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

Not much eighteenth-century fiction can be found in Marie-Hélène Huet’s Culture of Disaster—chiefly a few pages on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s continuation to Émile, entitled Émile et Sophie; Ou, Les Solitaires. But do not let that stop you. It is a terrific book: good to read, good to think about, wide-ranging, varied, and continuously suggestive, as well as a great model for students.

Huet writes more as a cultural historian than as a literary critic. In compact chapters, the first three sections survey three natural disasters (the 1720 plague, the Lisbon earthquake, and the 1832 cholera epidemic), three political disasters (Rousseau writing about Rome, the institution of the Revolutionary calendar and the execution of its inventor Gilbert Romme, and Chateaubriand’s career), and two exploration catastrophes (the shipwreck of the Medusa and John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to seek the Northwest Passage). Varied mosaic assemblages review actions, contemporary reports, documents, historical accounts, iconographies, and fictionalizations. As the portraits take shape, Huet pauses to reflect both autonomously and with reference to an impressive range of theorists, including Agamben, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Freud, Jameson, Ronnell, Žižek, and (more casually) numerous others. The texture is rich and rewarding.

Disasters challenged theodicy, initially because of their dubious justice, but then, as Huet elegantly shows, because much of the misery is wreaked by mankind. Even the effects of the Lisbon earthquake were exacerbated by urbanization, and plagues were spread by commerce. By focusing on circumstances, the Enlightenment turned the page towards secularization, away from the tremblement de terre and towards the trembling of people (55), that is to say, towards human involvement and human response. In her introduction, Huet quotes Horkheimer and Adorno’s characterization of the Enlightenment program as “the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy” (9). So, for instance, “for Chateaubriand, cholera was ... a natural disaster that could only be fully understood when redefined in political terms” (2). But who ever attempted to fully understand an act of God? The more plausible aim is, arguably, more modest: as “our culture thinks through disasters,” writes Huet, they “shape our creative imagination” (2, her italics, stressing that more is involved—or less—than thinking about disasters). That is still a tall order, largely filled in the ensuing chapters.

As the book consists of a collection of episodes, so each chapter consists of an array of snapshots. The biographically focused chapters on Rousseau and Chateaubriand felt rather meandering to me, and the overly general comparisons of Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, drawing only on deconstructive criticism, seemed the least well-grounded pages in the book. Even these chapters, though, gather coherence towards the end. And most of the remaining chapters weave a tight and intricate web, with seemingly disparate bits and pieces falling into perfectly patterned mosaics. The disseminative method becomes radiant, for instance, as Géricault leads to da Vinci and Vasari, to Rubens, and finally to Merleau-Ponty, or as Verne leads to Poe and Freud and then, spectacularly, to a specular Magritte painting, where a mirror reflects a copy of Poe’s shipwreck narrative, Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. It is not incidental that the only sustained close reading arrives in the culminating Verne chapter. For in this book, as imagination comes to the fore, history gradually becomes literature.

Three themes recur, more inconspicuously than they might. First, disaster is “fragmentation itself” (158), manifested under numerous guises: ruins (82), dissolution (92), disorder (108), fracture (134), but initially and most intriguingly, dispersion (38) and dissemination (58). The plague spreads in minute particles “that participate equally in the organization of life and the dissolution of consciousness,” not as “a foreign disorder” but as “an intricate part of nature itself” (38). Hence, disasters are, in their own way, identities, subliminally consolidated by 75 (too many) occurrences of the word “itself.” Disasters are a form of being...