From the literary history of the catastrophic

Knut Ove Eliassen

Catastrophic Turns: From the Literary History of th e Catastrophic Exordium: Beckett

Catastrophe is one of Samuel Beckett’s later plays. According to one critic, it is also one of

the most optimistic in Beckett’s oeuvre. Written in French in the early 1980’s and

dedicated to the then imprisoned Czech writer, Vaclav Havel, it belongs to a group of short

plays published under the heading Dramaticules (Beckett 1982). Just ten pages in the

printed French edition, it is barely more than 200 lines, a third of which are stage

directions. In light of the dedication, the title, explicit, but nevertheless enigmatic, can be

read as a double entendre alluding to both the fate of the artist under a totalitarian regime as

well as the often problematic, difficult and complex relationship between actors and

directors. But it can also be read as an allusion to that particular moment in a drama where,

according to classical dramatic theory, tension is released and the intrigue is unravelled.

A play about a play, Catastrophe opens with a Director, Metteur en scène, and his

female assistant adding the final touches to a dramatic presentation, consisting exclusively

of one man, le Protagoniste, or P. Throughout the play he remains immovable atop a forty

centimetres high black block, clothed in a black dressing gown and wearing a black wide-

brimmed hat. The dramatic action consists of the Director’s efforts, helped by his assistant,

to mould the protagonist after his personal vision. Irritable and impatient the Director is not

satisfied with the Protagonist’s overall appearance. He demands the removal of coat and

hat leaving the man shivering en vieux pyjama gris. Next he requests for the actor’s fists to

be unclenched and then joined; eventually arranged at breast-height he is satisfied.

Dismissing the Assistant’s suggestion to have the man gagged or to show his face, she is

told to take notes to whiten the exposed flesh with makeup. Lighting is rehearsed with the

theatre technician, Luc: from darkness to light falling on the man’s head and then darkness

again. Satisfied, the Director exclaims: “Bon. On la tient notre catastrophe.” (Beckett 1982:

80) He imagines the rising of applause on the opening day and leaves. One last action

occurs; the Protagonist, who has been looking down during the whole play, slowly lifts his

head, looks up into the audience; and, as the stage directions put it: Lointain tonnerre

d’applaudissements. P. relève la tête, fixe la salle. Les applaudissements faiblissent,

s’arrêtent. Silence. (Op. cit.: 81).

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Partitio

A catastrophe is without doubt an “event”, in German ein Ereignis, in French un

Événement. What does not seem intuitively clear is how it should be understood. Should

catastrophes be understood as ruptures, as signs of discontinuity, and thus as both the end

of what went before and the advent of something new, or are they rather to be considered

as an actualisation, that is, as the manifestation of a process for which the catastrophe itself

is only the symptom? Whether it is one or the other, the notion of the catastrophe does

imply a figuration of temporality, and, as such, a figure of historicity.

It is often said that catastrophes render speechless (Voss 2006: 10). All the same,

and maybe for that very reason, catastrophes have for a long time been a literary concern.

Not only have catastrophes, natural or historical, been a steady provider of subject matter

for literary treatment ever since the great flood of the Gilgamesh epic and the destruction of

Troy; the concept of catastrophe itself has literary origins. Thereby, that which according to

convention leaves one at loss of words nevertheless seems to be inextricably linked to an

urge to find the appropriate words. In fact, catastrophe is itself a word, and hence, given the

term’s current semantics, a way of naming the unnameable, maybe even to deal with it.

The following pages outline the possible framework of a cultural history of

catastrophe, or, to be more precise, a history of various historical notions of temporality

implied by different concepts of catastrophe. Given the range of the field, the limited

number of pages available only allow for an approach of an analytical and tentative nature.

Furthermore, this undertaking is further hampered by the fact that the field is somewhat

understudied. As German cultural historian Olaf Briese has pointed out, there is a striking

and “gravierende Forschungsdefizit” in the study of the history of the catastrophe concept,

particularly with regards to the term’s status in Antiquity, and its renaissance reception

(Briese 2009: 24 n2). As there is little to be found in the way of general studies, the

following argument is based on readings of texts that, arguably, must be considered as

central to the canon of the literature of the catastrophic. It stylizes four different historical

figures of temporality that the various historical notions of catastrophe have made possible.

These can be summarized in the following way: 1) A linear and unidirectional time, where

time is a function of a transcendent figure or narrative, and where, in accordance to the

premises of the transcendental level, time unfolds in accordance with the direction of the

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overarching scheme; 2) A bifurcated time, where time is eminently historical, in the sense

that any catastrophic event also has implications for what went before which implies a

temporal structure of retroactivity; 3) A time of repetition where the central temporal figure

is the eternal return of the same which means that temporal difference is subjugated to a

figure of the same; and 4) A time of proliferation where time becomes difference, multiple,

multiplied and multilayered.

Preamble

No historical investigation into the nature of catastrophes can ignore the history of the

concept of ‘catastrophe’ itself. Catastrophes are historical constructs, not given empirical

phenomena. This should not be taken as an attempt at undermining the reality of the pain

and suffering that accompany the events that ordinarily are referred to as catastrophic, such

as natural disasters, epidemics, wars, massacres etc. but rather as a way of highlighting an

important aspect of the nature of catastrophes: They are always catastrophic for someone.

Something that seemed ordered and in order, ceases to be so in a dramatic and sudden way.

But due to their relative nature, catastrophes can not be synonymous with absolute disorder,

nor with the advent of anomie. They should rather be referred to as moments of relative

disorder. Such a line of reasoning also makes it more evident why catastrophes should be

referred to as ‘social’ constructs. And as social constructs, they are necessarily eminently

historical, a fact that the vicissitudes of the term’s semantics clearly bear witness to.

The following deals with the history of the concept of catastrophe from Greek

antiquity and Aristotelian poetics by way of that paragon of the French Renaissance,

François Rabelais, and the French Enlightenment’s champion of – avant la lettre – critical

theory, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to the 20th century American satirist and science fiction

writer, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Even taking into account the initial nod to Beckett, and the

occasional allusion to the critical theory of the last century, this is a narrative that may at

best make appeal to be a bird’s eye perspective. As such it has several important

limitations. It aims in no way to be exhaustive. There are many actors in the history of

catastrophe, not to mention singular events, and any selection will necessarily appear

somewhat arbitrary. Any comprehensive rendering of the history of the literature on

catastrophe would need to take into account an overwhelming number of important works:

merely the work on the catastrophes of war would span from Grimmelshausen’s

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Simplizzimus by the way of Voltaire’s Candide, Tolstoj’s War and Peace to twentieth

century writers like Jünger and Celine, or Levi and Kertész and Sebald, to name but a few.

Not to mention that there exists within the field of sociology a sub-discipline called “the

sociology of catastrophes” (e.g. Voss 2006). Hence the following argument lays itself open

to the critique that the selection of examples remains arbitrary, and that they at best can be

of interest due to their status within the Western canon. As the validity of such an

empiricist critique is hard to refute on the basis of its own premises, any counterarguments

would have to rest on a different methodological principle, one that lays claim to the

representative or even paradigmatic nature of the selected examples. Thus the following

argument is less an exhaustive historical account than an invitation to reflect on a few

central figures of thought in the Western tradition.

Classical Beginnings

Catastrophes were from the start a literary concern. Or maybe, one should say, as the word

is Greek, they were a poetic concern. Derived from the verb, katastréphein, it consists of

two elements, the prefix and preposition kata- and the suffix -strophe. The prefix kata-

denotes ‘motion from above, down from’, ‘down towards or down upon’, and ‘against’,

while -strophe signifies ‘a turning’, ‘turning around’, or ‘twist’. In his classic reference

book, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, Gero von Wilpert provides the following definition of

catastrophe, “in der Dramaturgie bes. Der Tragödie (Aristoteles, Poetik, 10) entscheidener

Wendepunkt meist am Abschluß der Handlung, bringt die mit der Peripetie eingeleitete

Lösung des Konflikts und bestimmt das Schicksal des Helden zu schlimmen (Untergang in

der Tragödie) oder zum Guten (humorvolle Lösung der Verwicklung in der Komödie).“

(von Wilpert: 444). It is well worth noting, that von Wilpert does not reserve the term for

negative events, “Wendepunkt”, but that he also includes the change from bad to good.

Liddell and Scott’s comprehensive A Greek-English Lexicon gives further proof that

the concept had a different meaning in Antiquity as the notice on καταστροφή indicates that

the original signification of the term differs from the modern one by signifying a process

rather than an event. Apparently the word was most commonly used in a concrete, physical

sense: ‘Overturning, overthrowing, subduing, reduction’ are synonyms the dictionary

suggests. The dictionary also lists a secondary sense belonging to the language of theatre

which appears more explicitly linked to that matter at hand, namely ‘a sudden turn, an end,

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a close, the end or turn of the plot’. It should also be mentioned that Liddell and Scott add a

third sense of the word, one that is even more recognizable, although less frequent in

antiquity, the “ruin and undoing (of a person)”.1

Thus the semantic content of the Greek term does not, at first glance anyhow,

appear to be congruent with the most common contemporary signification in modern West-

European languages. To speak in very general terms, what today is meant by the term

‘catastrophe’, in Germanic or Romance languages, is universal disaster. It is in line with

this observation that the epithet ‘personal’ is often employed when there is talk about

individual catastrophes. Apparently the semantics of the term, with regards to disaster and

ruin, seems to have evolved from signifying events on an individual level, to dramatic

occurrences with implications for a large number of people. This, however, should not be

taken as a way of cautiously suggesting that the Greeks were without notions of global

disaster. On the contrary, as the ancient Greek word ‘cataclysm’, for instance, indicates.

The cataclysm is the deluge or the great flood, the flooding that wipes away everything – a

mythical notion from the Eastern Mediterranean well known from the Gilgamesh epic,

Genesis, and Plato. Contrary to cataclysms, catastrophes seem to have been, within the

framework of the classical mind, closely linked to the borders and orders of the theatre.

Here they were witnessed as dramatic turns of the plots, and of course unexpected shifts in

the fate of the dramatic personae.

Based on Liddell and Scott, the metaphorical uses of the term catastrophe seem

primarily not only to have belonged to the language of the theatre, but also to the later part

of Antiquity. One would thus expect to find the term in Aristotle’s poetics. And indeed, a

long tradition in drama theory does identify the term as an Aristotelian concept (something

the quote from von Wilpert illustrates). Many textbooks in drama theory present

catastrophe as a staple component of the classical tragedy format; it is often qualified as the

final station of the drama that follows the prostasis and the epistasis. In addition,

paraphrases of Aristotle like the following abound: “Simple plots have only a ‘change of

fortune’ (catastrophe)”.2 Thus, it is not without interest, that closer inspection reveals that

Aristotle, contrary to what for instance von Wilpert states, does not employ the term

1 I am referring to the 1961 reprint of the ninth edition of this standard reference work where the relevant concepts are to be found on page 915. 2 See for instance, http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html, or http://www.wheresthedrama.com/plot.htm.

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‘catastrophe’ in the Poetics – nor prostasis or epistasis for that matter (the Aristotelian

equivalents are in fact desis and lysis). In The Poetics, Aristotle employs the terms

metabasis (‘passing over, shifting’) and metabole (‘change, vicissitude’) where the later

tradition often would prefer catastrophe. However, whereas the word is not to be found in

Aristotle’s poetics, it appears in the part of his work that is usually referred to as the

scientific writings, more specifically, according to Liddell and Scott, in the physics section

of Problems, where it denotes “the return of a string to its axial position”.

It is to Olaf Briese we owe the to my knowledge most exhaustive treatment of the

concept’s early transformations. He claims that its earliest uses can be found in the

dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the historians Thucydides and Herodotus.

Moreover, he points to the fact that while Aeschylus apparently is the first one to employ

the term, the historical closeness between the four makes it in reality impossible to claim.

Briese provides several enlightening examples: In the play The Suppliants, Aeschylus uses

the noun to refer to impossibility to avoid a conflict, and furthermore, to the end of an

action. In the Eumenides (The Furies) the term designates the reprehensible collapse of

conceptions of justice. For his part, Herodot employs the word in the sense of military

subjugation of an enemy, while in both Sophocles and Thucydides it designates the heroic

ending of a life. According to Briese, this covers the most frequent uses of the term in

classical Antiquity, and he stresses that the concept is not used in any substantial way. It is

not a “Substanzbegriff” but rather the designation of a process that is by definition neither

positive nor negative (Briese 2009: 26f.).

Thus the dramatic or theatrical notion of ‘catastrophe’ seems thus to belong to a

later Aristotelian tradition rather than to Aristotle itself. It appears to be due to the

influence of late Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus who lists catastrophe as the fourth

moment of tragedy following prologue, and the aforementioned prostasis and epistasis.

Not only was Ars Grammatica one of the most popular Latin grammars all the way up to

the 18th century, his commentary on Terence, Commentum Terenti, had a considerable

impact on renaissance drama theory. Its profound influence on writers such as Scaliger in

the 16th century, and Johnson and Dryden in the 17th is commonly acknowledged.

Furthermore Donatus work was, as Daniel Boughner underlines in a study on

Shakespeare’s The Tempest, regularly published along with the playwright’s (Boughner,

1970 3ff.). Albeit Aristotle seems to have been unfamiliar with the term catastrophe as a

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dramatic concept, there seems to be a strong tradition from the drama theory of later

Antiquity that employed ‘catastrophe’ as a technical term. Still, even at this late point in

time, the term appears not only to have been used merely in the context of tragedy, but also

in that of comedy, where the term, writes Donatus, designated a general changes of fortune,

for instance that of a marriage (Donatus 1902: 27f.). This signals an understanding of the

term as basically referring to a process; that is, that catastrophe refers less to the event

itself, than to the signification of the event as the symbol of a process.

The theatrical usage of the term illustrates that catastrophes are plot constructs, and

that they are relative to the ordering of events and the subsequent horizon of expectations

that any ordering of the past projects upon the future. This underlines that catastrophes are

always someone’s catastrophes; they thus come with a particular point of view, or maybe

even two, the protagonist’s as well as the audience’s. Moreover, they are necessarily

relative to what has gone before; they are changes that bring something to an end, the

turning of fortunes. Hence they become possible only from the moment on when an

established context or horizon of expectation precedes them; vice versa, any order of

things, any narrative, will thus include the possibility of its own catastrophe. Catastrophes

are in this sense the collapse of established orders, and as such, moments of reversal.

It is by the reversals of fortunes and subsequent collapse of horizons of expectations

that catastrophes trigger strong physical reactions. Despite their construed nature, they

remain mental realities. The collapse of temporal order is also the collapse of a given order

of things; through the advent of catastrophes this “second nature” reveals its precarious

nature. In the theatre, this precariousness triggers the audience’s reaction through the fear –

Aristotle’s phobos – that the collapse of order produces in the beholder, but also through

the insight that the subject of the reversal of fortune could very well be the beholder

himself – the Aristotelian eleos. Finally, this turn of events, and the collapse of the

established narrative, is also the unveiling of the real narrative, the true order of things that

until the moment of catastrophe has been veiled behind or under a false set of expectations.

Thus, one should keep in mind the effect the catastrophe produces on the audience.

The aim of tragedy, according to Aristotle, was the catharsis. Primarily a medical term,

catharsis refers to the bodily relief, the healthy purging that is the effect of the fear and pity

that tragedy arouses in the spectator. However, catharsis also refers to the involuntary

spasm triggered by comedy, the outburst of laughter, the HA-HA-HA. While on the one

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hand being that which reverses and undermines established meaning, that is, that which

unsettles, catastrophes are on the other hand that which purges and creates the possibility of

something new. In this way, catastrophes, be they of a tragic or of a comic kind, find their

common denominator in their spontaneous and even involuntary bodily reactions they

trigger. In this sense they have, at least in the context of Aristotelian poetics, a medical

function. They release tensions. This seems also to be in concurrence with another

signification of the term mentioned above, ‘the returning of a string to its axial position’.

According to literary critic Frank Kermode famous series of lectures, The Sense of

an Ending, the Greeks believed that “even the Gods could not change the past” (Kermode

1967: 47). A catastrophe was the realization of a set fate, an apocalyptic unveiling of what

was already meant to be. In this sense, the Greek catastrophe took place in a well ordered

universe. The turn of fate in the protagonist’s course of life was not a radical reversal in the

sense that all order as such evaporated. On the contrary, they revealed or confirmed an

order that had not been immediately given. Atropos, along with her sisters Clotho and

Lachesis, were the goddesses of destiny in Greek mythology. ‘Atropos’ signifies ‘without

turn’. Her symbol was a pair of scissors that she applied to cut the thread that represented

the individual life. However, even if this marked the end of one particular narrative thread,

the text as such was not ended, as her sisters continued on producing and weaving the

threads that made up the great text of the Greeks. Individual death is, within the framework

of Greek tragedy, not the end of destiny; the fate of Oedipus continued the mechanisms of

destiny set up by his ancestors, generations earlier, in the family of the Labdacids.

Contrary to the ordering principles of Greek mentality, based as it were on the

ordered structure of a cosmos, the modern concept of time does indeed allow for

beginnings to be changed, in other words for reversals. The modern conception of

catastrophes imply that they do in fact change the past; narratives are structured with

regards to their endings in the sense that it is the end that gives meaning to what has passed

before. This model, in Western culture at least, has, as Kermode shows, its paradigmatic

form in Christian eschatology (Kermode 1967 45ff.). The advent of Christ and the

institution of the new pact altered the past. The new pact turned the Law of Moses into the

old pact, what had gone before into prehistory, just like the New Testament turned the

Jewish Tanach into what we today know as the Old Testament, and into a prefiguration of

what was to happen, thereby supplanting the linear and unidirectional time of Greek

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cosmology, where time is a function of a transcendent figure or narrative, with a bifurcated

time, where time is eminently historical and events works retroactively on the past.

Renaissance Catastrophe (Rabelais)

If the Greeks notion of catastrophe was different from the current one, the obvious question

is: From where does the modern notion of the catastrophe originate? When did it emerge?

The trail of conceptual history takes us once more back to literature. Although the notion

was transmitted through the classical tradition, thanks to Donatus’ status, its first

appearance in a vernacular language is due to one of the major works of the Western canon,

François Rabelais’ tale of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The word appears for the first time in

French in the so-called Quart Livre, the fourth book of the series, the final edition of which

appeared in 1552, barely a year before the author’s death, and in the last of the instalments

usually attributed to the Renaissance author.

It is well known that Rabelais’ epic deals with the life of two giants, Gargantua and

Pantagruel, a father and his son, respectively. The three initial instalments, the first of

which appeared in 1532, focus on the giants and their companions. This is done in a

manner that is so grotesque, vulgar and wildly fantastic that it earned the author the right to

his own proper adjective, ‘Rabelaisian’. The exaggeration and celebration of bodily

functions and of sensual pleasures, led literary theorists, most famously Mikhail Bakhtin, to

link Rabelais’ text to the old European carnival traditions, a rich complex of popular

counter-cultures that within the strictly regulated hierarchy of Feudal society served as a

safety valve as well as a channel of critique and subversion. Despite its hilarious vulgarity

and obvious popular references, the series is also both deeply serious and extremely

learned. In its dealing with a wide range of pressing and controversial issues spanning from

politics and religion to medicine and education it also displays the author’s learnedness and

familiarity with the classics.

The epic is written against a background of historical as well as personal disasters,

if not ‘catastrophes’. During the publication of the first volume in 1532, the plague hit

France with terrible effects. In the fall of the same year, massive draught led to the worst

harvest in decades. The tensions between Catholics and Huguenots mounted and from 1534

(due to the so called ‘affaire of the placard’) open hostility and persecutions were common

phenomena (eventually leading to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572). The book

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was quickly renowned for its satire on monastic institutions as well as scholastic tradition

and catholic orthodoxy. This brought Rabelais in conflict with both the Catholic Church

and the universities. He was accused of heresy and all his publications were condemned by

the Sorbonne. Although protected by powerful benefactors, Rabelais’s position became

more and more untenable with the increasing level of religious tension and the ensuing

condemnation of any kind of laxity.

The Quart livre, the last book of the Pantagruel series, reflects the increasing level

of conflicts within French society as well as the plagues and natural disasters of the

preceding years. France appeared to be haunted, which is reflected in the epithet that

occasionally accompanies the fourth volume: Rabelais’ “season in hell” (Berry 1977: 471).

Bleaker and less funny than the preceding volumes, its satire is explicit and stark. Devoted

to the adventures of Pantagruel and his friends on a naval journey in search of the meaning

of life, the Divine Bottle, it focuses initially on the ideals of hedonistic materialism that

informs the series – drink, food and companionship as the essence of human existence. The

voyage however passes through a strange world of dark and of fear-inducing allegories.

The allegories permit Rabelais to address a series of religious, philosophical, and political

issues. These eventually have an impact on the values that have been established

throughout the first three volumes, and Berry has suggestively called the Quart livre “a

book of reversals”, where oppositions are turned around, travestied and collapsed (Berry

2000). Here, that which in the three previous instalments of the Pantagruel saga was

considered from the point of view of affirmation, such as the celebrative and life-affirming

carnival, takes on a more sinister character, as the time of feast and celebration is framed

by the imminence of fear and even death.

Given its prehistory, catastrophes on both a national and a personal level, it is not

inappropriate that this is the book that introduces the term “catastrophe” in the European

vernacular tradition. The word itself appears four times in the volume. The first three

explicitly echo the Donation notion of catastrophe; they refer respectively to the reversal of

fortune, the ending of a story and, what is noteworthy, to the protagonists’ reactions to an

account of the pitiful state of the Roman Catholic Church. We will focus on the first

occurrence as this one most explicitly makes the connection between narrative and

physiology. The context is Rabelais’ self-presentation in the preface addressing his

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benefactor, the Cardinal Odet, where the author reflects on what garb he would do best to

wrap himself in:

Plus y a. Sus un passaige du père Hippocrates on livre cy dessus allegué nous suons disputans et recherchans non si le minois du medicin chagrin, tetrique, reubarbatif, Catonian, mal plaisant, mal content, sevère, rechigné contriste le malade : et du medicin la face joyeuse, seraine, gratieuse, ouverte, plaisante resjouist le malade. Cela est tout esprouvé & trescertain. Mais si telles contristations et esjouissemens proviennent par apprehension du malade contemplant ces qualitez en son medicin, & par icelles conjecturant l’issue et catastrophe de son mal ensuivir : sçavoir est par les joyeuses joyeuse et desirée, par les fascheuses fascheuse et abhorrente. Ou par transfusion des esperitz serains ou tenebreux : aërez ou terrestres, joyeulx ou melancholiques du medicin en la persone du malade. Comme est l’opinion de Platon, et Averroïs. (Rabelais 1994 : 518f.) [There is also a passage in our father Hippocrates, in the book I have named, which causes some to sweat, dispute, and labour; not indeed to know whether the physician's frowning, discontented, and morose Catonian look render the patient sad, and his joyful, serene, and pleasing countenance rejoice him; for experience teaches us that this is most certain; but whether such sensations of grief or pleasure are produced by the apprehension of the patient observing his motions and qualities in his physician, and drawing from thence conjectures of the end and catastrophe of his disease; as, by his pleasing look, joyful and desirable events, and by his sorrowful and unpleasing air, sad and dismal consequences; or whether those sensations be produced by a transfusion of the serene or gloomy, aerial or terrestrial, joyful or melancholic spirits of the physician into the person of the patient, as is the opinion of Plato, Averroes, and others.]3

The catastrophe, according to this, might lead to “joyful and desirable events” as well as

“to sad and dismal consequences”. The term retains the semantic openness from antiquity

referring to positive as well as negative reversals. Less a process, it refers to a shift of state.

This shift is, at this very crucial point in the text, its opening, explicitly linked to the text’s

somatic, even curative effects, to its powers of Aristotelian catharsis.

Rabelais training as a physician reveals itself in his work’s abundant references to

and discussions of issues in the contemporary medical discourse. In the prologue of the

Quart Livre, Rabelais sets up the following program for a therapeutic literature:

Santé est nostre vie, comme tresbien declare Ariphron Sicyonien. Sans santé n’est la vie vie, n’est la vie vivable, ABΙΟΣ BΙΟΣ, BΙΟΣ ABΙΩΤΟΣ. Sans santé n’est la vie que langueur : la vie n’est que simulachre de mort. Ainsi doncques vous estans de santé privez, c’est à dire mors, saisissez vous du vif : saisissez vous de vie, c’est santé. (Rabelais 1994: 525) [Health is our life, as Ariphron the Sicyonian wisely has it; without health life is not life, it is not living life: abios bios, bios abiotos. Without health life is only a

3 This English rendering (and the following) is taken from Sir Thomas Urquhart renowned 17th century translation of Rabelais, available at: http://www.archive.org/stream/worksoffrancoisr04rabe

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languishment and an image of death. Therefore, you that want your health, that is to say, that are dead, seize the quick; secure life to yourselves, that is to say, health.]

Seizing health here also means seizing laughter, as laughter – according to the Hippocratic

medical paradigm Rabelais belongs to – was a sign of health as it depended on the

abundance and purity of the blood. This is in line with what modern research has provided

of evidence of the physiological, psychological and therapeutic effects of laughter.

“Rabelais and his contemporaries appear to have intuited and observed that link between

health and laughter, and the role of the doctor in facilitating them, which has been

quantified and is being revisited in current medical thinking” (Berry, 1977: 36).

There is nothing simple about Rabelais’ medicinal use of humour. It has at least

three dimensions: 1) It is a tool as in the case of disparaging humour, the humour that

creates distance to the unbearable; 2) It works as affiliative humour, that is humour used in

a way to promote group cohesiveness; 3) It is an affirmative humour, the laughter that, with

Friedrich Nietzsche’s formula “says yes to life”, accepting even its meaninglessness. Such

a list serves primarily a heuristic or systematic purpose; the black humour encountered in

the descriptions of mutilation in Rabelais’ fourth book is not and cannot be totally

separated from its affiliative or affirmative functions. By addressing his readers as patients

in need of treatment for physical and psychological disorders, Rabelais is inviting them to

laugh not just at his work, but at themselves, at their human condition. He urges them to

seize health, but at the same time encourages them to laugh wryly at the frailties of the

human body and mind. Illness is and remains an inevitable part of being human.

Rabelais’ fourth book ends without the protagonists reaching their goal. The divine

bottle and the transcendence it symbolizes remain out of reach. Contrary to the cosmos of

his Greek predecessors, Rabelais’ universe is open-ended. Catastrophes do not only change

the future, for Rabelais, they also influence the past. The explicit connection between

catastrophe and medicine links the concept to that of crisis a term which in medical

terminology referred to the critical moment in the development of an illness when the

outcome would be decided. Crisis is etymologically differentiation, the establishment of a

difference. Catastrophes are crises in as far as they mark the advent of something different,

the end of a particular horizon of expectations, and, as a moment of crisis, the possibility of

a new set of expectations making possible or even necessary a new understanding of what

has gone before. A catastrophe is thus not merely the advent of social or epistemological

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anomie, the collapse of whatever order there is or that may exist; neither does it negate any

order whatsoever; it is a fatal event which marks the undoing of a particular plot, but that

also simultaneously allows for the birth of another.

As Mikhail Bakhtin points out in his famous study of the French author, Rabelais

and his World, in the Rabelaisian universe “the body” is the last and best word of the

cosmos, its leading force. And its laughter at the bodily grotesque, its laughter at itself in

fact, is thereby turned into the affirmative sign of the world’s renewal and improvement.

Still, this body no longer finds the conditions of possibility of its particular way of being in

the cosmologically ordered universe of Antiquity. The narrative of the individual life is no

longer the work of the deities of destiny, but is instead subjugated to the vicissitudes of

politics, and to the follies, whims and cruelties that characterize the human condition. What

Rabelais’ diagnosis in the final analysis reveals is the impact of the contingency of

historical conflicts on historical meaning. No master plot remains untouched of the effects

of history, thus historical narratives are themselves historical. Historical meaning is a

product of retroaction, that particular reworking of the past that Freud referred to as

Nachträglichkeit. Its structure is that of a double reflexivity; not only is what has gone

before subjugated to permanent revision and reinterpretation, the act of reinterpretation is

itself eminently historical. Crises are not just the product of a reorganizing of the historical

archive; any reorganizing is in itself a critical moment, a catastrophe. Hence, the critical

time is not only bifurcated in the sense that any catastrophic event has implications for

what went before; the permanency of this operation, the condition that the past is under

permanent revision, opens up for a time of repetition where the central temporal figure is

the eternal return of the same and the permanent imposition of difference.

Modern Catastrophe (Rousseau)

Even though Rabelais retains the classical sense of the concept he also opens the door to

the modern notion of catastrophe and to what today is the general sense of the term, namely

as the designation of an occasion of radical historical contingency. This is congruent with

the definition offered by the online-edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: “An event

producing a subversion of the order or system of things”. Events are not only products of

history, they, as we have seen, also produce history.

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Historically the word ‘catastrophe’ seems to have been explicitly employed in the

sense of ‘general disaster’ towards the end of the seventeenth century, as it is one of the

significations of the term provided by Richelet in his Dictionnaire françois contenant les

mots et les choses from 1680. However, the main usage of the term in the 18th century

remained the poetic one, and it was very rarely used in the sense suggested by Richelet.

Thus there is no mention of general disaster under the heading ‘Catastrophe’ in Furetières

Dictionnaire Universel from 1690, where there are two principal meanings listed, the

technical dramatic or poetic sense, and the secondary, derived one, that refers to the destiny

of a famous person (“La vie des grands hommes se terminent en catastrophe”). Other

prominent dictionaries of the century, such as Le Dictionnaire de Trévoux and the fourth

edition of Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) appear to follow Furetière

closely as they do not elaborate the concept beyond his definition. Even the author of

‘CATASTROPHE’ in the Diderot and d’Alemberts Encyclopédie does not make any

mention of any other signification than the conventional, as the author of the entry, in this

case Motte, does not even mention the secondary sense found in Furetière, but limits

himself to the following: “CATASTROPHE, s. f. en Poésie; c’est le changement ou la

révolution qui arrive à la fin de l’action d’un poëme dramatique, & qui la termine. Voyez

Drame & Tragédie.” [CATASROPHE, in poetry; it is the change or the revolution that

takes place at the end of the action of a poetic drama and that terminates it. See Drama and

Tragedy]. This is then elaborated with examples and quotes from traditional classicist

drama theory. Thus even the encyclopedistes seem to have remained within the framework

of the classical notion of the catastrophe. However, it should be kept in mind that the

volume that contains this definition was written in the early 1750’s, so that Pankoucke’s

supplement to the Encyclopédie from 1776 in fact contains the almost novel definition “Il

ne se dit guère que d’un événement funeste”. This was later to be picked up by the fifth

edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française from 1798 (after the revolution!),

where however the old definition still was listed first. “CATASTROPHE. s. f. Le dernier et

principal événement d’une Tragédie. Grande catastrophe. Sanglante catastrophe. Il ne se dit

guère que d’un événement funeste. » [“CATASTROPHE. s. f. The last and principal event

of tragedy. A great catastrophe. A bloody catastrophe. It is hardly used but with regards to

disastrous events.]

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As Jacques Derrida amply proves in De la grammatologie, the œuvre of Jean-

Jacques Rousseau, that singular pioneer of European critical thought, is suffused with the

notion of catastrophe, and more precisely, with the idea of the catastrophe of civilizations.

In fact, for Rousseau, the catastrophic is an inherent element of civilization. He thus

appears as one of the candidates to be the first, to consistently employ the term in a sense

that can be called modern in an emphatic sense. As Derrida demonstrates, for Rousseau

progress equals catastrophe, or rather, catastrophe is an inherent part of what is referred to

as progress. Catastrophe has for Rousseau, Derrida argues in his commentary on the Essai

sur l’origine des langues, “la forme de la raison philosophique” (Derrida, p. 287). Modern

rationality is the very figure of evil and the sign of the process of degeneration from the

values of pre-philosophical society.

On peut y recenser presque toutes les significations qui définiront constamment la figure du mal et le procès de la dégénérescence : substitution à la fois violente et progressive de la servitude à la liberté politique comme liberté de la parole vive, dissolution de la petite cité démocratique et autarcique, prépondérance de l’articulation sur l’accentuation, de la consonne sur la voyelle, du septentrional sur le méridional, de la capitale sur la province. Allant nécessairement dans le sens de la première catastrophe, la catastrophe supplémentaire, en détruit néanmoins les effets positifs ou compensateurs. (Derrida 1967: 287f.) [Almost all the significations that will constantly define the figure of evil and the process of its degeneration are recorded here: a simultaneously violent and progressive substitution of servitude for political freedom as freedom of the living word, dissolution of the small and autarchic city, preponderance of articulation over accentuation, of consonant over vowel, of northern over southern, of the capital over the province. Going necessarily in the direction of the first catastrophe, the supplementary catastrophe nevertheless destroys its positive or compensating effects.”]4

Rousseau’s catastrophe comes across as nothing but a figure of enlightened reason

itself, it is as old as philosophy and as Western scientific reason and conceptual thought.

What the Swiss thinker communicates to his reader is, as he himself puts it in his

translation of Tacitus’ Historiae, “une histoire pleine des catastrophes” (Rousseau, ‘Essai’,

p. 1228). Catastrophe thus pervades Rousseau’s work. However for Rousseau catastrophe

is not merely the name of a dramatic historical or political event, that is the overturn of the

existing order, the collapse of a reign, or the invasion of the barbarians. What Rousseau in

4 English text taken from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks translation of On Grammatology available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/6989848/Derrida-Of-logy

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fact suggest is another and new notion of catastrophe, namely the idea that the catastrophe

is not at the end of history, but rather concurrent with it.

Olaf Briese also emphasises the semantic shift the word underwent in the age of

Rousseau. Until the beginning of the 18th century, Briese states, catastrophe’s primary

meaning is that of the theatre, the term designates “ein innerdramaturgischer Vorgang”,

that is, an internal element of the plot. Catastrophe is that which releases the suspense of

the plot, whether it is comedy or tragedy, it denotes a “Tendenz nach erfreulichen Ende, sie

führt zur Stille und Ruhe“ [the drift towards a gratifying end, it leads to silence and quiet]

(Briese 2009: 29). However another semantic development of the term took place during

the 17th century that according to Briese did not reach the dictionaries until the last half of

the following century. What Briese’s obviously thorough philological groundwork reveals

is that the first use of the term in German can be found in an astrological dissertation from

1597 by Helisaeus Roeslin, a friend of Johannes Kepler, dealing with the influence of

comets on the sublunary world. According to Roeslin the comets heralded a catastrophe for

all earthly life to be expected in 1604, in other words, an apocalyptic prophecy. (Briese

2009: 32f)

From cosmology of the supralunary sphere there was a short way to the sublunary,

and the first uses of the concept as a designation of natural disasters, was set in circulation

by the end of the 17th century. Explicitly the term was linked to the theological notion of “a

fallen nature” – natura lapsa. Hence catastrophes are signs of divine will, or intervention,

and as such, also a symptom of the present state of man’s salutary progress. It appears that

it is to the English natural historian and theologician, Thomas Burnet, and his work Telluris

theoria sacra from 1685 we owe the explicit terminological link between moral critique,

eschatological catastrophes and natural disaster, that would later inform the work of Jean-

Jacques Rousseau (but also, in the wake of the earth quake of Lisbon leave its mark on the

discourse of Enlightenment) (Briese 2009: 33).

Frank Kermode points out that the shift in the conception of the apocalyptic from

the idea of an imminent end to the immanent end, is characteristic of modern thought

(Kermode: 25). This notion remains closely linked with an idea of the apocalypse as the

moment of revelation, where old truths will be shattered or given a new and truer

interpretation. The model of this can of course be found in the famous ‘through a glass

darkly’ passage in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. The question remains whether or

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not Rousseau takes this figure one step further; because, as Derrida argues, for Rousseau

the catastrophe is already a fait accompli; it is coexisting with and simultaneous to the

modern world of progress. This theme, that Rousseau elaborates from his first work, the

prize winning rebuttal of the question posed by the Academy of Lyon in 1749 ‘Have

progress of the Sciences and the Arts contributed to the improvement of morals?’, an essay

known as the Discours sur les sciences et les arts. Hence, for Rousseau catastrophe is not

exterior to civilization, it is an inherent, integral part of it. His thought is thus an example

of Kermode’s observation that catastrophe seems to be an inherent part of modernity, just

as apocalypse was a part of the religious world view of medieval times (Kermode: loc. cit.).

While earlier centuries had their millenarist movements, their chiliasts, Rousseau instead

proposed that the end is already there. In that way Rousseau, at the beginning of modernity,

adds additional complexity to any notion of temporal finality.

As Derrida shows, the catastrophe thereby becomes a complex figure of

temporality, referring at the same time to historical disasters, forgetting, and the paradoxes

of endings. The term thus designates phenomena on two different levels. On the one hand

the catastrophe refers to dramatic events that bring about the collapse of political and

religious order; on the other hand Rousseau’s notion of ‘catastrophe’ also refers to a more

complicated figure, namely that the notion of the catastrophic in itself harbours a

permanent catastrophe. In other words, that there is a catastrophe of the catastrophe, a

radical historicity which is an integral part of the catastrophic notion of history. And in the

final account, that catastrophe refers to the ontological difference that is inherent in the

passing of time, and on the more general level of culture, of historicity

Catastrophes of Modernity (Critical Theory)

What seems to be particular to the catastrophic outlook on history of the 20th century is that

the concept of historical progress has become inextricably linked to catastrophe, in a way

that owes a lot to Rousseau. Catastrophe is no longer that which is to come, but it is rather

given, already there, it is imminent as it is immanent. Progress is in itself a catastrophic

process, a permanent catastrophe where any order, that is, whatever is at any given time

conceived of as the old order, falls apart for the benefit of the establishment of a new one.

The catastrophic, in the sense of overturning of the old, is thus the order of the day. One

could be tempted to speak of a symmetrical anthropology of catastrophes in Bruno Latour’s

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sense of the expression in as far as the order of things can not be other than symmetrical to

the order of words, that is of man: The world of things has become catastrophic because it

is being articulated from the point of view of catastrophe. The nature of things and the

nature of man are always-already reciprocally articulated.

From the modernist point of view of progress, ‘real’ catastrophe occurs when things

get out of hand. The last century was thus a century obsessed with disasters, and on a great

variety of levels: political, historical and ecological disasters as well as political and

human. Genocide, wars, floods and hunger catastrophes were no longer conceived of as

external to progress, as accidental, but rather as one of its structural elements. Few have

expressed this more explicitly than the paragons of critical theory, Max Horkheimer and

Theodor Adorno. In the opening lines of the Dialektik der Aufklärung they famously state

that the historical process known as enlightenment have always aimed at liberating men

from fear and establishing their sovereignty, yet, over the fully enlightened earth radiates

disaster triumphant – strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils (Horkheimer and Adorno

1986: 7). And a few years earlier, Walter Benjamin, in his historic-philosophical theses,

"On the Concept of History," pictured the angel of history in the shape of

Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heißt. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muß so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm. (Benjamin 1974: 701)

[There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly

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into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.]5

Here the catastrophic has become the predominant historical figure. What Benjamin seems

to suggest is a concept of time dominated by repetition, by the eternal return of the same.

Any temporal or historical difference is here subjugated to a figure of the same, as all the

singular catastrophes converge into ‘one single catastrophe’, the catastrophe of history as

such. Thereby history is without issue, without transcendence.

What the Frankfurter School makes explicit is Rousseau’s differentiation between

two kinds of catastrophes, or rather, between two levels. The catastrophic for Benjamin,

Adorno, and Horkheimer, is not only the catastrophes that make up what one refers to as

historical events, it is situated on a much more profound level. The unspeakable of

catastrophe is not any longer recognized as such and hence is beyond even the possibility

of atonement. The catastrophe beyond all catastrophes is the point where there is nothing to

tell, as there is nothing left to be remembered, and no more witnesses, as Georges Didi-

Hubermann points out in Das Archiv Brennt (2007: 7).

For a long time the catastrophic designated what happened when meaning –

historical, narrative, and dramatic – breaks down in the sense that the schemata or

narratives that up to a certain point had provided meaningful synthesis of disparate events

were proven invalid. Such breakdowns of the structure of the plot have the effect that they

rendered speechless and powerless; they thereby triggered the fear that was a required

element in Aristotelian theory. Understood in this way, catastrophe was a moment of

discontinuity destroying the established narrative schemes and hence the forms and formats

of control that had been applied to master the contingencies of history or existence.

Nevertheless, this is a way of understanding the nature of catastrophe that also offers the

idea of a fresh beginning. Such a concept of catastrophe turned it into a moment that

opened up for new narratives. This could happen in at least two senses: either as the

unveiling of a new truer history, that is of another narrative that had remained hidden or

dormant behind the now collapsed narrative order, or as the beginning of a new era, the

start of a different narrative providing new possibilities.

What these two models of thought have in common is that the catastrophe is an

external or accidental event to the historical narrative it brings an end to. However, when

5 English translation by Harry Zohn, taken from Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 2003), 392-93.

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the catastrophe becomes an integral part of history itself, this implies that not only is the

revision of historical schemata an essential part of history itself, but that even the

catastrophic events that history turns into “monuments”, to use Nietzsche’s concept from

Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, must thereby be reinterpreted. It

implies that what is referred to as historical memory – that is what history helps us or

allows us to remember – is necessarily marked by its non-totality. This is not merely due to

the fact that historical archives are necessarily always incomplete, as Didi-Hubermann

underscores (2007: 7ff), but is the consequence of the productive nature of the archive. As

much as the archive represents and collects events, it produces them. The archive is in

principle always incomplete; as a result, the events it records can never be received and

represented completely as the singular event is always interpreted in light of the totality of

events. It follows that the catastrophe of history also is the catastrophe of memory. Thereby

an aspect of memory that is at the same time both fatal and necessary is demonstrated,

namely its fallibility with respect to the catastrophes it was supposed to remember and

honour. Memorizing equals necessarily reinterpretation and this in turn implies non-totality

as re-interpretation itself is the mark of incompleteness and of the need of permanent

revision. This non-totality and the forgotten suffering it necessarily implies is what the

works of the critical theory of Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno mourn and seek to bear

witness to.

However, the difference generated by memory, its non-totality, could nevertheless

be seen as the very condition of memory and thereby that of temporality itself. If memory

is historical, that is, structured as a narrative, memory itself can be considered from the

point of view of its narratological even textual aspects. At this point it might be appropriate

to refer again to Derrida, for whom catastrophe also is a figure of the textual turn,

designation that is the inescapable polyvalence of the text, of any text, the deconstructive

moment or mechanism, where the reference is unstable, not decidable. This leads inevitably

to the question of whether or not this reflects an aporia that is intrinsic to the concept of

catastrophe, or in other words, the catastrophe of catastrophe.

20th century: Vonnegut

By the time of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five or the Childrens Crusade;

a Duty-Dance with Death catastrophe had become a quotidian term; a staple element of the

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first page rhetoric of the boulevard press. Whether due to the catastrophic development of

the rhetorical standard of the media, or whether it reflects the age of the permanent

catastrophe, remains an open question. Or maybe the alternative is a false one; at least that

is what Jean Baudrillard claimed in the essay collection L’illusion de la fin, when he

diagnosed the present age as characterized as a “permanent catastrophe”, marked by the

absence of events, or, as he hyperbolically formulates it, “la grêve des événements”

(Baudrillard 1992: 39). When catastrophes become the order of the day or the catastrophic

a permanent condition, does this not implode the concept? The thought is no less thought-

provoking when it upon closer scrutiny reveals itself as paradoxical; the age of the

permanent catastrophe is also the age of the total absence of events, of historical

monuments. Catastrophe implies difference, permanent catastrophe is pure difference; the

difference between difference and repetition evaporates, thereby eliminating the possibility

of catastrophe, that is the event of reversal.

Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade from

1969 illustrates many of the dilemmas and paradoxes involved in the Baudrillardian notion

of catastrophe. Vonnegut’s starting point is one of the most famous catastrophes of war in

the 20th century, the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 and the ensuing firestorm.

What, in the view of most historical accounts, is particular with the Dresden bombing is

that it was undertaken apparently without any strategic or tactical purposes. Dresden had

been declared an open city by the Nazi regime, and had been filled up with civilians fleeing

from the advancing Russian forces. However, the Dresden firestorm was no accident, but

the result of a well established bombing strategy tested out earlier in the bombing of

Hamburg in 1943 and applied with devastating consequence over Tokyo in March 1945

(often considered the singular event during the Second World War with the highest number

of casualties). Firestorms were the results of a bombing technique that produced a vacuum

by establishing a temperature on the ground above 1 500 degrees Celsius, thereby creating

an extreme micro climate system, an air pump that would turn the air itself into flames.

This is the event as seen through the eyes of the narrator of Vonnegut’s novel:

A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn. It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun

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was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighbourhood was dead.

So it goes. (Vonnegut 1994: 169)

The novel itself, initially staging the author as a first person narrator, presents itself as the

failed attempt at writing the definitive novel of the catastrophe of war and massive

annihilation. The failed attempt being in an ironic, bordering on the fatalistic, comment,

integrated in the text itself by the bittersweet and fatalistic refrain regularly punctuates the

novel’s description of large and small disasters, ‘So it goes’.

The pivot that Vonnegut’s novel turns around is the impossibility of transforming

the Dresden bombing into a literary catastrophe. The utter pointlessness of the raid makes it

impossible to turn the bombing into an event that can function as a necessary moment in a

plot, nor can it, like the idea behind the Leibnizian theodicy, be turned into an event by

which the happiness of future generations is bought by the suffering of the present ones.

Against the backdrop of the bombing of the Viet Nam – and the protagonist’s son belongs

to the elite corps, the Green Berets – the bombing of Dresden becomes a key to a world

history that is turned into repetition; that is the repetition of meaningless atrocities, the

subtitle’s “duty-dance with death”. These are events which cannot be made meaningful by

any author, nor by the schemata and formulas provided by tradition. It does in fact become

clear already in the book’s initial chapters that Vonnegut’s attempt to give a novelistic

account of his war time experience is doomed to fail. His ambition to write the Great War

novel, destined to have historical impact on its audience, is stillborn. The novel refuses to

be written, as the idea of a novel changing the course of the world, becomes more and more

absurd; even the idea of the novel collapses gradually during the course of the narrative.

The question remains however such a narrative can be found that is able to fulfil his initial

ambition. If repetition is the condition of historical existence, and the children’s crusade its

recurring figuration, it means that temporal difference is subjugated to a figure of the same

and there is no transcendence, no eschatological impulse. In fact, the book’s two primary

figures, the author and the novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim – who both see beyond the

surface of things to the tragic realities of human history and the follies of human ambitions

– make no attempt to bring about a change.

Billy Pilgrim, the novel’s latter day version of the mediaeval morality plays’

Everyman, is the novel’s focal point and protagonist, a disoriented, un-heroic, and badly

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trained American soldier, a chaplain’s assistant. Captured by the Germans during ‘the

battle of the bulge’, in the Belgian Ardennes, he is taken to a POW camp close to Dresden.

Not only does he represent the very antipode of the epic war hero, as a big child in a grown

up’s body, Pilgrim also epitomizes the novel’s subtitle, The Children’s Crusade. Still, more

remarkable than his fate as a prisoner of war is Billy Pilgrim’s post-war adventurers, where

he after repatriation, marriage and a formal training for dentist, becomes abducted by aliens

from other space, the inhabitants of the planet Tralfamadore. Their most striking feature is

their sense of time; the Tralfamadorians are able to see in four dimensions, including thus

that of time, thus they have already seen every instant of their lives. For them the nature of

time is not succession, but simultaneousness. Through his stays on the planet Tralfamadore,

whose inhabitants on an irregular basis takes him out of his earthly existence, Billy's

liberating insights are the outgrowth of his being freed from the prison of time and, as a

result, not only seeing his own past, present and future as one and coexistent but also living

his life and experiencing it on these premises. One consequent realization is that death is an

illusion as all moments of time coexist.

What has taken place in Billy Pilegrim’s universe is a time quake, a catastrophe, or

rather, the ceaseless return of catastrophes has short-circuited our interpretational schemata.

While one catastrophe might be appropriated by narratives of history a series of

catastrophes, the repetitions of catastrophes, is beyond history, beyond what can be

accounted for, or re-accounted. The author himself illustrates this with an old rhyme that

more or less functions as a reading instruction for the reader. ‘My Name is Yon Yonson,// I

work in Wisconsin,// I work in a lumber mill there.// The people I meet when I walk down

the street,// They say, “What’s your name?”// And I say,// My name is Yon Yonson,// I

work in Wisconsin’ (Vonnegut 1994: 3). This is Vonneguts deadpan, and at the same time

humorous and deadly serious interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same.

Catastrophes are effects of temporality, moments where temporal orders are jolted,

creating the experience of, what Kurt Vonnegut later called a “time quake” in the 1997

novel aptly called exactly that, Time Quake. These temporal effects are not merely abstract

and intellectual; they also produce emotional jolts, and are thereby experienced physically,

through surges of uneasiness, even of fear. However, as we have seen, according to the

tradition such jolts are not necessarily of a negative character, something the dead pan

humour of Vonnegut also bears witness to.

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If what Freud called der Witz, that is the joke, is a turning around of language, a

catastrophe of language, where language is subverted, and that which has gone before is re-

evaluated, the catastrophe might also result in a laugh; that is the meaning it was given in

antiquity’s theory of comedy, and later picked up again by Rabelais. So, depending on the

circumstances, it might result in the therapeutic effect that Aristotle famously referred to as

catharsis. Furthermore, if catastrophe is that which allows for and calls forth new narratives

and plots, they contain a positive element. This does not necessarily reside in a change in

the event of the catastrophe itself, but rather in the evaluation of it. The catastrophe of the

catastrophe might also have another outcome, that of opening up for another interpretation.

Rather than being the figure of the same, it might be the subversion of the monumental

events of historical narrative, it might open up for at a time of proliferation where time

becomes difference, multiple, multiplied and multilayered.

Peroratio – or: Poo-tee-weet? As this essay now draws to its end, to its catastrophe, let us return to Beckett and the

enigmatic title of his play. The titular catastrophe can be said to refer to the sad state of

affairs the play presents, that is the tyrannical power structure played out in the interplay

between the three actors (and thus, allegorically deciphered by the key provided by the

dedication, as a comment on the political repression of artists and intellectuals in Eastern

Europe). It may also, on the level of form, refer to the dramatic reversal of the plot implied

by the protagonist’s final gesture. Finally, this reversal opens up for the possibility of a

different future, both with regards to the totalitarian state of affairs, but also with regards to

the individual destiny of the protagonist. Thus the catastrophe marks, for Beckett, the

possibility of a new beginning, the catastrophe of the catastrophe. In this he remains within

the framework of a modern concept of the catastrophic.

Catastrophe is originally a disruption, an unexpected turn of events which brings

something to a halt, and after which we are left speechless, left with what our body tells us.

However, when catastrophe becomes a permanent condition, the premises of history and

existence as such, the end result may very well be paralysis. The medicine for the paralysis

that haunts this fear is defiance, judging from Beckett, or liberating laughter, if we are to

believe Rabelais, Vonnegut, and Nietzsche – that is the joyful acceptance of the possibility

of proliferated time.

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In the beginning of this essay we touched upon a rarely used and quite specific

sense of the word catastrophe in ancient Greek, namely its particular meaning in Aristotle’s

Problemata, ‘the return of a string to its axial position’ (Liddell and Scott: 915). An

obvious example of this is the chord of a string instrument ceasing to vibrate. Two

thousand years after Aristotle, this definition is echoed in the last words of a melancholic

Danish prince: ‘The rest is silence…’ Still, Hamlet’s words do not conclude the play. For

even though the main characters all lie dead on the stage, the closing remarks are left for

others, among them, a Norwegian prince with the very unusual name Fortinbras. As Kurt

Vonnegut alter ego in Slaughterhouse five puts it, “Everything is supposed to be very quiet

after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there

is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?” (Vonnegut 1994: 169)

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Mercier-Faivre, Anne-Marie and Chantal Thomas, eds, L’invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe siècle: du châtiment divin au désastre naturel (Paris: Droz, 2008)

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