This is part 20 of a series on writing climate change for fiction.
Last time when we looked at character focused stories we touched on Realism. Now we need to dive deeper. As before, we’ve inherited a legacy from Realism which holds up a particular type of writing as “Good Writing” that creates problems when it comes to a writing about climate change. To put the problem simply: the world is going nuts and we don’t know what counts as realistic anymore.
Therefore “serious” and “realistic” writing struggles to handle our actual very serious reality.
“Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or a short story to the genre of science fiction. It is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.” – Amitav Ghosh
How to be Realistic (in literary terms)
Realism in its extreme form (Naturalism) is an explicit attempt to apply scientific thinking to literature, like in Emile Zola’s The Experimental Novel seeking a “literature governed by science”.
At the very least, the aim is to hold a mirror up to society. Much like our ideals around good journalism, the idea is to be objective, impartial, and show all sides. Stick to the facts. Show don’t tell. Show us how it really is.
This attempt might involve the following:
Focusing on middle to lower class characters, because this is the most common ordinary and therefore “real” experience.
Focusing on real world contemporary life, rather than idealized pasts or futures.
Avoiding heroes and villains, and instead showing all sides in an objective manner so that their actions can be understood as if by a scientist examining case studies.
Avoiding elevated language, and focusing on every day and colloquial language, the way people actually speak.
Focusing on detached description of observational details, and avoiding metaphor or simile or other techniques that push the author’s subjectivity onto the reader (e.g. “The dead fish stank like hell” vs “The dead fish had a strong scent of ammonia”).
Avoiding the fantastical and the improbable, and instead keeping things within the limits of “realistic” probability. For example, whatever political critique the story might involve, the story itself is non-revolutionary. What is “real” is what is ordinary for large numbers of people. Extreme events or the status quo suddenly changing is too implausible. That stuff just never happens in reality. Something outrageous, like, say, a pandemic that shuts down the entire world, just doesn’t happen in the lives of ordinary people. Pandemics only happen in science fiction, not to real people.
So...
Yeah...
You might be seeing a problem emerging here...
While the impulse behind this writing is in many ways admirable, it all hinges on what we consider to be “realistic”. One standard answer is that a 1990s era middle-class American family is a pretty good baseline for normal reality. Which is a pretty weird answer.
What the Hell is Realistic Anymore Anyway?
“Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real. What this means in practice is that the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it... an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend – may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive. ...consider how much harder a writer would have to work to set up a scene that is wildly improbable even in real life.” – Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh seems to have answered his own questions in Gun Island, packing the novel wall to wall with improbable coincidences and veering off into what starts looking like New Age spiritualism (is it all a coincidence... or is it all a “coincidence”??). Ghosh more or less ditched Realism in favour of myth and wonder.
And yet, to me the result does indeed feel contrived.
That constructed sense of reality is not something we can easily drop.
Also, as climate change nerd, Gun Island doesn’t feel all that true to how climate actually works. Climate change is more than just a series of bewildering and unlikely events.
So, can we save reality from reality? Is old man Pops doomed to join a New Age cult? What does it mean to hold a mirror up to reality when we have lost touch with reality?
Saving Realism?
Science fiction has zero problems here. We’re talking about a genre convention for literary writers who want to be considered “serious” and not get evicted to the sci-fi ghetto.
Meanwhile out in the ghetto...
“Science fiction is the realism of our time.” - Kim Stanley Robinson
The science fiction writer’s approach is roughly this:
Establish climate change as an element of your world-building.
Establish the rules by which climate change works.
Do whatever the hell you like, as long is follows the rules.
Use all those wonderful realist techniques to make the wackiness not feel too outrageous.
Science fiction has always done this. So, that’s the smart ass answer. Embrace our sci-fi reality.
However, when it comes to climate we might have some deeper problems here.
Scale
Realism is generally defining “realistic” in terms of what feels real at an individual level.
This throws us back into the same problem we had with character focused stories. The scale of human life is too small to understand climate change. Again, at the level of individual experience climate change is either invisible, or a series of freakish one off events.
This is why in Gun Island old man Pops can wander around the world feeling like the climate change is a series of spooky random happenings that might be connected spiritually but make no sense physically.
If you want to leave a story at that level that’s fine (it is true to many people’s experience), but if you want to give people an understanding of the world they live in then we need more.
Climate change doesn’t merely make improbable things happen. Far from it. In fact, entirely predictable things are happening (“We warned you!” shout the climate scientists).
First, the world is rapidly changing, so our expectations need to play catch up with reality. Second, and more importantly, we have a serious problem of scale.
When you ask a question the answer you get depends on the scale you look. Is Earth doomed? No and yes. In the next five seconds: No. In five million billion trillion years: yes.
Do lions and zebras live in the same place. No and yes. At a 1cm scale: No. At a 10000000000 km scale: Yes (and so do blue whales and the Kardashians).
Literature typically uses the scale of a single human life, over as short a time scale as one single day. At this scale tornadoes and wildfires are a freak events. Wildly improbable. At the millennia long, continental scales of climate, these events become boringly predictable (in probabilistic terms).
Therefore if a story is trapped at that small individual scale the world is often freakishly bizarre. Is it all random? Are spiritual forces involved?
No.
Nature simply works at many different scales. Sometimes those workings intersect with our lives. If we want to understand a freak event we have to jump up or down a level, and out of our individual self. Understanding comes with the correct scale.
The moment we gain some perspective these events cease to be random and improbable, instead they become patterned and probabilistic.
The great thing with stories is that we can jump up and down scales as much as we like, if we choose to do so. Being limited to a single character’s narrow perspective is a convention, not a necessity.
The Purpose of Art
As a final thought, here’s a major moral dilemma to worry about.
It flows out of the ideals that give us Realism to begin with – the commitment to objectivity. This is a dilemma shared by science and journalism, both of which aim to act as neutral observers, just as Realism aims to do. Give people the facts. Let them make up their own minds.
Here’s the problem: what are you, as an objective observer, supposed to do when the world decides to ignore reality and jump off a cliff carrying you with them?
Seriously! What do you do?
I’m not going to pretend to have an answer. But it’s a question everyone has to wrestle with these days. When is it enough to just observe? When is it necessary to pick a side and fight?
At some point I might cover explicitly activist writing. For now, it’s enough to note that even talking about climate change at all can come across as on-the-nose preaching. Climate is a politicized issue. Even plain realistic non-partisan descriptions, merely by raising the issue, can sound political. Confronting reality is taking a side when the other side is denying reality. Imagining a future at all is taking a stand.
Not only is it hard to know what counts as realistic anymore, it’s hard to know what counts as objective.
Next time we’ll continue exploring ways of writing climate, getting into good old tragedy and comedy.
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