What is the Environmental Uncanny? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Brittni Wisner and Tiffany Boyles
Literature and Culture MA Students
Nov. 7, 2024
Imagine you’re walking home from school. As you’re walking, dark clouds roll in overhead. Seeing the signs of a coming storm, you decide to go down a road you don’t usually take on your commute. As you’re walking down this road you see a shape begin to take form in the distance – an enormous, twisting, howling thing. The storm has become a tornado. Naturally, you’re terrified, but you and a few others on the road quickly seek shelter in a nearby building. After a while, the storm passes. You’re safe. But when you and the others emerge from your shelter you see that the landscape has been flattened and littered with debris. The tornado has rendered the space unrecognizable.
In his book The Great Derangement, literary critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh shares a version of this story – one he actually experienced. In doing so, Ghosh suggests that as climate change renders our encounters with natural disasters more common, we are forced to face once familiar environments in new and unfamiliar ways. If you’ve seen our literary terms video on the uncanny, this transformation is probably ringing some bells. But while we may have childhood fears of tornadoes, this doesn’t seem irrational, right? I’m certainly more likely to be mowed down by a tornado than a talking doll. So how might the environmental uncanny differ from something like the supernatural uncanny? Or alternatively, how are these things connected?
To better understand this, let’s turn to Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny. Near the end of this essay Freud suggests that childhood is to the individual what “primitive cultures” are to humanity. In both stages, Freud argues that people in these stages of development are prone to irrational beliefs about the world around them – such as the belief that seemingly lifeless objects are, in fact, alive. Freud suggests that on our path to maturity we have to move beyond these beliefs in order to rationally understand our reality. Of course, Freud’s description of non-Western or “pre-modern” cultures as “primitive” is not only deeply rooted in racism and imperialism but, as we see with the environmental uncanny, it is also wrong.
But what is imperialism? The Oxford English Dictionary defines imperialism as “the advocacy of holding political dominion or control over dependent territories.” For our purposes, we’re mostly thinking about the British Empire and its legacy in our contemporary spaces, be it political, social, or economic. For example, as Ghosh suggests, we can track the way capitalism spread in the 18th century alongside the global development of the British Empire. Now, it is true that due to imperialism, many of us have adopted “rational” configurations of the world. We imagine that humans and nature are separate. Or that our environments are lifeless backdrops to human narratives. But in a time when the world is changing rapidly, our environments are no longer static.
And with climate change, individual effort is not enough to surmount those “rational” beliefs about the world. If we want to understand what’s uncanny about our changing environment, we need to collectively recognize what was repressed and how that repression is affecting us today. What we need is a way to understand how climate change is linked to human action across huge spans of time. And what better way to understand that than through literature?
To continue thinking about this, let’s turn to the short story “When We Are Ruins, Dance on Us” by M. Jesuthasan. By telling the story from the perspective of a building, Jesuthasan blurs our sense of protagonist and setting. And because our building-protagonist is the ancient Supreme Court of Singapore, its understanding of time is fundamentally different from the standard human protagonist.
But, we should also note that this building does not exist totally outside of human time or history. As the former Supreme Court of Singapore, our protagonist is a relic of an imperial past. The building even says, “We are God-fearing, Queen-serving solids.” Thus, the building is a stand-in for the values of the British Empire – and it is bearing witness to the effects of those values. After all, it was the same empire that created the Supreme Court that also established the “petrochemical” economy on the island. And it was that very economic system that would lead to the food shortages, energy crisis, and heat waves that the building has witnessed over the centuries. The building’s perspective allows us to bridge connections between imperial pasts, climate change, and the uncanny environments emerging from those connections.
While it may have been enough for the readers to gather a sense of the environmental uncanny from a building made protagonist, Jesuthasan takes it a step further by incorporating the supernatural into this narrative. Not only are we, the readers, recognizing the structures of imperialism come back to haunt us through climate change, but the structure itself is haunted by local ghosts called hantu, who claim that the building’s “ancestors did this to [them]”. These spirits allow us to come to recognize that something from our past haunts us in our present, and these hauntings manifest through changes in our environment. The building is not a product of climate change, it is a recorder of it.
Though we as individuals cannot hold onto centuries of memory, our structures and systems do, and their memory haunts us. By seeing the ways this is connected to climate change, we can make sense of our uncanny reality – as something that can’t be contained by pure rationalism. We, like the former Supreme Court, can either face this repressed knowledge and learn from it – or we can continue to conceal it. In order to reconcile this fact, we need to turn to alternative ways of thinking and being – those that Freud inaccurately labels as “primitive.” For, in the wake of climate change, indigenous cultures present understandings of the world that allow us to make sense of our reality. While imperial history would have us erase this knowledge to fit their constraints of a rational reality, the ghosts of our actions are coming back to haunt us – and to radically transform our environment.
Storytelling is one way we can build these connections and, hopefully, learn from our past. What are some stories that helped you understand climate change? Or do you, like Ghosh, have your own uncanny stories?
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Wisner, Brittni and Tiffany Boyes. "What is the Environmental Uncanny?" Oregon State Guide to Climate-Change Literature, edited by Rachael Garcia, 14 Jun. 2024, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-environmental-uncanny-definition-examples. Accessed [insert date].
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