right in that moment, an encroaching wildfire forces them to evacuate the building (115, 125). In the world of Ghosh’s novel, the environmental uncanny knows exactly when and where to strike.
Datta’s friend Professor Giacinta Schiavon, is an expert in the “history of Venice” (23). She points out that the term bundook, meaning “guns” in various parts of India, is a metonymy, referring to the place where guns were produced, none other than Venice (137). Thus, the “Gun Merchant” by the name of “Bonduki Sadagar” is in fact “The Merchant who visited Venice” (137, 138). Schiavon suggests that Datta’s story is about a “merchant, whose homeland, in Eastern India, is struck by drought and floods brought on by the climatic disturbances of the Little Ice Age” (141).
The parallels to Datta’s life are obvious. Facing bankruptcy due to the global financial crisis of 2008, Datta accepts a job as a translator for refugees from Bangladesh in Venice (146). In a “daydream”, he reflects on the “depiction of Manasa Devi” in the “Merchant legends of Bengal” (152). Datta sees her as an “intermediary” between “two species that had no language in common” (152-153). Without this trickster’s “mediation there could be no relationship between animal and human” except aggression (153). In his “quest for profit”, the Merchant would “recognize no restraint in relation to other living beings” (154). For their protection, Manasa Devi tried to get him to acknowledge her. When Datta comes to his senses, he dismisses the imaginary scenario as a “childlike fantasy” (154).
Reenacting the journey of Bonduki Sadagar, Datta faces similar threats as his predecessor in Venice (169, 171, 196-197, 203). While he still thinks that the events of his own story happen by “chance and coincidence” only (187), the fantastic world of the novel suggests that Manasa Devi had chosen Datta to succeed the Gun Merchant as his revenant (cf. 207). Datta is overcome by the “uncanny feeling” that he was not only dreaming, but that he was “being dreamed by creatures whose very existence was fantastical” to him, like cobras and spiders (208). One last time he tries to find a “scientific explanation” for his encounter with a North American “brown recluse spider” in Venice (214). He must admit that the spider’s “strange” (213) presence in Europe is the result of human action, causing “global warming”, thus establishing a direct “connection” between him as a representative of the human species and “that spider” (214), apparently a messenger of Manasa Devi. The lesson Datta must learn from this “unknown force” is that the earth system can “fight back”, not only animals but also “wind and weather” (216f.). In another uncanny encounter, worms are swarming over him and his companion Schiavon: “It was as if the earth itself had sent out tentacles to touch us” (231). As Haraway put it, they encounter “chthonic ones”, “replete with tentacles” and “spider legs” (2). She conjures up a spider with “many-armed allies”, concluding: “Myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene” (31).
In Venice, Datta is confronted with the “strange spectacle” of the flooded city” (Ghosh, Gun Island 234). More “strange weather” in the form of a “tornado” in a “twisting serpentine form” haunts the city (250). Datta’s job as a translator requires him to join an expedition to the Mediterranean, where a blue “refugee boat” is steering towards Italy (172f.). While the Italian government sends warships (173, 188), “right-wingers” appear for the showdown on chartered boats (264). Another “serpentine” twister appears on the scene (253), then dolphins and whales (261, 264, 265, 269, 275), and finally even “millions of birds” (281), like a “storm” (282), apparently a “major migration event” (274).
The blue refugee boat figures in the novel as a “symbol of everything that’s going wrong with the world – inequality, climate change, capitalism” (199). In Datta’s historical reflections, the vessel represents the “overturning of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe” (279). “European imperial powers” had changed the “demographic profile of the entire planet” by trafficking slaves and indentured laborers (278f.). Nonetheless, they had “always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe” (279). With the arrival of the Blue Boat, this biopolitical “project” had been “upended” (279). In a “miraculous spectacle”, scientifically called bioluminescence, the “color of the water around the refugee boat” changes to a glowing green (282). Face to the miracle, the admiral of the Italian warship, Sandro di Vigonovo, disobeys his orders and decides to rescue the refugees by transferring them to his ship (282–284).[2] While there could be a “scientific explanation” for everything that had happened, the “strange” thing however is, that “all of this is happening at the same moment” (284). This is what turns the event into an occurrence of the natural fantastic.
III. Contemporary history of the Anthropocene
In his Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Ghosh concludes that “climate change” is only one aspect of the crisis, caused by the “acceleration” of the last decades and “deeply rooted in history” (158). The ensuing devastation of human livelihoods is caused by “Earth systems”, largely “out of sight of those who are most responsible for animating those forces” (165). At the “heart of the planetary crisis”, Ghosh locates the practice of “colonial terraforming” (215).
In Down to Earth, Bruno Latour refers to the ‘migration crisis’ as the “Great Replacement” (103). While historically, “Europe has invaded all peoples”, nowadays “all peoples are coming to Europe in their turn” (103). The chiasmus stresses Europe’s responsibility (104). Ghosh’s captain Sandro di Vignovo is the allegory of Europe’s much needed ‘response-ability’ (Haraway). In the novel, Professor Schiavon reminds Datta that the “universe” speaks to us “through stories”, and if we don’t listen”, we will be punished (Ghosh, Gun Island 128). This commentary of Professor Schiavon is an explanation of the poetics of the book in the hands of the readers, another metalepsis. Through the “power of stories” – Schiavon insists – “silent beings” can speak to us (127).
According to Ghosh, the task of all the artists involved in the telling of stories is to “imaginatively” restore “agency and voice to nonhumans” (Ghosh. Nutmeg 204). He assumes that “hidden forces” are “manifesting themselves in climatic events of unprecedented and uncanny violence” (257). Ghosh’s Manasa Devi is a “maker and destroyer”, an allegory of Gaia, the earth system (cf. Haraway, Trouble, 43), while the cobra is her messenger (52). From this perspective, Ghosh’s Gun Island may be also read as a chthonic tale of the Chthulucene.
Works cited
Asaad, Lava. “Ethnographic Surrealism in Gun Island: Reorienting Climate Change Narrative.” South Asian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, 2023, 7–17, DOI:10.1080/02759527.2022.2159688, https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2022.2159688. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Behrendt, Eva. “Das Schlimmste kommt noch. In Manier des magischen Realismus beschreibt Amitav Ghosh in Die Inseln, was uns in Anbetracht des Klimawandels bevorsteht.” die tageszeitung (literataz), 15. Oct. 2019, 22. https://download.taz.de/literatazHerbstFBM19_15102019.pdf. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Caillois, Roger. “The Natural Fantastic.” 1970. Roger Caillois. The Edge of Surrealism. Edited by Claudine Frank. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, 349–357
Clark, Alex. “Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh review – climate and culture in crisis. Bengali legend blends with contemporary adventure in a novel finding new ways to write about migration and climate breakdown.” The Guardian, 5 June 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/05/gun-island-amitav-ghosh-review. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Ghosh, Amitav. Gun Island: A Novel. New Delhi: Penguin, 2019.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. London: John Murray, 2021.
Haraway, Donna J.: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016.
Kaur, Rajender: “Envisioning New Modes of Solidarity: Climate Change, Kinship, and the Uncanny in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island.” The Global South, vol. 16, no. 2, 2023, 114-134.
Khan, Rakibul Hasan: “Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island: The Climate Crisis and Planetary Environmentalism.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 65, no. 4, 2024, pp. 1–15, online ahead of print since 7 Feb 2024. DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2024.2314094, https://doi.org/10.1080. Accessed 16 July 2024.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. 2015. Translated by Catherine Porter. Medford, MA: Polity, 2017.
Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. 2017. Translated by Catherine Porter. Medford, MA: Polity, 2018.
Lewis, Simon and Mark Andrew Maslin. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature, vol. 519, 2017, 171–180.
Lovelock, James. Healing Gaia. Practical Medicine for the Planet. New York: Harmony Books 1991.
[1] See also Clark (online), Behrendt for ‘magical realism’ (22), Lava Asaad for “ethnographic Surrealism” (7, 12).
[2] Khan stresses that the happy ending of Gun Island offers “multispecies climate justice” (1). Kaur points out that Ghosh’s “utopian ending” refuses the “popularity of the dystopian mode that is the favored mode of climate fiction in the West” (129).