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This article looks at Émile Zola’s novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and argues that it describes its subject, the Second Empire, as a warming climate tending toward climate catastrophe. Zola’s affinity to the notion of climate is shown to be linked to his poetic employment of the concept of ‘milieu’, inspired by Hippolyte Taine. Close readings of selected passages from the Rougon-Macquart are used to work out the climatic difference between ‘the old’ and ‘the new Paris’, and the process of warming that characterises the Second Empire. Octave Mouret’s department store holds a special place in the article, as it is analysed through what the article suggests calling a ‘meteorotopos’: a location of intensified climatic conditions that accounts for an increased interaction between human and non-human actors. The department store is also one of the many sites in the novel cycle that locally prefigure the ‘global’ climate catastrophe of Paris burning, in which the Second Empire perishes.
On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid.
Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes.
The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.
On 7 February 1861, John Tyndall, professor of natural philosophy, delivered a historical lecture: he could prove that different gases absorb heat to a very different degree, which implies that the temperate conditions provided for by the Earth's atmosphere are dependent on its particular composition of gases. The theoretical foundation of climate science was laid.
Ten years later, on the other side of the Channel, a young and ambitious author was working on a comprehensive literary analysis of the French era under the Second Empire. Émile Zola had probably not heard or read of Tyndall's discovery. However, the article makes the case for reading Zola's Rougon-Macquart as an extensive story of climate change. Zola's literary attempts to capture the defining characteristic of the Second Empire led him to the insight that its various milieus were all part of the same ‘climate’: that of an all-encompassing warming. Zola suggests that this climate is man-made: the economic success of the Second Empire is based on heating, in a literal and metaphorical sense, as well as on stoking the steam-engines and creating the hypertrophic atmosphere of the hothouse that enhances life and maximises turnover and profit. In contrast to Tyndall and his audience, Zola sensed the catastrophic consequences of this warming: the Second Empire was inevitably moving towards a final débâcle, i.e. it was doomed to perish in local and ‘global’ climate catastrophes.
The article foregrounds the supplementary status of Tyndall's physical and Zola's literary knowledge. As Zola's striking intuition demonstrates, literature appears to have a privileged approach to the phenomenon of man-induced climate change.
The article focuses on the rebellious subplot of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest that forms around Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and reads it as a satyr play. Demonstrated is how the Dionysian subplot stands in close analogical connection with the play’s main action. It is also argued that the storyline emphasises a dimension of the play that is of high relevance to the analysis of its metatheatrical implications. The correspondences between the main action and the satyr play elements highlight the important role that intemperance, excess and the suspension of control play in the Shakespearean theatrical setting.
Narcissus and Echo
(2012)
George Eliot’s late novel Daniel Deronda tackles big, fundamental political questions that radiate from the societal circumstances of the novel’s production and reach deep into our present-day life. The novel critically analyses the capitalistic, morally flawed and standard-less English society and narrates the title hero’s proto-Zionist mission to found a Jewish nation that re-establishes history, meaning and ethical values. This study attempts to trace the novel’s two models of society and time by bringing them into resonance with the myth of Narcissus and Echo famously rendered by Ovid. The unloving, self-referential, visual Narcissus is read as the model for the capitalistic world of spectacle and speculation. Echo’s loving, memory-bearing voice forms an important part in the construction of the sublating unity of the Jewish nation-to-come. Guided by this resonance between George Eliot’s novel and Ovid’s myth pieces of critical theory and philosophy are woven into the study’s fabric. The resulting analysis dissects and deconstructs the novel’s fascinating and highly complex patterns of conditions of possibility for the fabrication of the redeeming Jewish nation, the very same conditions that the novel presents as the conditions of possibility for narrating a meaningful story.
The article is dedicated to the problem of social bonds that is negotiated in Troilus and Cressida. Troilus and Ulysses embody an old, traditional order of the world that is out of joint, while Cressida's behaviour and her way of interacting indicate a different and new regime of social regulation that is about to take over. With its complex superposition of (touches of) love and war, Troilus and Cressida brings together rituals of touch, anarchic speech acts, and a gendered perspective on the world that associates touch and temporality with 'frail' femininity and temptation. With unrivalled intensity, the play puts to the spectator that the basic condition of touch, i.e. exposing oneself to another, entails an incalculable risk. Hector tragically falls for the vulnerability inherent in touch and the audience suffers with him because they share this existential precondition on which modern society is 'founded.' The gloomy, inescapable atmosphere of societal crisis that Troilus and Cressida creates emphasises the fact that the fragility of touch is not to be overcome. The fractions - no matter whether Greek, Trojan, or those of loving couples - cannot simply be reunited to form a new, authentic entity. Generating at least some form of social cohesion therefore remains a challenge.
Catastrophic Spectacle
(2018)
The wood-engraving with the caption “The first sight of Paris”, published in Cassell’s History of the War between France and Germany 1870–1871 (1873), does not depict a spectacular catastrophe. As its title already indicates, it rather illustrates a constellation of sight. What there is to see is not so much a spectacular vista but the fact that one sees – and the way how this works. I would therefore like to use the wood-engraving to analyse the basic setting that is formative for every constellation of ‘spectacle’. This prepares for the second step, which brings in the notion of catastrophe: I will argue that the spectacle of catastrophe which has gained prominence especially in the nineteenth century is not merely a phenomenon of representing catastrophe, but involves the constellation of spectacle as such. Spectacular catastrophes perform and derive their force from a catastrophe of spectacle – this is what the following
will elaborate on.