Narrative Horizons: Deliberate Derangement in Oceanic Climate Fiction

ABSTRACT Although we live in the Anthropocene—the geological age of humankind, wherein humans have measurably impacted the biosphere—we struggle to narrate the Anthropocene. In particular, we struggle to give narrative shape to its foremost feature: anthropogenic climate change. Describing the limits of storytelling in the era of human‐driven climate change, both David Wallace‐Wells and Amitav Ghosh identify a “failure of imagination” in popular media. Ghosh defines our age as one of “derangement”—i.e., a distorted, anthropocentric worldview characterized by “modes of concealment” at odds with our supposed ecological self‐awareness. Literature often enables such derangement, and many critics have taken fiction to task over its inability to narrate the climate crisis. In my article, I conversely suggest the generative possibilities of derangement in climate‐minded fiction. I analyze how certain texts make narrative fodder out of our “failure of imagination,” telling human‐centered stories about our inability to tell nonhuman stories—a process of representation and reception I call deliberate derangement . I focus on a pair of climate fictions set around bodies of water: A. S. Byatt's “Sea Story” (2013) and Vajra Chandrasekera's “Half‐Eaten Cities” (2018). I argue that these two cli‐fi short stories explicitly embrace and enact “modes of concealment” in order to call attention to the barriers and boundaries that impede humanity's ecological imagination. This deliberate derangement occurs via human encounters with the material and symbolic waters of the ocean, a planetary‐scale nonhuman entity whose presence and agency highlights the limits of a human‐centered worldview. By actively foregrounding literal (and littoral), cognitive, and narrative horizons, this pair of oceanic cli‐fi texts seek to show us the Anthropocene by not showing us the Anthropocene. What results is an uncanny presence‐in‐absence—a haunting reminder of our deranged, limited awareness of the more‐than‐human world.