Writing Climate Change (18)
Getting Literary – Modern Epic, Encyclopedias, and Giant Books About Everything
This is part 18 of a series on writing Climate Change for fiction.
As we saw previously something is just off when we try to do an epic about our contemporary world.
Epic is easiest for fantasy and the distant past, not modern reality. The heroism feels fake. That brutal good vs evil moral clarity is foreign to the bewildered modern mind. We no longer live in a world shaped by grand culture heroes who we worship uncritically.
Instead, our modern moment is an age of individuals within a kaleidoscopic web of complex interconnected systems: governance, communication, trade, and more. We are citizens of nations and of the world, and this world is bloody confusing.
Classical epic might be dead outside sci-fi/fantasy, but the modern world does produce sprawling works which are epic-like. These are very different beasts than classical epics.
Various attempts have been to classify and analyze these works. I won’t get too much into that because it’s a body of theory I make no claims to understand. Mostly I’m going to pluck out techniques from these epic-likes and take a look at why these might work for a climate story.
This is a fairly major one, because alongside Apocalypse and the Weird, Epic-like appears to be one of the major forms that people are going for when writing climate.
Epic-likes
The kind of books that get put into this category are things like Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. These works are big and sprawling, trying to get everything in there. And yet, they’re not heroic works like classical epic. They might still be trying to answer the question “Who are we?” but the modern answer has become so large it encompasses the whole world.
A few theories out there try to explain what’s going on.
The idea of the Encyclopedic Narrative, as the name suggests, is a work that tries to get the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a culture into one book. The idea of the Modern Epic might be summarized as being what epic looks like when you rule the entire world – as has happened with the modern globalized world order. Again, that means getting a lot of stuff in there from all over the place. Both of these concepts appear to overlap considerably.
I’d also like to add in a third idea, which is important for climate change. I’m going to call this “System Stories”. These are stories where the driving force of events is not people as such, but abstract systems. The aim of the story is to explore the system. The film The Big Short is the kind of thing I have in mind – an almost documentary like exploration of the Global Financial Crash and the complex systemic forces that allowed that to happen. Again, when it comes to actual techniques this overlaps a lot with the above.
Regardless of what we call this stuff, a similar impulse is driving these stories. Similar techniques are used to achieve similar effects.
A Climate Epic-like Example
For climate change the definitional work would have to be Ministry for the Future. It pushes this style of writing to the extreme. Indeed it pushes the very limits of what it means to be a novel, and uses many of the techniques we’ll look at here.
Ministry for the Future consists of short chapters which can consist of anything from anywhere, and fly by in an effect similar to browsing the internet for the next fifty years. Collectively this wave of incoherent information draws a kind of gestalt image of an entire world slowly coming to terms with climate change. Depth of character and plot are sacrificed in the interests of this sheer enormity of scope.
That scope is necessary to communicate just how large and interconnected climate change really is, that complex system of interconnected cause and effect. That scope is also necessary to avoid the pitfalls of epic heroes saving the universe that we discussed last time. In this kind of story even the most epic of heroes is dwarfed by the sheer enormity of their context.
The appeal of this kind of writing for exploring climate change is fairly obvious. Climate change is enormous, systemic, past present and future, highly technical, and all encompassing.
This kind of writing is for when you want to tell it all. The big picture. How it all fits together. If you want to capture the totality of climate change, how else?
Now, let’s consider the techniques...
The Infodump
Standard writing advice is that infodumps should be eliminated. Infodumps are seen as failed exposition. Infodumps should be fixed by removing unnecessary information, and blending what remains into the story’s action.
Typically that’s great advice.
And then... you get a work like Moby Dick that gives you an entire chapter on whale classification. Suffice to say the kind of story were discussing here drop-kicks the infodump advice out the window.
The problem with bad infodumps is that they are boring and distracting. But they don’t have to be.
The driving impulse in sprawling epic-likes might be summed up as this: The more information the reader has the better they’ll be able to understand what’s going on. The world is so complicated that it’s impossible to give them too much information. Therefore my reader will be interested in almost anything.
Climate change is full of information that really just has to be info-dumped to understand. Like, how do you tell a story were a major driver of events is the abstract economic concept of a Discount Rate as applies in Cost Benefit Analysis in corporate and governmental planning procedures? And just think of all the scientific jargon required to properly explain how burning oil in Texas can cause floods in Pakistan. Concepts like this get taught in university lectures, and even then half the students have no idea what the hell any of it means.
The info-dump is the tool for this stuff. And an info-dump can be entertaining.
The Big Short gloriously info-dumps in the form of 4th Wall Breaking celebrity cameos, such as Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining financial jargon. This is a lot of fun. Likewise Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is loved because it has info-dumping encyclopaedia-style entries. They just happen to be hilarious.
So long as the infodump works then it’s a long way from being mere failed exposition.
Digressions
Similar to infodumps, if the aim is to get the reader to understand the context of things (and our context is enormous), we’ll spend a lot time wandering off away from the main action of the story. Side issues. Back story. Unrelated topics. Whatever happens to be appropriate.
Standard advice would be to cut this as “excess material”. But is it really excess if the whole point is to communicate the totality of things? Climate change is so thoroughly interconnected you can follow the threads back to the swamps of the Carboniferous epoch or forward into a post-human future, or across space to the lives of every living thing alive today.
Again, as long it’s entertaining then it works. Digression has been in literature for thousands of years.
Multiple Forms
Part of the impulse to get everything from everywhere extends to the writing itself: multiple forms of text.
Poems. Plays. Dialogues. Myths. Religious texts. Newspaper articles. Film transcripts. Letters. Diary entries. The minutes from a meeting. Everything.
This impulse can extend to straight up collage, by lifting pieces wholesale from other texts (or perhaps inventing new versions that look much the same). The resulting text is fragmented, incoherent, yet totalizing as it captures not only the breadth of the subject but the breadth of ways of communicating that subject.
As for climate change, this means that hard facts can be done alongside surrealism alongside the deeply personal alongside the cosmic. Every mode has strengths and weaknesses. Here we can overcome their individual weaknesses by using all of them at once. The power of any particular style can be leveraged at any time when it is the most powerful style for the subject.
The end product can be fairly unusual, especially if it’s pushed to an extreme, but it can be made to work.
Multiple Plot Lines
A single individual in a single location is far too small to fully encompass a subject of enormous scale. The obvious answer is to tell more than one story.
This could be done with multiple main characters scattered across space whose lives only loosely intertwine, or by having multiple plots separated in time.
The appeal of doing this for climate is fairly obvious. Setting one plot line in 1885, another in 1985, and yet another in 2085 sets up ample room to explore how climate change started, why it wasn’t stopped, and what the consequences are. This three part story does in fact look like it might become a cli-fi cliche. I’ve seen it pop up a few places now.
Polyphony
The idea that climate change might have a single meaning (or a single cause/solution/etc), or that ways of framing the issue are anything more than that – frames and perspectives – is itself part of the deep root causes of climate change.
Imperialism and capitalism have historically acted by dominating and limiting the possibility and validity of other perspectives. The cognitive space of the world was shrunk into an ever narrower range of valid views. Land became something to plant a flag on before the other guy. Nature became a set of tradable commodities. All other meanings were stripped out, sidelined, and culturally assimilated.
Applied to literature, to use the jargon, this narrowness of perspective is a Monologic way of storytelling. The author’s singular ideological position is demonstrated throughout the text. All characters, places, and events exist as positive or negative examples to demonstrate the truth of the author’s position. The author asserts their authority. This isn’t necessarily bad per se, but it’s certainly one-sided.
In a Polyphonic way of storytelling the author acknowledges their own position as only one among many viewpoints. The other views are free to speak as themselves, not merely as demonstration pieces to advance the author’s views. Characters tell the truth as they see it. These contrasting viewpoints then come into dialogue and whatever truth is to be found emerges from that interaction. The author enters into dialogue in a collective search for the truth.
Truth is not independent of people. Sights cannot exist without eyes to see. Ideas cannot exist without minds to think. A book, even if its pages are full of 100% objectively true facts, only exists as truth when read. Therefore viewpoint is central.
To think is to be in dialogue, to accept or reject the words others once chose, to invent new words or return to old words, to see the world through the eyes of a vast conversation. Polyphonic stories bring this conversation explicitly onto the page.
Many of the above techniques can feed into a polyphonic way of writing. The multiple plots, styles, the digressions. It can all serve to bring in new voices and perspectives, provided they are allowed to speak as themselves. From out of this chaotic dialogue, hopefully, emerges something greater than the sum of its parts – a kind of collective grasping for a truth bigger than any one of us.
“Climate Change” as such doesn’t exist. The concept is an abstraction. What does exist are things like: smokestacks, coalmines, air, oceans, sunlight, politicians, trees, fish, protest signs, children, advertising campaigns, hurricanes, and raindrops. Collectively all of these things are “Climate Change”. This experience can be the apocalypse or a non-event depending on one’s point of view. None of us can truly grasp the totality alone. Any singular grand narrative we try to impose upon this event-beyond-events soon falls apart. The truth is too large.
Conclusion
Because climate change is so vast many writers seems to be gravitating towards this kind of writing.
These techniques tend to make for works that are large, difficult, and unconventional. Not every work could or would want to go all in on every one of these techniques. However, when done well, this would seem to be the best way of capturing the true scale of the climate crisis.
Next time we’ll continue exploring ways of writing climate.
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This is a terrific overview of the epic-style novel. I was blown away by Ministry for the Future's mode of storytelling, esp the info dumps. It reminded me of Victorian novels where you could get away with that kind of detail and digression. It also made me think (rather bitterly) that only a male writer could be spout off like that without the stern editor striking most of it away. This is by far a more generous interpretation.