The Culture of Disaster by Marie-Hélène Huet (review)

The 1720 plague of Marseille, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the Revolutionary Terror, the 1830 global cholera epidemic, nineteenth-century shipwrecks, unexplained deaths: these, various other disasters, and our response to and interpretation of them are the subject of Marie-Hélène Huet’s book. What do these catastrophes and reactions to them teach us about our human condition and the ways technologies of power have attempted to process and control them? The core of the book’s argument and interest situates itself in a Rousseauian vision and experience of disaster as irreversible fragmentation, an act of violence at the very origin of our splintered modernity: ‘the sequel of a disastrous event we can hardly recognize and from which we will not recover’ (p. 86). The plague, she argues, threatens the very ethos and raison d’être of the Enlightenment; the Lisbon earthquake shifts the ‘responsibility from nature’s blind force to men’s corrupted blindness’ (p. 53); cholera’s real threat was social and political contagion, not medical; and the Revolution’s Terror and its new ‘enlightened’ calendar registered an emergency time, built on the irreparable ruins of disaster. The writers, philosophers, artists, and directors who grappled with these disasters — she examines Chateaubriand, Géricault, Verne, Cortázar, Ridley Scott, among others — become individuals incapable of transcending their single, fragmented point of view. With no protective star or astre overhead, they constantly search for more clues but are left in each search with a dismembered aporetic abstraction, a surplus of a narrative that cannot be integrated into a mere sum. This is the culture of disaster, our modernity, which Huet sees brewing in the catastrophes of the eighteenth century and fomenting on the seas of the nineteenth. Disaster haunts us and, as Huet notes in a discussion of Verne’s Le Sphinx des glaces, threatens ‘the return of the human species to the subhuman category of monstrosity’ (p. 198). The beauty and strength of this book lie in its philological approach and extensive comparative reach. Like John T. Hamilton in his Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton University Press, 2013), Huet provides a new model of comparative work; one that examines words beyond their capacity to carry meaning and sees, in their discursive flexibility and ambiguity, ways to rethink the types of connections we make across media, historical periods, and languages. From medusa, to sphinx, to caul, dis-aster, and glace, perhaps the only thing that keeps us from total dispersion and blindness is the way in which these words possess traces. This book is important to anyone who wishes to study the Enlightenment and its ambiguous legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a legacy crystallized in how modernity and post-modernity respond and think through disaster. Although its themes resonate with our current geopolitical environment and culture, its true brilliance comes from the expansive, meticulously researched creative readings that make connections among otherwise dispersed fragments and remind us why literature is still necessary; it speaks to that which technology, modern science, or economics cannot fully grasp or adequately translate. Huet leads us like an expert detective, parsing the traces and helping us interpret the proliferation of fragments and meanings that arise out of the wreckage and become so quickly contaminated by, and instrumentalized for, political agendas.