Ethnographic Surrealism in Gun Island: Reorienting Climate Change Narrative

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island brings to the forefront the inadequacy of realist fiction in presenting climate crisis. Assiduously, the novel teems with alternative modes of narration that dispenses with the authority of accurate representations of crisis. In this essay, I am applying James Clifford’s term “ethnographic Surrealism” in analyzing Ghosh’s representation of catastrophe in Gun Island. The inception of Surrealism in 1920s and 1930s in Europe was a recourse for its proponents to find new ways to process the aftermath of WWI. Similarly, I argue that Ghosh is dismissing strict realist fiction in writing about catastrophe. The novel has been lauded for its improbable realities, implausible connections, and folkloric Bengali legends. Ghosh is juxtaposing otherwise clashing cultural discourses to creatively characterize climate change. In this way, Ghosh is requestioning the prevalent mode of responding, mainly categorized by concealing or denying, to climate crisis through offering non-western and unscientific solutions that work on blurring the boundaries of “real” and “surreal” in countering climate catastrophes. Ghosh, as Clifford would argue, is emphasizing that cultural norms and production of knowledge about crisis is part of “artificial arrangements.” I argue that in writing about catastrophe, Ghosh does not start from the presupposition that reality is absolute; instead, Ghosh finds a utopia in reconstructing reality.