Dancing with Disaster

Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times

Kate Rigby

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813936895
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath.

Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present—including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright— Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene.

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

1

MOVING EARTH

On the morning of November 1, 1755, the Portuguese capital, then one of the world’s largest and wealthiest cities, was rent by a massive earthquake, followed in quick succession by two aftershocks. Large fissures appeared in its busy town center, roofs collapsed, and several grand buildings were reduced to rubble. Lisbon’s famous port, the point from which numerous voyages of exploration and colonization had set forth in previous centuries and still a bustling hub of international trade, was particularly badly affected: underlain by unconsolidated sediments, which amplify seismic waves, several stone quays subsided into the Tagus River and were swallowed up by its swirling waters, taking with them all those who had rushed out of the city center to congregate at the harbor.

The Great Lisbon Earthquake, as it became known, remains the largest seismic event ever recorded in European history. Subsequently estimated to have measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, its force was felt on land over an area of more than fifteen million square kilometers, from North Africa to Scandinavia. From its epicenter deep below the ocean around two hundred kilometers west-southwest of Cape St. Vincent, it sent a series of tidal waves coursing across the Atlantic in all directions, cresting up to fifteen meters in southern Portugal, where they surged over the seawalls of Cadiz. Damaging waves also lashed the coastlines of Algiers and Tangier, while an elevated swell was noted as far away as North America’s eastern seaboard. Although the waters only topped at around six meters in Lisbon, the largest concentration of casualties was found there. Estimates of fatalities lie between thirty and seventy thousand people, who were either crushed by falling masonry, many of them in the crowded stone churches where All Saints’ Day celebrations were in process; drowned in the ensuing tsunami; or immolated in the fires that continued to burn for five days, consuming most of what remained of the Portuguese capital.¹ Along with the shattered buildings and lost lives, considerable economic and cultural wealth was also destroyed, including immense quantities of gold and silver; hundreds of pictures, including works by Titian, Correggio, and Reubens; thousands of books and manuscripts; and countless valuable pieces of furniture, tapestries, and ornaments from churches and homes.² The Portuguese were no strangers to earth tremors, but they had never experienced anything like this in living memory. The shockwaves that were felt across much of Europe in consequence of this catastrophe, moreover, were ideational as well as physical. In a striking instance of the entanglement of natural and cultural history, the Lisbon earthquake is frequently cast as a “turning point” or “watershed” dividing Europe’s past from its future.³ As I will show in this chapter, however, its force was felt all the more powerfully because the grounds of belief were themselves already shifting.

Quite apart from their powerfully destructive potential, earthquakes must surely count among the most unsettling of natural hazards, especially for those who live in seismically quiescent climes. Occurring without any discernible warning, even a small tremor shatters our everyday assurance that, however uncertain the rest of our existence might seem, one thing we can rely upon is the solidity of the ground beneath our feet. As Charles Darwin observed in his Journal and Remarks (1839), a “bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid.”⁴ By the mid-eighteenth century, most Europeans had probably accommodated themselves on some level to the counterintuitive knowledge that the earth was neither flat nor the center of the universe but one of several spherical planets circling the sun. But their primary experience of the earth, like that of most people the world over, now and then, was “as a supportive and sustaining ground—as the resting point from which we register the movement and thingness of all other things.”⁵ It is the phenomenality of Earth as a solid foundation that gives rise to the figurative use of ground to signify a sure basis for truth. When the earth moves, therefore, more stands to be lost than the roof above our heads: our very confidence in the intelligibility of the world is potentially placed at risk.

In his graphic description of the experience of a large earthquake in his seminal book on seismology of 1904, the American geologist Clarence E. Dutton provides a glimpse of both the terror occasioned by a strong tremblor and the cognitive strategies that humans have commonly adopted to frame and, in some measure, tame this fearful phenomenon:

The first sensation is a confused murmuring sound of a strange and even weird character. Almost simultaneously loose objects begin to tremble and chatter. Sometimes, almost in an instant, sometimes more gradually, but always quickly, the sound becomes a roar, the chattering becomes a crashing… . The shaking increases in violence… . Through its din are heard loud, deep, solemn booms that seem like the voice of the Eternal One, speaking out of the depths of the universe.⁶

As Dutton’s reference to “the voice of the Eternal One” recalls, making sense of earthquakes, along with other geophysical extremes, has long been the business of myth and religion. In animistic cultures, they are most likely to be attributed to the stirring of the great creatures that dwell within or support the earth: in Japan, for example, it was a catfish; in China, a frog; in the Philippines, a snake; and in North America, a turtle.⁷ There is a pale echo of animism in Dutton’s description of the auditory aspect of the quake as beginning with “murmuring” and “chattering”; for Dutton, however, as the inheritor of a deanimated, reductively materialist worldview, this only adds to the “weirdness” of the phenomenon, in which objects that Dutton assumes to be inanimate acquire the uncanny semblance of vitality and voice. This glimpse of a disturbingly lively and communicative materiality is then swiftly subsumed into a monotheistic interpretive frame, in which the booming of the earth directs attention to the heavens, reminding the faithful of the sovereignty that the Creator continues to wield over His creation and raising discomforting questions regarding human obedience to divine law.

In the Christian West, numerous biblical passages from both the Old and New Testaments could readily be called upon to construe earthquakes as the consequence of human sinfulness. In some instances, divine anger appears to engender a kind of generalized quaking. In Jeremiah 10:10, for example, Earth is apparently accorded its own agency in response to the Lord’s disfavor toward His fallen people:

But the Lord is the true God;

he is the living God and the
everlasting King;

At his wrath the earth quakes,

and the nations cannot endure his
indignation.

Elsewhere, though, the elements are apparently enlisted by the Almighty to prosecute more narrowly targeted acts of divine vengeance, such as that which befalls the wealthy and decadent towns of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 24–28:

Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulphur and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground… . And Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the LORD; and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.

In Revelation, moreover, in response to the oppression and corruption of what was the closest thing to a global empire the world had yet seen—that of the Romans (referred to here under the code name of “Babylon”)—God’s targeted vengeance is anticipated to assume planetary proportions:

And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a violent earthquake, such as had not occurred since people were upon the earth, so violent was that earthquake. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell. (Rev. 16:18–19)

At least one biblical text, namely the book of Job, nonetheless throws doubt on the idea that those who are afflicted by what theologians subsequently came to call “natural evils” should be assumed to have deserved their misfortune. Contrary to his friends, who are convinced that the upright Job must be guilty of some secret sin for which he is being punished by the series of terrible calamities that have befallen him, the deity who addresses him from the whirlwind (Job 38–41) simply bids Job to lift his gaze to the infinitely more-than-human dimensions of creation; from the mountains where the wild “goats give birth” (39:1) through the deserts, “empty of human life,” where the Lord’s rain brings verdure to “the waste and desolate land” (38:26, 27), to the mighty Bethemoth and Leviathan, this is a world that is shown to far exceed human comprehension and control. This is, to be sure, far from providing a direct answer to the question of how an allegedly just and all-powerful deity could allow bad things to befall good people, and the book of Job has been interpreted in widely differing ways. But it does suggest that destructive earthquakes and other such calamities should not necessarily be construed by the faithful as direct manifestations of divine wrath toward anyone in particular, or humanity in general.

Since the time of the early church fathers, various arguments have been put forward within Christian thought to explain the existence of such “natural evils”: that is, those forms of pain and suffering that arise from the vulnerability of human beings, along with other living creatures, to the violence of the elements, disease, disability, and, ineluctably, death. For some, the existence of troublesome terrestrial phenomena such as earthquakes was a sure indication that the whole of creation was tainted by the Fall and either prey to satanic forces or subject to occasional blockages of divine beneficence. Others argued, sometimes with reference to Job, that these calamities were actually blessings in disguise, designed to develop human souls through the experience of undeserved adversity, bringing them closer to God and making them more sympathetic to the travails of others. While the judgmental took the part of Job’s friends in maintaining that the individuals and communities so afflicted must be guilty of some wrong that had drawn divine vengeance, the less assuming reasoned that disruptive physical phenomena, which appeared to us as evil, perhaps served some greater purpose that was inscrutable to mortal minds.

Among the intelligentsia of the mid-eighteenth century, the notion that the earth itself was “fallen” (as distinct from merely afflicted by the consequences of humanity’s sinfulness) had lost ground to the more optimistic view that the evidence for order in the natural world, as disclosed by those empirical inquiries launched by Sir Francis Bacon (1587–1657), the so-called father of modern science, testified to the fundamental goodness of creation and that all was ultimately for the best in this “best of all possible worlds,” as the German philosopher G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) put it in his Theodicy (1610). This entente cordiale between theology and science rested on the long-standing Aristotelian distinction between primary and secondary causes: while God was the primary author of creation, the physical world that He had summoned into being had its own operative principles, which were the worthy object of systematic human study. It was above all this enlightened faith in an ultimately beneficent divinely created natural order, otherwise known as “physico-theology,” that was shaken by the Lisbon earthquake; and it was around this calamity that the modern concept of “natural disaster” began to crystallize.

Coinciding with, and contributing to, the rapid expansion of the publishing industry in the mid-eighteenth century, this terrestrial upheaval was also the first eco-catastrophe in history to become a transnational media sensation. Hundreds of tracts in almost every European language were published and republished for several years following the quake. Among these publications were eyewitness accounts, sermons, philosophical reflections, scientific disquisitions, fanciful tales, and a great deal of largely pretty awful poetry.⁸ Within the widening public sphere that was constitutive of the European Enlightenment, responses varied significantly. For more orthodox Christians, the Lisbon disaster offered a welcome opportunity to reassert the association between moral and natural evils, which had been losing favor, at least among the intelligentsia, in the previous decades.

Johann Gottlob Krüger, for example, a Prussian academician and professor of medicine and philosophy at Helmstedt University, asserted in his moral observations on the “causes of the earthquake” of 1756 that “all reasonable people consider the fall of Lisbon to be a story in which God played the leading role.”⁹ The very fact that Krüger felt called upon to reaffirm his faith in an interventionist and punitive deity in this context indicates, however, that this structure of belief could no longer be taken for granted. Among those who shared this older interpretive schema, moreover, Catholics and Protestants were divided as to the intended target of the Almighty’s wrath. Protestants generally pointed the finger at the power of the clergy, the superstitious beliefs and practices that they encouraged in their benighted flock, and, above all, the cruelty and injustice of the Lisbon-based Inquisition. Catholics, by contrast, were more likely to pin the blame on the general immorality and faithlessness that had proliferated along with the worldly wealth of this bustling trading port, in which largely Protestant Dutch and British merchants did lucrative business. However, not all Catholics and Protestants even agreed among themselves as to the precise moral evils that had called down God’s wrath upon this particular city.¹⁰ While the French Catholic Jansenists joined Protestants in targeting the Inquisition, Portuguese Jesuits, who were responsible for overseeing its operations, countered that the problem was rather that the Inquisition had grown too lax.¹¹

As had perhaps always been the case, the punishment paradigm also afforded the opportunity for forms of social criticism that challenged oppressive practices. On the Protestant side, for example, one English pastor was inspired to highlight the crimes of colonialism, proclaiming, “Think, O Spain, O Portugal, of the millions of poor Indians that your forefathers butchered for the sake of gold.”¹² Krüger himself took the more conventional Protestant view that it was the “more than satanic misanthropy” of the Inquisition that really set Lisbon apart.¹³ Not unlike the founder of English Methodism, John Wesley, in his widely circulated sermon “The Late Earthquake at Lisbon,”¹⁴ Krüger nonetheless cautions that other big cities were also at risk as a consequence of the vices that they bred, among which he numbers greed, gambling, deceit, carousing, debauchery, and atheism. At pains to reconcile this catastrophe with his earlier treatise on the revelation of God in the beauty and magnificence of Nature (Naturlehre, 1750), he also gives consideration to the physical causes of earthquakes and argues that God’s strategic deployment of the subterranean gases that the science of the day held responsible for both earthquakes and volcanoes, which, as he put it, “stood ready for attack,” awaiting “their orders” from on high, actually displayed His infinite mercy, along with His might: the ruination of Lisbon was but a tiny foretaste of what was to come and afforded survivors and witnesses the opportunity to repent and reform their ways before they met their Maker on the great Judgment Day.¹⁵

This mythico-religious interpretive schema, which, as in the case of Krüger, was often conjoined with scientific explanations, appears to have retained widespread popular appeal for at least another century.¹⁶ It was given a considerable boost by the Protestant revivalist movements of the latter part of the eighteenth century and continues to inform some strands of US-style Evangelical Christianity to this day. The fate of the Italian Jesuit priest Gabriel Malagrida, however, is indicative of the increasing intolerance toward the punishment paradigm that developed among European elites in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake. The purportedly miracleworking Malagrida was among the most persuasive of those divines who questioned the reconstruction of Lisbon, urging instead prayer and penitence, scourging and fasting, in pious preparation for the Millennium. In particular, he attacked the Marquis de Pombal, the Portuguese chief minister, whose response to the catastrophe is...