This is part 19 of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
“I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown, 1924
“At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 2016
The gold standard of “serious” writing for the past century or more has been the character focused story. This goes back at least to the Romantic movement over two hundred years ago.
In this style of writing, the heart of any story is the individual moral adventure. Your story must have a main character. Your story is about this character. Your story must trace the arc or this character’s moral development. We are looking inwards to that individual’s choices, their thoughts, their emotions. Good writing technique is aimed at bringing forward that individual experience. First person perspective. Free indirect speech. Stream of consciousness. Describing the world through the eyes of character. The aim is to go inwards. The aim is to understand the self.
The character focused story was a historical choice that emerged alongside individualism. Now, as we confront an era of climate change this choice increasingly begins to feel like the wrong choice. The obvious answer is to ditch these individualistic stories and do the style of writing we looked at previously, writing of the grandest scale possible, the true scale required to understand climate change in its totality. And yet something is lacking from that writing too.
I am not the scale of a planet. I will not live one thousand years. I must live my life. Me. Here. Now.
What am I supposed to do?
What good is understanding the grand cosmic context of it all, if I don’t know how to live?
That story of the individual moral adventure has produced some of the greatest literature in history. Rather than throw out the classics, let’s see if we can re-imagine the character focused story in an age of collective crisis.
Some History
As far as I can tell this turn inwards to the self really kicked off with the Romantics. Thoreau musing beside Walden Pond, choosing to live deliberately, is the archetypal kind of guy. The basic idea runs something like this:
The aim of life is to be a liberated individual. Follow your own path. Dream your own dreams. Listen to your heart.
Being free in society is difficult. Society is a real problem. It’s full of arbitrary rules, constraints, illusions, and general foulness.
The answer is to escape society. Move to the woods where there aren’t any people. Live beside a pond. Strip off the corrupting influence of civilization. Out here communing with nature you can find the truth. Know who you really are. Feel how it all really is. etc etc.
The Romantic’s individualistic view of life took over the West.
After two-hundred years the result is both liberating and toxic. We have more individual freedoms than almost any civilization in history. We also have tech-bros moving fast and breaking things rather badly. We also have a society of isolated, atomized, consumers living under a political system which tries to solve collective problems via individual choices. This stuff even helped give us the Nazis.
The Romantics have been and gone, but literature has never moved past individualism. In the 19th century Realism and Naturalism pushed back against the Romantics. What they pushed back against, however, was the juvenile emotionality and not the focus on the self. Instead they attempted to make storytelling more like science. Their aim was to be objective.
Explain how your character has come to be. Explore the factors of heredity and environment. Explore the process of Darwinian social evolution that explain precisely why Betsy murdered Arthur with a candlestick in the kitchen. Give us the facts. Give us the details. Don’t take sides, just observe.
This too has been enormously influential on modern writing and sensibilities. Have you ever you’ve looked at some horrid scandal in the News, and thought, “Yes, yes, but if only we understood Betsy’s childhood, then we’d know why she murdered her husband with a candlestick.”? That’s the Realist impulse.
Various other literary movements have come and gone over the years. Individualism has typically remained central. Neither modernism nor post-modernism seem to have made any meaningful break from individualism, rather they found new ways to express that individual experience. If anything the trend was towards a fragmentation in which the only thing holding the text together is that central individual.
So that’s our history. Any contemporary writer is living in a world we these are our classics. These are the books you ought to read. This is good writing.
And along comes climate change.
And it doesn’t work anymore.
The Individual VS The Global Climate
History’s largest storm so far was Typhoon Tip in 1979, a Category 5 Super Typhoon with a peak sustained wind speed of 300 km/h, and a diameter of 2220 km. That’s large enough to reach from Canada to Mexico.
All of humanity could fit within Typhoon Tip. Climate change is expected to make storms get larger over time. When we consider climate change from that solitary view deep within one individual’s inner emotional world, we hear one sound:
Screaming.
A vast chasm opens up between the self and the cosmic forces of nature. The standard experience of the individual confronted by climate change is of overwhelm, incomprehension, and powerlessness.
When character focused writing attempts to take on climate change the risk is to sink into some version of terrified screaming. Overwhelming terror. A world out of my control. Burning down. The future darkening. All my actions made futile and absurd. Here’s me, little me, eating my vegetables and riding my bicycle like a superstitious talisman against the End of Times. My actions have no effect on anything, and their results will last ten-thousand years.
Perhaps more troubling still than screaming, we might hear another sound:
Silence.
Climate change is too big to be seen by the isolated individual. We are trying to observe the curvature of the Earth from inside a bathroom stall. Looks flat to me!
Being limited to silence or a scream aint great.
A Bigger Self
Neither character focused stories nor individualism are inherently bad, rather they are incomplete when it comes to confronting topics of massive scale.
I’m not sure what the answer to this is, but here’s one attempt at a way out: The Ecological Self. If me is too small, maybe I need to get me a bigger me.
Allow me to define my terms.
“Ecological Self” does get used in Deep Ecology, and some people take if off into woo-woo pantheistic spiritual directions. I’m not interested in ego-dissolving spirituality here. My understanding of an ecological self is something I arrived at long before I’d ever heard of Deep Ecology, because when you study ecology the following idea is fairly obvious.
By ecological self, I simply mean the individual in their ecological context. We are what we eat, drink, breath, urinate, etc. We are our social relationships. We are our clothes. We are the landscapes we live in. Remove us from the landscape and both us and the landscape are changed. When indigenous people say, “I am the land”, this is what I mean.
Now, if you want to take this further and have telepathic connections with trees that’s on you. I’m just talking about the brute material facts here. To put this in scientific terms I’m talking about “System Boundaries”. All living things are complex adaptive systems existing in a network of other complex systems. The boundaries between these systems are blurry and arbitrary. The boundary between you and the outside world exists in your head. It’s conceptual. The bacteria in your gut don’t see it. The air in your lungs doesn’t see it. If we follow all possible connections for any system we end up with the entire observable universe. For simplicity we draw boundaries around things. We get to decide where those boundaries go.
The problem with character focused stories is that their conception of the individual is microscopic. The boundaries are pulled in as tight as possible. You are an entity that lives inside your brain. Hell, even your brain isn’t under your control. You might just be the frontal lobes. You are a mere part, desperately trying to seize control of a body ruled by external animal instincts. Therefore the boundaries of a literary character usually fall somewhere between their innermost secret desires, and the kitchen sink.
Now, I am presenting the ecological self here as a way to write character focused stories about climate change. Is the ecological self also the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Is this how we merge with the Dao and transcend mortality? Maybe, but that’s another issue.
When it comes to writing, the ecological self serves another purpose. It gets us into a “middle space”. Climate change in its totality is too big. The individual is too small. By reaching our vision of the self out a bit, we can close the gap. And we can do this while still focusing on character.
What this looks like in practice is still something I’m figuring out, but it’s likely to mean bringing the focus out a bit from tight first person stream-of-consciousness, and paying more attention to the character’s relationships – both human and nonhuman, living and nonliving.
As an example, consider how a landscape can “think” through people. A trash-strewn highway induces anger and desolation, whoever the person might be. Likewise, a pleasant pond induces happiness and relaxation. Who then is directing what is being thought? Is it the individual? Is it the self-in-landscape? Is it the landscape-in-self? The boundaries between place and person are fluid.
To get us even further into the “middle space”, we might want to consider widening the time frame too. One person on one day is too small. But one person over a lifetime begins to take on the scale required to confront climate change.
Likewise we can do the opposite to climate change itself. This massively interconnected hyperobject can be broken down into smaller chunks. A single flood exists at a human scale in a way that “climate change” does not.
The aim then with all this is to mimic some advice for effective activism. You are too small for your individual choices to mean much. You are also too powerless to change the entire world. Therefore the answer is to act in that middle space where you have enough power to make a difference and the results are not so small as to be meaningless.
The Individual in an Age of Climate Crisis
Every era poses us with new questions about what it means to live. A character focused story will inevitably spend time exploring those questions.
Climate change is throwing us a fairly wild set of questions to deal with. Here’s a few of the bigger ones.
Freedom & Responsibility
Thoreau still resonates today because many of the problems he was banging his head against still exist. His self-set task of breaking free from a culture he didn’t agree with remains for us today.
If anything our task is greater. It was enough for the Romantics to escape for the purposes of living their own idiosyncratic life. We must escape for the purposes of planetary survival. To merely go along with the status quo is to participate in an unimaginable moral crime. Personal freedom and global responsibility have become linked.
The task of today’s liberated individual is to not merely escape society and live alone, but to escape society so that society can be remade.
Hope & Fear
Every crisis is terrifying. Every crisis is an opportunity. It’s not often the entire world is forced to question itself at the level of fundamentals. It’s not often the entire world is faced with existential destruction.
The emotional space of climate change is torn between simultaneous terror and excitement. We each live with a profound uncertainty, where the present takes on double meaning, flickering between hope and fear depending on the mood of the moment. Good and bad futures are unfolding simultaneously, themselves shaped by the balance between our own hopes and fears which drive the actions we choose to take.
Grief & Creation
When those future possibilities at last take shape in the present, we are struck with either death or birth. We live then in a space of loss as well as the struggles of a new life. Grief might have the upper hand for most people at present, but increasingly we are all being called into a space of creation. This is one wild moment in which to be alive.
Confusion & Belief
Propaganda war has been a longstanding part of climate change as an issue. While we are moving out of the straight up denial phase this battle over belief is still going on. We live in a world where people are fragmented into alternative realities on this issue.
Even if we can get our facts straight we are still confronted by considerable confusion. Climate change is inherently uncertain. We don’t know what will happen. We don’t know what actions are the right choice.
Even if we can get that straight it’s still not clear what I as an individual ought to do. Should I sacrifice my life for the cause? Should I sit back and enjoy front row seats to the apocalyptic spectacle? Should I try to live a “normal” life? Should I head to the hills and build a bomb shelter?
The answers are not obvious.
Division & Unity
Climate change unites the whole world, and divides us too.
The moment anyone decides they care about climate change, they are united with millions around the world who share their concerns. And yet, climate injustice cuts right through even intimate relationships, pulling families apart, dividing children from their parents. The divides between rich and poor, between young and old are taking on apocalyptic dimensions. People must now navigate relationships in a world were previously trivial disagreements, like choice of diet or transport, are weighted with level of significance more familiar to the world of religion.
Absurdity & Meaning
We’ve already touched on how bonkers society is when we looked at hypernormalization. The flip side is that we are also in a moment when individual lives have the capacity to be profoundly meaningful. Historians will study this moment to figure out what the hell we were doing. This moment of geological creation and destruction puts the individual in a position of both profound powerlessness and profound influence. Whatever we each choose to do, those actions will echo for a long time.
We are not merely wrestling with the eternal question, “What does it mean to live?” We are also living at a moment when the burden of historical responsibility on that life is immense.
Anger & Power
If you’ve been paying much attention to climate issues, you maybe, just maybe, might be a little bit pissed off. Beyond hope and fear one of the dominant emotions of climate change has to be anger. We are not all equally responsible here.
(How dare you!)
On the flip side of this anger is our experiences with power. We are confronted by the actions of power, our own powerlessness, but also a large expansion in our own attempts to exercise power. Our lives have become shot through with questions of power and consequences.
For example, take someone who neurotically sorts their garbage into the correct recycling bins. They do this because they think this action will “help the planet”. While the action might in itself be futile, their relationship to that action has changed profoundly.
This individual is attempting to exercise their power in the world. Unlike their grandparents, they are not merely throwing out the trash, they are attempting to alter the course of world history by throwing out the trash. That’s a big shift in perception.
Values and Concepts
Climate change challenges all sorts of cherised ideas. For simplicity let’s just look at how we think about nature.
The original Romantic impulse was to find yourself by escaping into nature. Climate change brings us the “Death of Nature”. Humanity cannot be escaped no matter where you go. Instead we must truly grapple with what it means to say that humans are part of nature. If you want to find transcendence in nature today, you might be trying to find it under a freeway overpass.
While it might seem absurd to commune with nature in a toxic wasteland hellscape under a concrete highway, that is because of the design of the highway, not anything inherent to the reality of nature.
Every highway has an ecology. At root a highway is a “natural” space built of “natural” materials by a “natural” species of animal. Highways are ecosystems. Doing botany in these spaces only appears absurd because we built highways as if ecology doesn’t exist. Nature isn’t supposed to be here, and yet it is, because all spaces transcend humanity, escape our control, and fill up with frogs when it rains. Therefore, if you really want to, you can commune with nature under a freeway.
Nature is everywhere if humans are nature too. That’s a big mind shift a lot of people might have to make as our world is transformed by human induced climate change.
Conclusion
The West has been fixated on individualistic moral adventures for a long time. Modern individualism has in many ways become toxic, standing in the way of understanding or dealing with climate change. Enlarging our idea of what it means to be a free individual might serve as a way out from at least some of that toxicity, allowing us to dive into the emotional landscape of climate change without being too overwhelmed or missing the point. Character focused stories are not going away any time soon, nor would we want them to.
Next time we’ll continue exploring ways of writing climate.
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