Yesterday I mentioned in passing some counterpoints to Amitav Ghosh’s argument that modern bougie narrative can’t handle catastrophe. Now I’d like to get into it a little more. Ghosh acknowledges that catastrophism has its place in sci-fi and fantasy, so I’m going to stick to texts that most people would count as “literary” fiction.
First, there’s the earthquakes. Kleist’s “The Earthquake in Chile” and Wilder’s The Bridge Over San Luis Rey are both wonderful in their way. Do they show that post-enlightenment fiction can handle catastrophe? At a distance, sure. Catastrophe is something that happens elsewhere – in fiction, anyhow. Both writers are probably looking back to Voltaire’s account of the Lisbon Earthquake – a tremor that helped knock down the ancien regime. But that’s the kind of thing that happens only in reality. Novels and short stories are still, as Ghosh suggests, invested in preserving the fiction of a stable world at home.
The other thing is that both these texts are already meta-commentaries on the conventions of bougie novels. For Kleist as for Wilder, the earthquake is a device for bringing together people from different places and classes in felicitous ways – in short, a source of coincidences. Since coincidence is the bete noir of “literary” fiction, generally regarded by critics as a narrative shortcut for the lazy, the earthquakes in these stories represent a catastrophe not only for the characters they entrap but also for the form of the novel. Catastrophe is (only) the occasion for expressions of literate self-awareness.
Coetzee is a more complicated case. Someday, once I’ve reread it, I’ll post something that sets Waiting for the Barbarians side-by-side with Rutilius’ DRS. I suspect the comparison would be fruitful – but these are social, not natural, catastrophes, and not exactly what Ghosh is talking about.
Someone that I forgot to mention last time is Colson Whitehead, whose zombie apocalypse Zone One got its claws in me last December. It’s probably the least well-reviewed of Whitehead’s books, in my view undeservedly. At the risk of giving away something about the ending that every reader probably suspects from the get-go, the narrator’s knack for outwitting and escaping zombie hordes turns out to reflect his experience as a black man in pre-apocalypse America. Key and Peele played this conceit for laughs; Colson Whitehead does the other thing.
Post-Trump, it seems prophetic, and I don’t think anyone should now be writing off a novel in which your fellow citizens turn on you en masse as just “genre fiction.” Whitehead writes social collapse as a natural disaster; it’s global warming in reverse.
I can’t help but think of Zone One in connection with Whitehead’s nonfiction book about poker. Unlike most people who write about poker, Whitehead acknowledges that he’s a loser. For him, playing the game is all about learning how to inhabit that role.
To keep on playing the game just so you know how it feels to lose – that must be what it’s like not to have a stake in stability. The rules are against you, so who cares if they’re radically disrupted? Things aren’t all that much worse for Zone One‘s narrator after the zombies come that they were before.
Winners write most of the novels that we have a chance to read. They, and for the most part their characters, are seriously invested in the continued stability of the bourgeois background. These people aren’t going to capture global warming on the page, but someone with the spirit of Colson Whitehead might.