Amanda Anderson: So could you give an example of a novel that deploys some of these kinds of strategies or new forms, and how they’re challenging our traditional conceptions of plot or narrative mode or style of characterization?
Debjani Ganguly: So one very good example is a novel by Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, published in 2004. And when the novel appeared, the idea of catastrophe, interestingly, was associated more with geopolitical upheavals such as the 9/11 and global state of war, rather than climate change. The novel is set in the Sundarbans, a vast deltaic region of mangrove forest, straddling the two districts in the state of West Bengal in India and Southern Bangladesh, and Sundarbans is also one of the most complex and endangered ecological zones in the world. So since its publication, the novel has overwhelmingly been read as a postcolonial classic, staging an agonistic battle between the demands of environmental conservation, species extinction, and the urgency of social justice for refugees. So it has a very distinct plot where the battle over certain refugees resettled by the government in this particular endangered zone—there is a political and social unfolding of that crisis with very distinct characterization of this crisis.
What I trace in my reading is, if one reads this novel through the planetary lens, then certain other aspects begin to come to the fore, the forcings of the geophysical and the climatological on the Sundarbans. And in some senses, the climatological catastrophe and the humanitarian catastrophe begins to get braided in the novel’s structure, in the way the novel’s plot unfolds. And this braiding is mediated by a character—so, the novel does not abjure characterization.
In fact, there is a very powerful character called Nirmal, who is actually dead in the diegetic plot of the novel, but his presence in the novel appears in the form of a journal and throughout the journal, he reflects on the precarity of human and non-human lives in the Sundarbans. And this braiding of the humanitarian catastrophe and the geophysical catastrophe is captured in the novel’s textual design, such that Nirmal’s diary appears in italics and alternates with the rest of the narrative in normal typography. And The Hungry Tide brilliantly illustrates what I’ve been calling this braiding of historical time and geological time in planetary realism.
And three features in particular are probably worth noting. The first is the novel’s magnificent depiction of the Sundarbans as an ecological and geological force. It appears as an actant, more powerful than humans in the novel, and one that determines the fate of both human and non-human actors. The second is the novel’s spectacular capture of multi-species relationality through the figure of the endangered dolphin, the Irrawaddy dolphin, that Ghosh writes about extensively in the novel; the role of the cetologist, Piya Roy, [and] the fisherman, Fokir; and the tides in which they explore, swim in, and even fatally encounter a world teeming with crabs, shrimps, and other aquatic creatures. So this multi-species entanglement constitutes the novel’s biotic surround. And the third feature of the novel is how it braids mythographical and geological time with the historical. It’s a fine illustration of the scalar recalibration that goes on in the novel, a recombinant literary mode that registers human-generated climatological shocks as they reverberate in the present.
Amanda Anderson: I’m struck in your description by the interesting ways in which you see the novel moving beyond the framework of the political. It puts me in mind, too, in thinking about your description of the use of the journal within the narrative, of the 19th-century novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, which has an alternation between a third-person omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator, Esther, and part of what’s so estranging about that novel is that it is attempting to force the reader to think from a systems perspective even as they enter into the experience of the individual first-person narrator. I’m just struck because there’s a way in which omniscience in the 19th century is trying to do something estranging as well, trying to force readers to think from—the standpoint of sociology is one way to put it, but another way to put it is just, from a perspective that really isn’t human, and it’s about an evolving perspective linked to a form of knowledge. So I’m struck by the continuity between that sort of example and the profound discontinuity.
In addition to your important scholarly work, you also direct a humanities research institute at Virginia, and you previously directed a humanities research center at the Australian National University. I’m curious: how has the experience directing research centers influenced your scholarship and your approach to humanities research more generally—and your understanding of catastrophe, I guess I would say?
Debjani Ganguly: Well, my experience in directing humanities centers and institutes these past 14 years now has been central to the way my projects have unfolded, and especially this particular project. While I, of course, work within my discipline and work with genres and forms that we are trained to read, the opening up of humanistic horizons, of humanities research, through various meta challenges of the late 20th and 21st century—whether they are the environmental, the digital, the technospheric—they have been central to the way I have begun to imagine the role of humanities research and humanities scholarship.
One window that one has a point of entry in through in directing humanities research centers is various avenues of conversation with multiple disciplines, not just disciplines that are proximate to us—the social sciences, the interpretive sciences, science and technology studies—but also for instance, the environmental sciences, computational sciences, the legal sciences. And the various collaborative nodes and projects that emerged over the years have suddenly opened and widened my grasp of thinking through what it means to live in our times and how we begin to find a language that braids insights from these various multidisciplinary engagements and also critical theoretical paradigms.
So I found my experience hugely generative, and certainly I could not have imagined beginning this work and writing about, say, drones, or writing about thinking the human through the machinic, without the work of the humanities informatics lab that I helped co-establish at my institute in Virginia. We are focused on the impact of this new phase of digital intensification of our lives through web 2.0, social media, the rise of big data, algorithmic reasoning—what implications this has for the way we imagine global public spheres, the role of imagination, the role of literary and creative genres, our philosophical and moral orientation to some of the fundamental questions about human existence. And so I’m deeply indebted to the work of the collective research and collectivity that emerges in our institutes.