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Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

April is Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. Check out a couple of our newer poetry titles and some older ones, too!

Rafael Campo's Alternative Medicine is his sixth collection of poetry. These Lambda Literary Award nominated poems examine the primal relationship between language, empathy, and healing. Read "Band of Gold" on the Lambda Literary website, and check out this great profile of Campo on the PBS Newshour. 

 

 

 

 

Renato Rosaldo's latest book The Day of Shelly's Death perfectly bridges our poetry list and our anthropology list. Rosaldo calls his moving exploration of the day his wife Shelly died while doing fieldwork "ethnographic poetry." Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Juan Felipe Herrera said, "This text is revolutionary; it presents another way, a new way of making poetry matter."

 

 

 

 

James Applewhite is one of North Carolina's best-loved poets. In the News and Observer, Fred Chapell wrote, ""The publication of James Applewhite's Selected Poems is a signal event in the history of North Carolina literature." In their feature "Ten Poems Every North Carolinian Should Read," Our State Magazine singles out "Barbecue" from Selected Poems. Read the poem here. 

 

 

 

Words of Protest, Words of Freedom, edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, collects more than 150 poems that showcase the American civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century. Including the work of Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Alice Walker, among many others, this collection is a must-read for a poetic perspective on that tumultuous era.

 

 

 

Want some explication and criticism along with your poetry? Check out our quarterly journal Poetics Today. Edited by Meir Sternberg, Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. 

 

 

 

Check out all our poetry titles here. Happy reading!

The Tricycle Taxi Driver by Renato Rosaldo

Please accept my gift, I say.

In Lagawe I own the only
tricyle taxi, orange, yellow, red,
fresh paint, curving lines.

After noon the soldiers arrive breathless,
say an American woman fell
from the precipice near Mungayang.

At dusk they arrive, Ifugaos, a few men,
two women, one carries the baby
of the American woman in a yellow backpack.

I shall be the one.

In a rattan hammock tied to a pole
Ifugao men bring the woman’s body.
The American man shoulders

his five-year-old son,
his walk heavy, shirt soaked,
face streaked with dirt,

his tears behind red eyes,
then he mumbles,
Taxi, and steps toward me.

He places his two sons on the seats,
then sits between them, offers to pay.
I’ve come here to give him a ride.

Please accept my gift, I say.

 

From The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief by Renato Rosaldo.

Rafael Campo on PBS News Hour

Poet and doctor Rafael Campo, whose latest book is Alternative Medicine, appeared on the PBS News Hour this week to discuss the power of poetry in healing and teaching. Watch the video below and then head to the News Hour website for videos of Campo reading three of his poems and for a lesson plan for using Campo's poetry with your own students.

 

Iatrogenic, a Poem by Rafael Campo

Iatrogenic

You say, “I do this to myself.” Outside,
my other patients wait. Maybe snow falls;
we’re all just waiting for our deaths to come,
we’re all just hoping it won’t hurt too much.
You say, “It makes it seem less lonely here.”
I study them, as if the deep red cuts
were only wounds, as if they didn’t hurt
so much. The way you hold your upturned arms,
the cuts seem aimed at your unshaven face.
Outside, my other patients wait their turns.
I run gloved fingertips along their course,
as if I could touch pain itself, as if
by touching pain I might alleviate
my own despair. You say, “It’s snowing, Doc.”
The snow, instead of howling, soundlessly
comes down. I think you think it’s beautiful;
I say, “This isn’t all about the snow,
is it?” The way you hold your upturned arms,
I think about embracing you, but don’t.
I think, “We do this to ourselves.” I think
the falling snow explains itself to us,
blinding, faceless, and so deeply wounding.

From Alternative Medicine, by Rafael Campo, which publishes today!

Book Spine Poetry

A post earlier this month by Publishers Weekly got us searching our office bookshelves this week to create some book spine poetry. Here are some of our creations.

 

 

The fragility of things

Singing for the dead

Speaking of flowers

Listening in detail

Writing in the air

How soon is now?

 

 

This one rhymes!

Cosmopolitan archaeologies

Quantum anthropologies

Revolution in the Andes

Addiction trajectories

Governing indigenous territories

Imperial debris

 

Here's a sad one:

Treasured possessions

Somebody's children.

Poverty in common, 

Adoptive migration.

River of tears

Adios, Ninos.

 

 

A haiku:

Prescription TV

Addiction trajectories

Patients of the state

 

 

 

 

And finally, a slightly naughty poem:

Screening sex, 

Wallowing in sex.

Radical sensations,

Fevered measures.

Securing paradise

Orgasmology.        

After sex?

 

Writing these was really fun. Feel free to send us your own!