« Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and Emergence of...

Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period:Awareness of Historicity and Emergence of InterpretativeViewpoints

Françoise LavocatUniversity Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle. Department of Comparative Literature (EA 172)

Abstract When, why, and how do people write about a natural disaster? The articlecharacterizes three ways of narrating catastrophe — allegorical, anecdotal, and histori-cal— and shows that a shift toward the historical narrative takes place at the beginningof the seventeenth century, more precisely around 1630, and mainly in Italy. The mostlikely explanation is twofold. First, the interpretation of catastrophes no longer reliessolely on rehgious explanations, but political and polemical ones are also starting to beconsidered. Second, the expression of a point of view contributes to this increasedrecourse to the narrative. This article argues that the flourishing of catastrophe narra-tives is related to interpretative conflicts. The second issue raised by this article is thedifference between factual and flctional narratives. This question is examined in thecontext of the historical experience constructed by the narrative. The fictional accountsof catastrophe will be characterized as such: fiction allows the disaster to be experiencedin a paradoxical relation to time, through the point of view of an "impossible witness."

1. Introduction

1.1. The Narrative of Catastrophe and Its Study

This article aims to study the various ways catastrophes have been narrated

from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century (one

example from a later period will also be investigated). It focuses first on

factual accounts and then on fictional representations in romances and in

the novel.

Torfaji 33:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2012) DOI 10.1215/03335372-18121352013 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

254 Poetics Today 33:3 - 4

Numerous studies in various disciplines have been devoted to die analysisof catastrophes and their representation, especially since the beginning of thismillennium.' Today, environmental risks and recent catastrophic events,such as tsunamiSj floods, and earthquakes, from New Orleans to Fukushima,take center stage, and several aspects (historical and aesthetic) of therepresentation of natural disasters in the Middle Ages and the followingcenturies have indeed been highlighted by scholars over the past twentyyears.^ However, a comprehensive study of this kind of account, especiallyin respect to the early modern period and with a focus on narrativity andpoint of view, has never been undertaken.

1.2. Methodological Preliminaries

In this article, the word catastrophe will be used synonymously with the ex-pression natural disaster or calamity: an event which results in a lot of destructionor in the deaths of or injuries to many people.^ The term rarely bears thiscontemporary sense in the early modern period (Lukinovitch 1982; O'Dea2008: 35-48; Quenet 2005: 194-95; Rohr 2007) although it is not totallyunknown either. The word has for a long time been associated with thetheater. However, several authors o{feuilles volantes,'* François Rabelais, andRändle Cotgrave^ in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tonnes (1611),

among others, also define the word catastrophe as a natural disaster.From a methodological standpoint, focusing on natural disasters makes it

possible to narrow down the field of inquiry. Of course, the distinction be-tween natural and political catastrophes—central to a definition oï catastro-phe— is rather problematic. It has remained unclear throughout the earlymodern period (Zonza 2011: 289 -91) and is still controversial today (Dupuy2004, 2005). But this choice is historically and conceptually justified, first,because the distinction among natural history, sacred history, and humanhistory has been a major issue in the thought of the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries (Koselleck 1997) and, second, because even before the fa-mous earthquake of Lisbon (1755), natural disasters had already raisedquestions and controversies about causality that were quite specific and dis-tinct from those which wars had elicited.

1. Albeverio el al. 2006; Gray and Oliver 2OO4;Jelecek et al. 2003.2. ßennassar 1995; Deiécraz and Durussel 2007; Delumeau and Lequin 1987; Favier 2002,

2005, 2006; Favier and Granet-Abissel 2000; Groh et al. 2003; Jouhaud et al. 2009; Lavocat2011; Le Roy Ladurie et al. 2007; Mercier-Faiwe and Thomas 2008; Walter 2008.

3. According to recent research about catastrophic events: for example, Garrick and Christie2008: 4.

4. See Liaroutzos 2011: 465.5. "Catastrophe. A catastrophe, conclusion, last act, or part of a play; the shutting up of a

matter; also, th'utter ruine, subversion, destruction, fatall, or finall end of" (Gotgrave 1611).

' Lavocat • Narratives of Catastrophe 255

But why study the period prior to this disaster of Lisbon against thebelief of some critics that the notion of catastrophe was "invented" in theeighteenth century ( Mercier-Faivre and Thomas 2008)? The choice of thisearlier historical period enables me to highlight the emergence of newforms of narrative recognizable in different kinds of texts^ but mpst par-ticularly evident and significant in the stories of disasters. In the seven-teenth century and especially around 1630, parallel to the development ofthe baroque novel, narratives about catastrophes underwent a dramaticchange. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, medieval ecclesi-astical sources manifest no detailed references to calamities (Verger lgoj:159-60). The French historical chronicles are just as laconic about the1348 black plague as they are about the pesdlences of the following cen-turies (Coste 2007; Delumeau and Lequin 1987). But from the end of theRenaissance onward, catastrophes have been more and more viewed asevents worth remembering. This encouraged the production of numerouswritten accounts of catastrophe by people such as priests or physicians,whose professions were only incidentally related to writing. They had oftenbeen commissioned by the tovm council or by the church of a city, insti-tutions that wanted their actions to be recorded and publicized.' Projectssuch as the erection of innumerable plague columns in eastern Europe orthe construction of devotional buildings commemorative of the end of anepidemic (such as Santa Maria della Salute in Venice or Saint CharlesChurch in Vienna) were also undertaken at the same time and v\dth simuaraims.

In the first part of the seventeenth century, there emerged in Europe theconsciousness of a necessity to keep a record of natural disasters. This holdstrue particularly, though not exclusively, for the 1631 Naples earthquake; forthe plague which raged in Rome, Venice, and Milan in 1630; as well as for theplague and fire that devastated London from 1665 to 1666. My hypothesis isthat this new way of looking at the catastrophic event, whue revealinga growing preoccupation with the education of the community, presentand future, has generated novel forms of storytelling.

6. Anne Duprat ( forthcoming) has brilliantly analyzed this genesis of new textual forms innarratives produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Christians who had beencaptured by Muslim corsairs.

7. Ascanio Centorio de'Hortensii, for instance, published in 1579 a compendium of themeasures taken during the previous plague (/ cinque libri degl'awertimenti, ordim, gride e edilifatti,

et osservati in Milano, ne' tempi sospeltosi della peste; negli anni J^yß et i^yy. Con molli Aveditnenti utili e

necessarii a tutte le Ciltà d'B^uropa, che cadessero in simili infortunii, e calamita). He was commissioned to

do so by the city of Milan, and he dedicated his work to the health authorities of the city.Giuseppe Ripamonti (1641) insists upon the fact that he has written an account of the plaguefollowing an order from the bishop and the senate of Milan.


Compared with the production of the sixteenth century, catastrophicaccounts of the seventeenth century, sometimes best sellers in their time,became more numerous, more detailed, and above all more narrative, bywhich I intend to say that they were organized as a series of actions chrono-logically interrelated, to borrow from Meir Sternberg's terminology.^ Incontrast, in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccacio's (2008 [1370]) long evocationof the 1348 plague in Florence—an isolated case at the time—was, so con-sidered, a desmption^ that is, a presentation of facts and states of affairswithout such a chrono-logical articulation,^ rather than a narrative of theepidemic. Three centuries later, most of the accounts of a plague are narratedchronologically, following the different phases of its development: its appear-ance and the early symptoms, generally misinterpreted at first, until thetruth becomes dramatically obvious; the progress of the disease; the struggleundertaken by both secular and religious (possibly conflicting) authorities;the resistance or even rebellion of the people against health measures; then,finally, the decline and disappearance of the epidemic. This kind of patternarises at the end of the sixteenth century and is generally adopted in first-person narratives of the plague and other disasters as well. We witness anincrease in narrativity'" there, which is to say that the representations ofnatural disasters were more and more characterized by narrative voice, set-ting, time, plot. This development continues into the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries in both factual and fictional narratives. .

I propose to study the development of narrativity in the evocation ofvarious natural disasters in the first half of the seventeenth century, withspecial regard to the plague of 1629-30 in Milan and the eruption ofMount Vesuvius in 1631. These examples will enable me to highlight thepresence of a new narrative form in accounts of catastrophe. I wül argue thatthis process of narrativization is linked to a perception and an interpretation

8. On the link between chronology, causality, and narrativity, see Stemberg 1990a, 1990b.9. This concept of description refers to the traditional categories of rhetoric. Such "descrip-

tion" differs from narrative in that it is a separable piece, a tableau with an "ekphrastic"dimension, referring to a state of affairs at a given point in time. It can be moved from onediscourse to another {Barthes 1970: 183). Concerning the plague, the description specificallybelongs to the category of the "tableau," as Pierre Fontanier (1977 [ 1821] : 431 ) characterizes it:"a vivid and lively description . . . of physical or moral phenomena" (my translation). For ahistory of the definitions of the description in the rhetorical tradition, see Adam 1993; Adamand Dürrer 1988. The conflicting or dependent relations between narration and descriptionare undeniably a difficult issue. On this, see Genette 1969; for a counterview, see Sternberg1981.10. As noticed by H. Porter Abbott (2009: 309), the word narrativity is often used "in a scalarsense as the 'narrativeness' of a narrative" and is "applied comparatively to particular narra-tives." The term has precisely this meaning in this article.

Lavocat • Narratives of Catastrophe 257

of the disaster as a historical event," as can best be seen in tales aiming to fixthe catastrophe in history and collective memory.

The relationship between narrativity and historicity that I intend to illus-trate through the analysis of accounts of disasters mainly relies on the works ofPaul Ricceur (1984-88) and historians such as Reinhart Koselleck (1975),François Hartog (2003), and Jean-François Hamel (2006) for its theoreticalbackground.

KoseUeck, within the framework of his history of concepts ("Begriffge-schichte"), has shown that in historiography different harrative patterns re-flect a transformation of experience. He distinguishes three kinds ofexperience of history which he relates to three genres of storytelling: surprise(as a form of experience), which corresponds to a story that registers some-thing unique and singular; accumulation, related to the collective experienceof a generation or a group; and reflexivity, which generates a diachronic andlogical storytelling. Not based on personal testimonies, reflexive historyrewrites history and takes into account large sequences of time.

Following Koselleck's thesis, I propose to analyze from this viewpoint themain three narrative forms identiflable in catastrophic accounts. I claim thatthese forms are related to allegory,'^ to the anecdote —the very nature ofwhich is to capture the peculiarity of something or somebody in a factualnarrative'^ —and to history proper. Furthermore, I will argue that only thehistorical mode makes it possible for the disaster to be construed as anevent in itself—that is to say, as something more than a sign or metaphorfor another event. As such, that event requires narration in a developedhistory worthy of being remembered by future generations for centuriesto come.

11. On narrativity and eventfulness, see Huhn et al. 2009; Ricœur 1980a, 1980b. Peter Hiihn'spoint, that the "eventfulness" is culturally determined, is relevant to our topic. The question toask is indeed that of the "tellability" of the catastrophe. What makes the catastrophe, at thebeginning of the seventeenth century, worth being told, "tellable"? We could tentatively suggestthat stories of catastrophes are mainly based on "curiosity" as the dynamics of retrospection, toborrow from the categories established by Stemberg (2001) and Raphaël Baroni {2007). More-over, Monika Fludemik's (2003; 245) thesis about tellability and experientiality could be par-ticularly helpful here: "For the narrator the experientiality of the story resides not merely in theevents themselves but in their emotional significance and exemplary nature. The events becometellable precisely because they have started to mean something to the narrator on an emotional level. It is this

conjunction of experience reviewed, reorganized, and evaluated ('point') that constitutes nar-rativity" (Fludernik 2003: 245; cited in Baroni 2009: 451; my emphasis).

12. Regarding the use of the terms allegory, metaphor, and rtryth in this article, see notes 14-18.13. My argument is consistent with the analysis ofjoel Fineman ( 1989:56), who claims that "theanecdote as the narration of a singular event, is the literary form or genre that uniquely refers tothe real . . . the anecdote has something literary about it." For further development and litera-ture on the anecdote and on the transformation of the relation between anecdotes and Historyover time, see Gossman 2003: 147-55.


Despite its decline in the late sixteenth century, the allegorical approachseems to' have been favored — manifesting itself from the Middle Ages to thisday.'*' In contrast, it is only at the beginning of the seventeenth century thatwe see the flourishing of anecdotes and historical narratives devoted to ca-tastrophes. This change could possibly have been brought about by therelative decline of allegory at the end of the Renaissance and the emergenceof what Barbara Shapiro (2000) has called "a culture of fact," trends alsomanifest in different fields of knowledge, such as law, the natural sciences, or

-demonology. Without attenipting to apply mechanically the categoriesdefined by Koselleck, I will try to show that the anecdote is characterizedby the aesthetics of surprise and by the regime of accumulation while histori-cal narratives develop reflexivity—thus demonstrating awareness of thehistorical process—as they take into account a broader time sequence. Theallegorical dimension of the myth is fundamentally ahistorical. Consequent-ly, the transformation in how disaster is represented, and the accompanyingincrease in textual narrativity—especially through first-person narratives-can be interpreted as the exemplification of a fundamental change in human-ity's relation to time, to facts, and to history in the early modern period.

The emphasis given in my argument to the "allegorical mode" calls forsome terminological clarification. In this article, if the notions of "myth,""allegory," and "metaphor" are not understood as wholly interchangeable,they will at least be taken as closely linked. '̂ To detail these notions and theirrelations would exceed the scope of this article. But we can specify thatmetaphor (Pierre Fontanier's [1977 {1821}: 99] "trope of resemblance")'**operates at the level of the discourse; allegory is at once a complex rhetorical

14. See, for instance, Françoise Revaz (2002), who studied the metaphors used by journalists tospeak about Hurricane Katrina, or Ernest B. Gilman (2009, 2011 ) on the use of the plague as ametaphor from seventeenth-century England to our time. For GUman, a metaphor is a disease,and disease is a metaphor; there is thus no possibility to conceptualize the plague in the literalmeaning of the word. My view is different. The transformation that narrative about the plagueand other catastrophes undergoes at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 1 believe, impliesa new prominence ofliteral meaning, and this process is consistent with the emergence of afact-based culture.15. The question of how exactly these concepts should be differentiated is still being debated.Contrary to Christian Vandendorpe {i ggg [1992]), Morton Wilfred Bloomñeld insists upon theidentity of allegory and metaphor (Bloomfield 1972) and underlines their proximity to myth(Bloomfield 1981). Agreeing with Bloomfield, I show in this article that the allegorical modedeals with catastrophe as a metaphor, in a mythical perspective.16. That is, it consists "in presenting an idea under the guise of another, more striking or betterknown idea, which, besides, is not in any way linked to the first one beyond a certain conformityor analogy" {Fontanier 1977 [1821]: 99; my translation). "A presenter une idée sous le signed'une autre idée plus frappante ou plus connue, qui d'ailleurs ne tient à la première par aucunautre lien que celui d'une certaine conformité ou analogie."


ñgure (which, in most cases, includes metaphors)" and a hermeneutic pro-cess, which lends multiple meanings to a given statement. " In the followingdiscussion, we wiU draw upon the traditional distinction between allegoria in

factis (which links two events together) and allegoria in verbis (which is limited to• words). In this context, regarding catastrophe as a sign that foretells anothercatastrophe amounts to understanding the catastrophic event as a metaphorand to giving it an interpretation in line with the allegoria in factis model.

Finally, this rhetorical device (metaphor or allegoria in verbis) and this modeof interpretation {allegoria infactis) are closely linked to "myth." This last termwill be used here to refer, on the one hand, to catastrophes as they appearwithin biblical and mythological frameworks (one could think of the deluge orof the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to name but two examples) andespecially, on the other hand, to the connection of a catastrophic event—actual, historical—to a mystic and supernatural dimension.'^

The shift from a perspective in which myth prevails to a historical under-standing of the catastrophe is inseparable from the expression, or even thestaging, of an authorial point of view.̂ ° Here the article confirms the claimmade by Hans Robert Jauss (1989) that the essential transformation of thehistorical narrative, not unlike the one that fiction has undergone, lies in thepoint of view that explicidy organizes it. But whue Jauss locates this change in

17. As underlined by Armand Strubel (1989: 13- 14), Quintilian's classical definition of theallegory as "aliud verbis, aliud sensu" (one thing in words, another in meaning) and "continuaetranslationes" (a succession of metaphors) [Institution oratoire, book IX, chap. 2, li. 46) is insuffi-cient, since in the texts the allegory involves a combination of figures. However, in the context ofwhat is studied here, the important thing is indeed, as also stressed by Strubel, that doublereading characterizes allegory.18. First formulated by Origen, the theory of the three levels of meaning in scripture (Uteral,moral, and spiritual, which correspond to the body, the soul, and the spirit) is systematized inthe fifth century by John Cassian and then picked up by many theologians, such as SaintAugustine, Saint Jerome, the Venerable Bede, and Bernard of Clairvaux. It reaches its heightin the twelfth century with the development of Scholastic theory. According to this developedinterpretative system, the levels of meanings are four; "The letter teaches events, allegory whatyou should believe, morality teaches what you should do, anagogy what mark you should beaiming for" (de Lubac 1998 [1959]: 1). "Allegory" designates bodi the whole process of in-terpretation and that focused on the level of the meaning. See also Pépin 1958, 1987.19. Compare André Jolles's (1968 [1930]: 91) concept of myth as a "simple form" that corre-sponds to the mood of the prophecy through which the universe itself seems to answer ourquestions.20. On the question of the point of view, with a helpful bibliography, see Niederhoff 2009.Burkhard Niederhoff (394) endorses Boris Uspenskij's and Susan Sniader Lanser's position infavor of an inclusive definidon: "If perspective also has an ideological dimension, a narrativewithout perspective is hardly possible." Even so, "perspective may be more or less conspicu-ous." My purpose is precisely to show that the narrator's perspective, as both witness andprotagonist, becomes manifest in seventeenth-century factual narratives of catastrophes andthat an intensification of narrativity ensues. This article accordingly hopes to meet NiederhofPs(395) call for more attention to factual narratives in studies devoted to point of view.


the late eighteenth century, I will show that it is already at work in the earlyseventeenth century. I also propose to examine what is overlaid by this pointof view, which moral values and cognitive and ideological issues underlie it. Itcan be assumed that the expression of a point of view, an interpretation of thecatastrophic events in a historical narrative, represents a gain in knowledge(Ricœur 1984-88, 1). Furthermore, the expression of a point of view associ-ated with the development of narrativity also favors the introduction of amoral aim, which, in most cases, serves the power and interests of a commu-nity (White 1973, 1981). This ideological tension in the story leads the nar-rator to oppose other versions or interpretations of the catastrophic event orto seek to discredit them. One might think that this conflict could also be anoperator of narrativity.^'

Besides, the simultaneity of the appearance and development of factualand fictional narratives^^ suggests that they could perhaps be performing thesame function: expressing a peculiar relation to history and to time. Fictionaland factual narratives indeed have some important features in commonthanks to the emergence, in both kinds of texts, of a narrativized witness.However, fictional narratives have their own characteristics; I will try todefine one of them by showing that catastrophic fiction combines allegory,anecdote, and history within a relation to time marked by paradoxicaldevices.

2. Factual Narrative

2.1. Catastrophe as AllegoryTreating a catastrophe as an allegory is very much akin to considering it asa sign.̂ ^ When viewed from a religious perspective, disaster is one of the very

21. For Boris Tomashevsky (1965 [1925]} and Charles Grivel(i973), as noted by Baroni (2007;77-8i)j narrativity and conflictuality are often associated. In these narratives, conflicts ofinterpretation and of power in the catastrophic context reveal political and social oppositions;conflicts also serve to make the protagonists more interesting.22. Concerning the distinction between fact and fiction, see Schaeffer 2009. In my view, thisdifference is, on the one hand, logical and ontological (fiction having no referent in the actualworld or referring to it only "indirecUy," in Ricœur's [1984-88, 2] terms). On the other hand,the différence between factual and fictional narratives is pragmatic and cultural: it evolvesaccording to time and space (see Lavocat and Duprat 2010). Like Thomas Pavel ( 1983, 1986), Ialso admit that some works can be parUy fictional and partly factual (it is the case with DanielDefoe's and Alessandro Manzoni's novels; see section 3.2). My concept accordingly concernsthe status of propositions rather than works or whole textual entities.23. As noted, for example, by Gilman {2011: 220): "Driving this early modem process ofdissemination was the need to explain the inexplicable horror of the plague by parsing itsmeaningj a project itself founded on the assumption that the plague must be meaningful. Thesetexts strive to connect the plague with its causes —that is, with sins both large and small, withstars and the air, with epochal changes in national events, with social discord and religious and


best embodiments of the allegoria in factis (Strubel 1975) and needs to- beinterpreted in its relationship with other disasters—be they from a mythicalpast, from the present time, or from an apocalyptic future.

As righdy pointed out by François Walter (2008), it would be simphstic tointerpret this kind of religious and allegorical representation as a reaction tothe progressive dispelling of the darkness of the Middle Ages, accomplishedwith the triumphant advent of the Enlightenment. Allegory was constandyused to shape representations during the sixteenth, seventeerith, and eigh-teenth centuries and well beyond.

The cognitive function that aüegory performs helps explain the peculiarlongevity that characterizes the recourse to it. From a psychological stand-point, myth repairs the cognitive hiatus produced by catastrophes by locatingthe source of the disaster in human agency, thus enabling an important linkbetween cause and effect to be formed where it is unbearably missing (Grand-jean et al. 2007). From a hermeneudcal point of view, allegory makes catas-trophe a signifier that operates on a chain that is at once paradigmatic andsyntagmatic. SyntagmaticaUy, each catastrophic event restates its origin andannounces its end, from an eschatological perspective. Paradigmatically, it isalways a metaphor for another disaster, often of a political nature. Finally,catastrophe viewed from the perspective of myth is not only a narrative butalso a generator of narratives. In the great narrative of humanity, catastrophesets into motion and completes human history; in more immediate history, itpunctuates, signals, and comments upon human actions. In this sense, wecould say that allegory has a metanarrative function.

The framework of allegory was particularly prominent during the religioustroubles of the sixteenth century. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (2004: 562)showed what is at stake in the allegorical reading that largely arises fromerudite exegetical practices: in decoding the end of time in the present day,people of the sixteenth century create a place of History and of revelation thatleaves litde room for an interpretation of the catastrophe as a singular event.

The image of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so vivid at the end ofthe Middle Ages (Gunningham and Grell 2000; Nikiforuk 1992) and stiU verypopular during the Renaissance, emphasizes the close connection whichexists between calamides. The slow .disappearance of this image can beseen as a corollary of the progressive separation of the historia naturalis,sacra, and diÁlis initiated by Francis Bacon (Koselleck 1997). Other meta-

political factions, with infestations of immigrants and the poor, in short, with the manifoldcorruptions of the natural moral and civil order by which, and in just punishment for which, theEnglish were 'plagued. ' " However, this use of allegory and metaphor is not restricted to plaguenarratives.


phors, howeverj have continued to lump different types of catastrophes to-gether for several centuries. For instance, the use of the word deluge to signifypolitical events of a large size — from the religious wars to the FrenchRevolution^** and from the point of view of the xactor as well as of the van-quished—illustrates this type of metaphorical relations which conflate eras,events, places, and worlds that are historically and ontologically distant.

The allegorical frame and the mythical perspective, always ready to bereactivated in catastrophic contexts, have been the object of numerousstudies (Bennassar 1995; Berlioz 1998). Most of the narratives and mentionsof disasters from the early modern period combine a chrono-Iogical framewith other types of causality, based on analogy, myth, and metaphor.A relevant example might be found in one of Thomas Vincent's (1667)works, God's tmible voice in the City,^^ which is a narrative, a testimony, and asermon all at once. As the title indicates, the English preacher presents thetwo disasters that hit London in 1665 and 1666 — the plague and the ñre — aswrathful manifestations of the Word, the punitive realization on earth of thewords of God.̂ "̂ As signs, they are" reminiscent of biblical events, such as theoverturning of Sodom and Gomorrah and the destruction of the Temple inJerusalem. Finally, according to Vincent, the first disaster—the plague—ismade out to be a prediction of the second one, the fire: this is precisely the waythe allegoria infactis works.

Despite their proniinence and their durability, allegorical representationsmust not overshadow the diversity of the narrative forms of experience that

24. Jacques Coppier wrote Déluge des Huguenots, avec leur tombeau avec le nom des chefs et desprinäpauxpunys{\^']2)\ two centuries later, an anonymous follower of the French Revolution publishedLe Déluge des rois. The "deluge" is often ametaphor for a crushing oflensive from the perspectiveof the winners, who consider themselves the arm of God. However, in Polish history the"deluge" ("Potop") refers to Uie Swedish invasion of 1655-56 from the victims' point of\aew. In the nineteenth century^ the "Swedish deluge" became in Poland an essential elementof national memor)' and identity. It is the topic of the second volume of Henryk Sienkiewicz'strilogy, Potop (1886). See Damien Thirietj "LM mmoire du Déluge" www.normalesup.org/ ~ dthiriei/Hors/potop.html.25. God's terrible voice in the dfy. Whereinyou have. ¡. The sound of the Voice, the J^arrative oftJie two lateDreadßill Judgements of Plague and Fire, irißicUd by the Lord upon the City of London, the former in theyear,J66^, the latter in theyear 1666. //. The interpretation of the voice, in a Discovery, L Of the Cause of the

Judganents, whereyou have a Catabre of London's sins. 2. Of the design of these Judgements, wliereyou have anetiumeration of the Duties God calls for by this terrible voice (Vincent 1667). For further analysis of thisworkj see Picard 2011.26. According to Henoch Clapham (1604: 10), the plague is named "dever" in the Biblebecause it is "a holy interpellation." He claims that 137 means "pestilence" (for example, inExodus 5:3) and "word of God" (for example, in Jeremiah 14:1) (quoted in Gilman 2011; 223).This is a mistake, but it presents a meaningful allegoria in verbis based on an accidental analogybetween "dever," meaning "plague," and "davar," a very common word in the Bible signifying"word, thing, topic." There is no objective relationship between the two. I warmly thankYitskhok Niborski for his help with this point.


flourished during the seventeenth century; nor should it lead us to any sim-plistic ideas about the understanding, responses, and actions of early modernsocieties in the face of catastrophes (as René Favier [2002, 2005,2006] insists;see also Favier and Granet-Abisset 2000).

I am thus more interested in disappearance than permanence in this sym-bolic system. The relative lessening of catastrophe's power to signify is to beput back into the general category of the decline of allegory at the end ofthe sixteenth century, and one example should suffice to illustrate my point.Le Tableau de la Fortune by Urbain Chevreau (1644), a compilation of tragicstories and memorable events, foOows very closely Le Revers de Fortune traitantdes choses mondaines by Daniel Drouyn (1587). In the chapter about floods,however, there is no longer any mention of the "deluge,"^' and Sodom andGomorrah have disappeared from the chapter devoted to flre and brimstone.

2.2. Anecdote: Drawing Generalities from Specifics

One indication of the weakening of the allegorical approach is the treatmentof the catastrophe based on the use of anecdotes: there are of course exem-plary anecdotes which refer to a higher moral or religious sense; nevertheless,while allegory tends toward the unifying, the anecdote is aimed toward theparticular, the contingent, and calls more for a literal reading. I define theanecdote as a micronarrative with an illustrative aim that tells about asingular case, interesting in itself and involving individualized actors.^* Theanecdote shares traits with the news item {/aits divers) and the leaflet (feuillesvolantes, canardsf^ while also distinguishing itself from these genres. In contrastto the. faits divers, anecdotes do not always resort to extreme and dramaticrhetoric. The major features of the anecdote, where concerned with naturaldisasters, are that it allows for the inscription of a witness, a gaze, and that itfocuses attention upon the way the catastrophe affects one life in particular,within a circumscribed and limited framework.

27. Démoris (2007) likewise shows that the first representations of storms from which biblicalreferences are absent take place at the end of the sixteenth century.28. For Jürgen Hein (1981), the main characteristics of the anecdote are a differentiated inci-dent and an explicit historical dimension. Archer Taylor (1970; 223) characterizes the anecdoteas "a brief narrative current in oral tradition that tells something unusual about a person, anevent or a thing. It may involve the quotation of a witty remark or description of a remarkablesituation." On the relationship between anecdotes and history proper, see also Fineman 1989;Gossman 2003. .29. According to Jean Céard (1977), people in the sixteenth century thought oifeuiltes votantesas narratives. For Denis Crouzet ( 1990), their impact lies more in the symbols they convey thanin the pleasure provided by the stories they are meant to tell.


Anecdotes are found neither in Thucydides's description of the plague ofAthens^^ nor in Lucretius's, and only one appears in Boccaccio's descriptionof the plague in Florence.^' Significantly, in The Decameron that one anecdote isassociated with the only mention of an eyewitness authenticated by a refer-ential and factual first person. Boccaccio (2008 [1370], 1: 8) certifies that hehas personally observed two pigs which died after having rubbed against theclothes of a plague-stricken person. This "accident" ("maraviglioso caso") isless pathetic than realistic and significant, as it is used to inform us of acharacteristic of contamination so powerful as to cut across the speciesbarrier.

During the early modem period, representing collective disasters becomesmore and more a question of understanding and valorizing the individualcase, always human and always likely to elicit compassion. Sometimes theanecdote summarizes the entire catastrophe. At the time indeed entire reper-toires of anecdotes about fires, plagues, and floods were compiled.^^ Theseanthologies of disasters enjoyed a steady publication, which continued wellinto the nineteenth century. Les catastrophes célèbres (1855) by Hyppolyte deChavannes de la Giraudière—a book reprinted twenty-one times between1855 and 1912—is a representative example of this type of collection. Thisexample shows that the compilation of anecdotes may have intended toembrace long temporal sequences and help build a collective memory ofthe disaster. However, the intertextual mobility of the anecdote also tendsto make any reference to a particular spatial and temporal situation moredifficult to establish.

Easily detachable, the anecdote indeed lends itself quite well to appropri-ation and to intertextual movement. One might illustrate both the circulationof anecdotes and how their rewriting tended to suppress their source details,

30. I difler on this point from Fineman. According to him, Thucydides "as a writer ofthe historyofthe anecdote, thereby stands, despite his totalizing historiographie intentions, for the appear-ance of contingency, and therefore of History" ( Fineman 1989: 62). For Fineman, the anecdoteintroduces the "opening" of contingency in the teleological progress of history {61), and soAthens's plague as told by Thucydides is an anecdote, However, if we take into account that theanecdote focuses on the particular, on individual cases, there is then a big difference betweenthe plague of Athens and that of Aix, for example, as told by Michel de Nostre-Dame {1555) oras related in the compilations of prodigious stories during the Renaissance.31. On the plague in TheDecar/won, see Farina Maggioni 1972; Flach 1992; Getto 1966 [1958];Grimm 1965; Vetterli 1941.32. For example, Ùïçiarnous Historia trágico-rnaritima, em que se escrevenichronolo^canimteosnaufra^sque äveram as naus de Portugal, depots que sepoz em exerctdo ajYauegaçào da India by Bernardo Gomes deBrito {1735-36). Gomes de Brito, who was a historian, collected twelve accounts of shipwreckswhich occurred between 1552 and 1602 and published them in chronological order, as isunderlined in the title of his work, 77ie Tragic History ojthe Sea: Narratives ofthe Shipwrecks Chrono-lôgicalfy Written (translated into English in 1959 and 1968). About shipwreck narratives, seeDuprat 2011.


which obviously hinder the discursive construction of the disaster as an event.• One of these stories is about a woman who, during a plague, appears at awindow while in the process of sewing her own shroud around herself andspeaks with a doctor who happens to be in the street below. She is later foundby grave diggers, dead in her half-sewn shroud. The story first appears in awork by Michel de Nostre-Dame (1555: 50-54), who is the doctor and whotells the story as a witness. The story is then appropriated by Pierre deBoaistuau (1981 [1558]: 176-78); then by Jean de Marconville (1564: 26r-27r), who places a special emphasis on the pathos; and finally by Drouyn(1587: 65V). In these last two authors, the setting of the anecdote is no longerAix, where the plague actually took place. The fate of the woman is a patheticexample of the plague's stereotyped circumstances—the inability of the com-munity to perform the funeral ceremonies, the stoic courage of people inextreme situations'^—but the story no longer refers to a particular epidemic.

Anecdotes can range even over larger temporal and geographic spaces.A famous example teüs how a Dutch merchant, imprisoned in Moscow,manages to escape from the fire and from the Tartars, all the while facingincredible horrors and dangers (date unknown). This story is narrated byboth the Frenchman Simon Goulart ( 1618 [ 1608] ) and the Enghshman RegeSincera (1667).̂ * Anecdotes also move easily between the limits of factual andfictional discourse, as with the story of a drunken man buried by mistake whowakes up unscathed in the plague pit. Already figuring as early as 1577 in anItalian version of the plague of Milan by Paolo Bisciola (1577), the manbecomes the hero of the epidemic in Vienna in 1667, as told by Abrahama Santa Clara (1915 [1688]: 23-24): he is the famous poor piper Augustine,still alive in Austrian popular memory. In his Journal of the Plague Tear, DanielDefoe (1990 [1722]: 91) makes another poor piper undergo the same misad-venture, this time in London. The circulation of anecdotes gives birth tocommonplace examples of the incredible.

What type of catastrophic experience does the anecdote itself shape {con-figure, in Ricœur's [1984-88, 2] terminology) through its narrative system?

This mode of apprehending catastrophe makes memorable not the di--saster itself but a little singularity that it embodies in a fragment of individualdestiny. Being a synecdoche of the catastrophe, anecdotes often focus on thesentimental and pathetic aspects of the account. The story of the woman inthe shroud, for example, produces a rhetoric of extremes which emphatically

33. Michel de Montaigne (2007 [1580]: DI, 12, 61), evoking the 1585 Bordeaux epidemic,relates the anecdote of how "a labourer of mine, in dying, with his hands and feet pulled theearth upon him."34. Rege Sincera is the pseudonym chosen by the author of the text. His real name remainsunknown.


demonstrates the powerlessness of words. The pathetic tone is amplified withtime and distance, from Nostre-Dame to Drouyn. As can be seen in the case.of the piper, however, the addition of a little story that will bring to theanecdote a happy ending can also invert the signifier of disaster. Anecdotederives from an Aristotelian poetic operation, aiming at the representation ofthe general through the particular. It is sometimes marked by arbitrary,perhaps even gratuitous, actions. Anecdotes of catastrophe fall mainly intothe first mode of the story experience, which Koselleck defines as "surprise."They sometimes also fall into the second mode, however, that of "accumu-lation": cases are compiled and serialized. The cognitive gain produced bythis kind of narrative does not reside in its explanation of the phenomenonbut in its construction of the catastrophe as a fact, one both extraordinary andreproducible, singular and universal.

The mobility of anecdotes can be clearly seen in their being reused andreactualized m feuilles volantes, with a change only in the date and the placeof the disastrous event. The goal of this kind of publication is less to representa particular event than to emphasize the pathetic, tragic,^^ or even comiceffect that catastrophes have on people, including the unknown and mosthumble ones. Anecdotes, through their limited framework, pinpoint thesingularity and the variety of human vicissitudes in the catastrophe.

Just as the disaster gets apprehended as a sign and through allegory inseveral cultural areas, so the presentation of a disaster by means of an anec-dote has found favor beyond the borders of Europe. A brief comparison withits occurrence in seventeenth-century Chinese literature should prove usefulby lending additional support to some of my conclusions.

Three short stories devoted to disaster can be found iri Pu Song ling's(1640-1715) corpus of tales,̂ *̂ and, though quite different, all three exhibitthis recourse to the anecdote. The first story, titled "Survivors of the Flood"(Pu 2010 [1880]: rV, n°i39), tells about a pious son who, having abandonedhis two children in order to save his mother during a flood, later finds themmiraculously alive. Several years after, during an earthquake his house once

- again escapes destruction. The end explicitly situates it within the genre of theexemplary tale: the gods do distinguish black and white, good and evil.

Like many of the stories found in the Strange Tales fiom the Liaozhai Studio(ibid.) collection, the second narrative belongs instead to the fairy and fan-tastic genre: a prefect is shown in a dream how to divert an impending locustinvasion from his village by pleading with a passerby who happens to be the

35. According to the usual meaning of the word at the time, that is to say bloody and arousingfeelings of horror. It is the case, for instance, in the account of the fire of Mechlin in BrabantbyGouIart(i6i8 [1608]: f i36r).36. The tales were collected around 1679 "̂*̂ published for the first time in 1766.


goddess of locusts (TV, n° 138). The third story is probably the most relevantto my inquiry. In it the author asserts that he had a personal experience of anearthquake and proceeds to detail his presence at the scene, what he wasdoing when the earthquake struck, and, albeit briefly, his reactions to thiscatastrophic event.^' Moreover, in all three stories location in space and timeis specified, but the third story also indicates the disaster's exact time ofoccurrence and duration. In this story, the uniqueness of the event is high-lighted without any recourse to pathos, the author having chosen to recountthe cataclysm in a tone at once descriptive and humorous. This best showsitself in the fact that the author emphasizes the laughable effects of fear just asmuch as he does the upheavals in the landscape: the villagers, finding them-selves in the streets, fail to realize that they are naked.

This comical tone also begets another anecdote (in the same story), this onemore individualized, about a woman who managed to snatch her child fromthe jaws of a wolf in the middle of the night and who tells her story withoutnoticing her nakedness. The narrator concludes thus: "How he exposes him-self to ridicule the one who is dominated by panic, and is no longer able toconceive of any idea!"^"

It is accordingly a general consideration belonging to the psychologicaland moral register that constitutes the viewing angle. It allows for the con-struction of a small event series by linking different types of accidents: theearthquake and the attack of the wolf

The first-person narrative (see note 37), the detached tone, the care given tothe literary description of the surrounding environment, and the absence ofsupernatural elements all come together to set this anecdotal story apart fromPu's other tales, bestowing on it an exceptional status in his corpus, as it were.This example suggests that the choice of the narrative form to communicatethe disaster also contributes to a renewal of the discursive processes andconventions of a genre (here, the short story or "strange tale").

Pu's tale also demonstrates that anecdotes can be instrumental in thefashioning of the catastrophe as an event: the author tèUs about a particularearthquake precisely situated in time and space. But if we define an event as amemorable break in the temporal chain deemed worthy of being collectivelyremembered, this event appears less important, in Pu's tales as in most anec-

37. "The beams and supports of the house snapped here and there with a crash, and we lookedat each other in fear and trembling" (Pu 2010 [1880]: 370).38. "Ren zhi huanghuang wu mou, yi he kexiao ye!" The English translation (first printed in1880) ignores this sentence, translated into French by André Levy: "La précipitation qu'en-gendre la panique ne laisse place à aucune autre préoccupation, et plus du tout au sens duridicule" (Pu 2005 [1679]; 215). I would like to express my gratitude to Lijinjia, who gave methis information and the quotation in Chinese and its literal translation. About the trans-lations of Pu's work, seejinjia 2009.

268 Poetics Today 333-4

dotes of catastrophe, than a collection ofhttle stories focused on curious,humorous, remarkable occurrences.

2.3. Catastrophe as (Hi)story

At this stage of my argument, it should also be remembered that defining thenatural disaster as an event has encountered its share of opposition.^^ Thisdefinition has been rejected by traditional historiography, as can be seen inthe French Annales school's disallowing of the concept of "event." In Fer-nand Braudel's (1969, 1975) perspective, catastrophes are somewhat para-doxically characterized by an almost motionless time, the same time thatcharacterizes man's relationship with the natural world. Recently, however,historians have come to dispute this approach. Serge BrifTaud {1993), Chris-tian Desplat (1995), and Gregory Quenet (1999) assume that catastrophesare historical because they are bound to cultural and social parameters,recorded and reconstructed by discourse. I would argue that changes atthe level of the discourse are actualized in the construction of catastrophesas historical events.

If the anecdote is involved in this new process, it is only to a limited extent.*"*It is just another form of storytelling in which this mutation (narrativizationand historicization) in the representation of disasters exhibits itself. I proposeto regard the new kind of catastrophic storytelling which emerges at the endof the sixteenth century as "historical" for several reasons. First, this type ofnarrative deals with disaster in terms of its human causes and its consequencesfor the life of a community. Furthermore, the catastrophic historical narra-tive is where the chronological unfolding of the story of the disaster now takesplace. Finally, some of these stories were written during the seventeenthcentury by professional historians—such as Giuseppe Ripamonti (1641) orAntonio Bulifon (1701)—who based them more on the annals of the citythan on their personal testimony.

Despite some similarities between anecdotes and historical accounts (suchas the focus on individuals and the importance of an explicit point of view),'"they are different in their relation to time and their narrative structure. Thecompilers of anecdotes generally localize the catastrophe in time and space,often mentioning its precise duration. But they nevertheless tend to lay out

39. I borrow "(hi)story," a helpful way of expressing the link between narrativity and historicity,from Sternberg 1990b.40. Concerning Thucydides and Hippocrates, Fineman (1989: 55) emphasizes the close re-lationship of historical writing with the writing of the medical case, which seeks to show aprogress with a beginning, a midway crisis, and an end.41. The similarities are stressed by Fineman (57), who claims that the anecdote is a "historeme,i.e. the smallest unit of the historiographie fact."


the small occurrences that, taken together, constitute the catastrophe ratheras a tableau which exhibits none of the features characteristic of the narrá-tivized accounts: detailed and extended chronology, focus on conflicts, con-struction of characters.

The great discursive models of plague accounts—Thucydides's, Lucre-tius's, Boccaccio's—are indeed tableaux. In their descriptions ofthe plaguefrom antiquity or from the medieval era, narrativity is often concentrated atthe beginning of the epidemic, its initial outbreak, Mdthout developing thestory of catastrophe to its end. In his letters on the eruption of Vesuvius, Plinythe Younger (1989 [1969]: VI, 16,20) details a chrono-logical process, but hismain interest lies less in the disaster itself rather than in recounting the lastdays of Pliny the Elder. Historical catastrophic narratives are shaped in aquite different way.

2.3.1. Emplotment and Characters Beginning with the end of the sixteenthcentury, catastrophe narratives undergo an important change. There is astriking difference between writings produced during the epidemic of1576-78 and that of 1629-30 but also between Italian treatises*^ and theones that originate from the rest of Europe. From the end of the sixteenthcentury onward, Italian eye witness catastrophe narratives undergo an im-portant change in the development of narrativity. Thus Johannes Boeckel'swork, which appeared in Hamburg in 1577, De Peste, guae Hamburgum duitatemanno LXV: Grairissime adflixit, presents the author's own eyewitness account. Butdespite its title, nothing in this narrative relates specifically to the Hamburgplague: no actor, private or public, is individualized. Published the sameyear, the narrative of the Jesuit Bisciola (1577) is very different and perfectlyexemplifies what we find in a great number of closely similar contemporaryaccounts. Its tide eloquendy highlights narrativity, with its challenges andobjectives:

True Narrative ofthe Progress ofthe Plague in Milan: Which Began on August, 1376, and Wenton until May l^yj. Written by R . D. Paolo Bisciola, Priest ofthe Company of Jesus in Milan,Church of San Fedele, in Which Are Narrated the Measures Taken by His Highness the MostIllustrious Cardinal Barromeo, and His Excellency, the Senate and the Commissioners ofthePublic Health, Where One Can Leam What Is the True Behaviour of a Perfect Shepherd WhoLoves His Flock, and How a Prince Ought to Rule a City in a Time of Plague, Which Is Very

^ (My translation)

42. In this article, treatise (from the Latin tractatus] refers to a kind of factual text difficult to definein generic terms: it is a didacdc exposition of something with a narrative component more orless developed.43. Relations verissima delprogresso delta peste di Milano. Qual principié nel mese d'Agosto J¿y6 e seguí fino almese di Mag¿o J^yy. Scritta dalR.D. Paolo Bisciola Prête delta compania del Jesu in Milano, netla Chiesa diSan- Fedele. Dove si raccontano le provisioni fatte da Monsignor Ilhistrissimo Cardinal Borromeo, e di Sua


Indeed, Bisciola's short narrative carries out this program in about fifteenpages. He recounts the plague's progress, situating each important phase in atime frame that extends from the first signs of contamination through all thedifferent stages of its decline to the procession that signifies the deliverancefrom the disease.

Perhaps for one of the first times in the history of catastrophe telling, theplot of the epidemic is mainly formed by a human agon of fighting againstopposing forces, human or not. As the title of his work announces, this is whatconstitutes the exemplary force of the catastrophe and, fundamentally, whatmakes it worth remembering. As can be seen in Bisciola's narrative, theemplotment is particularly noticeable in the first pages of this kind of account.There, typically, the beginning of contamination subsumes the contingencyof individual actions and fragments of daily life in a kind of novel of origins,which makes each plague a singular event.

In Bisciola's narrative, a woman on the way to see her sister visits an innwhere a plague-stricken gendemen from Mantua has just stayed. She then"lovingly" ("amorevolmente") communicates the disease to the entire city—we are not far here from a bawdy comedy or from an exemplary tale as itappears in the following example from the same narrative: a man who fleesMantua is refused entry into a convent and ends up at a farmer's house,where he is robbed of his money; the thieves are contaminated by the moneyand die. Like the stories of the woman sewing her own shroud, of the poorpiper buried by mistake, or of the Dutch merchant prisoner of the fire, theone about the thief punished by his contaminated loot is a recurring anec-dote, in factual accounts as in fiction.*" But in these narratives (about theMilan plagues of 1576 and 1630), anecdotes are not only synecdochic of thedisaster. They are the cause of the disaster and the origin of the story. Anec-dotes are integrated into a narrative developed in a chrono-logical sequence;consequently more individualized characters are introduced as well. Thenarratives of the Milan plague of 1576 have a hero. Carlo Borromeo—canonized for his work duiring these trying times—and antiheroes, who arequite precisely characterized: thieves and so-called untoH (sorcerers). In thenarrative of the Milan plague of 1630, they are even introduced as characterswith their own individuality, the barber Giacomo Mora, in Ripamonti's

EccelUnza, Senato, e Sigtiori deputati sopra la Sanità. Dove si pud imparare, il vero modo d'un perfelto Pastore

(unator del suo gre^e: e corne un Prinape devegovemar una Citlà, nel tempo di peste, cosa molto utile (Bisciola

'577)-44. In Benedetto Cinquanta's play The Plague 0/1630 ( 1632), a girl dies after pocketing the jewelsof a dead prostitute; in Manzoni's (1997 [1827]: chap. 33) novel Äi/rö/Afi/, Griso, Don Rodrigo'sservant, a thief and a traitor, is punished for and by his greed: he catches the plague fromshaking the clothes of his master in order to steal more.


{La peste 1945 [1641]) account, being a good example of this characterization.With Bisciola's narrative, a remarkable novelty manifests itself in the storyof catastrophe telling: the plot of the epidemic is mainly formed by the agón ofa human agent fighting against opposing forces, human or not. As the ddeof his work announces, this is what constitutes the exemplary scope of thecatastrophe and, fundamentally, makes it worth remembering.

2.3.2. Politics and Conflicts Where the authorities are involved in thestruggle against the epidemic, narratives of these catastrophes are very likelyto present an agonisdc dimension, which arises from divergent and conflict-ing interpretations of the event in question. One of the condidons that seemsto be essential to the narrativization of catastrophes is the existence of publicauthorides (ecclesiasdcal, municipal, or royal, depending on the period andthe country) who intend to make it well known that they have taken care of thecommunity by overseeing its sanitary, material, and spiritual needs. Theseare the same people who also try to impose their interpretation of the natureof the evil power behind the catastrophe. For example, they V\T11 determine ifthe cause of the Milan plague (1630) is to be found—or not—in criminaldeeds or whether the London fire (1666) was caused by a Catholic conspir-acy. Whatever the interpretation, it in turn determines the prophylacdcmeasures, the administrative steps, and the police action to be taken. Italywas quite ahead of other European countries in public health policies (Cip-pola 1979 [1977], 1985). We could even tentatively suggest that the develop-ment of truly outstanding accounts in a narrative form is related to theinvolvement of governments in disaster management. This hypothesiswould apply pardcularly well to the case of epidemics, since they generatemany conflicts: between religious communides,*^ between the populationand the physicians,"*^ between the people and the representatives of theauthorities,"*' between the political and the religious authorides."*"

45. During the Lyon plague of 1629, Protestants were accused of being responsible for it andpersecuted accordingly (see Jouhaud et al. 2009); similar cases involving Jews also took placein 1630, in Mantua, for example (see Cavarocchi 2002). There is a long history of interlinkagebetween catastrophes and persecution, the details of which lie outside the scope of this article.On accusations of sorcery and their links with epidemics, see Naphy 2002.46. Alessandro Tadino (1648), for instance, tells how people in Milan refused to admit that theplague had appeared iij the city and tried to kill the physicians commissioned by the municipalauthorities, accusing them of spreading bad news. In France the same misadventure befellDurand de Montlauzeur (1629) and for a similar reason (quoted in Coste 2007: 570-71).47. Foreseeably, people very often disobeyed or even rebelled against police rules during anepidemic. '48. Carlo M. Cippola mentions how conflicts regularly broke out during the Italian epidemicsof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, since religious and municipal authorities tended todisagree about the organization of processions and collective devotional activities. The author-ities — municipal or religious — were often aware of the fact that these public events incurred


A littie-known example illustrates more precisely a particular kind of ten-sion within plague-stricken communities, namely, those that found ex-pression in conflicts among medical practitioners. I am referring to thenarrative of the Roman plague of 1658 by Jacob Zahalon, a Jewish doctorin the ghetto ofRome.''^In his Treasure of Life (Ozarha-Hayyirri) Zahalon (1683)details the conflict that pitted him against the "Gentile physician" in charge ofthe ghetto's sanitary police force, a conflict brought about by their divergentviews on a plague diagnosis.^'' The narrative thus brings to light the tensionsthat were generated or exacerbated during the epidemic.

When such author-narrators happen to be close to—or commissionedby—the political or religious authorities, their narratives are more oftenthan not consonant with the official versions. As suggested by HaydenWhite (1981), narrativity can be associated with the imposition of meaning,itself oriented by the narrators' relationship to power. The witnesses'accounts of the 1666 London fire, which are based on an official narrativeand an interpretative outline issued by the London Gazette^ are particularlysignificant in this case: Pierre Kapitaniak (2011) has convincingly shownhow Thomas Newcombe's coverage of the Lx)ndon fire, in the eighty-fifthissue of the London Gazette (the Crown's official paper) in 1666, sought both toplay down the importance of the event and to emphasize the king's actions.More importantly, because of King Charles II's Catholic sympathies and theCatholic faith of part of his family, the London Gazette, acting as a channel forthe English Crown's propaganda, was also used to deny all rumours of ananti-Catholic conspiracy despite the arrest of French and Dutch suspects.

The authors of these narratives—such as Newcombe, Alessandro Tadino,Cesare Braccini, and Riparrionti^' —are often aware of the political stakesthat underlie the management of the catastrophe and openly express theirsupport of the authorities in their narratives. One indication of their com-

contamination and therefore tried to avoid them, for instance, in Villefranche-sur-Rouergue,Florence, and Montpellier in 162g and in Marseiile in 1720 (see Cippola 1973, 1976, 1979[1977], '985: '85fï"-i Coste 2007: 642-47).49. On Zahalon, see Friedenwald 1918, 1944; Leibowitz 2000 [1967]; Savilz 1935. Zahalon'snarrative of the 1658 Roman plague was pardy translated by Harry Friedenwald.50. "At that time it occurred to me that a certain patient whose name was Sabbatai Cohen (ofblessed memory) became ill with fever. He had a swelling in the groin and I did not consider it a .bubo. When he died I stated that he did not die of the plague, but the Gentile physician said hedied of the plague because he saw the swelling in the groin, which I regarded as a hernia of theintestines. There was therefore great difference of opinion as to the closing up of the house, aswas done when one died of the disease. They brought the body to the Gentile physician, openedit, and found that it was as I had said and not a bubo, as the GentUe physician had maintained,and I was saved" (Friedenwald 1918: 3).51. About Braccini and Ripamonti, see section 2.3.3.


mitment and their involvement in the vicissitudes of the city is that the nar-ratives often conclude with calculations of the costs incurred by the disaster.This can be seen, for example, at the end of two narratives: Braccini's (1632)about the earthquake that shook Naples in 1630 and Sincera's (1667) aboutthe 1666 London ñre. The doctors and priests who tell the stories for posteritydo so in order to praise representatives of temporal and spiritual power and totransmit personal and collective experience. The intense editorial activity^'which manifests itself at the approach of a new epidemic is another sign of agrowing desire to transniit an experience to an audience that is not only goingto undergo a divine ordeal but is also seeking to prepare for and prevent thedisaster as far as possible. With this in view, writers accordingly tell about thesuccess of the different measures and the exemplary actions taken by peoplein comparable situations of the past.

To this effect, the printers strive to compue and repubHsh the treatises andnarratives which dealt with the previous pestilences." During the plagueepidemic of the years 1629-30 in northern Italy, the reissuing of narrativesdepicting the plague which had taken place there in 1576-77 seems to havetaken advantage of an editorial opportunity. In the eighteenth century, sev-eral narratives about the plague which occurred a century earlier were pub-lished or republished: to give but one example, François Ranchin's (1721[1629]) Medical and Political Treatise ( Traité medical et politique), written during the

pestilence in 1629, was republished in 1721 probably because of the epidemicin Marseille.

What was the role of these reissues in the formation of a memory of thedisaster? Recent studies have shown that the memory of natural disastersdoes not usually last longer than fifty years (Favier and Granet-Abisset2000). The mass publication of treatises, narratives, and compilationsaimed to inscribe the memory of the disaster, and the political and literaryrepercussions^* of the Milan plague could very well suggest that thesepublication strategies were sometimes successful.

52. For example, eleven different works concerning the plague were published or republished inLondon in 1603 - 4, seventeen in 1625, and another seven in 1626. There also appeared severalEnglish translations of Fioravanti 1579, de Bèze 1580, and Paré 1630. See Carlino andjean-neret 2009.53. Among these republishings see, for instance, Raccolta di awertimenti e raccordiper conoscer ta pesie,Per curarsi, e preservará, e per purgar robbe e case irtfelte by Tebaldo Loveti, published in Venice in 1630and dedicated to the senate of this city. The printer, Bonifacio Ciera, explains that the sanitarymeasures recommended in the book were implemented during the previous plague, in 1576.The book was published again in Venice in 1682. In London, Thomas Cartwright's An hospitatlfor the diseased [i^jS) was republished in 1579, 1580, 1584, 1587, 1595, 1598, 1610, 1619, 1630,and 1638.54. From a political standpoint, the Milan plague's repercussions are illustrated by PietroVerri's Ossewaéoni sulta tortura [Observations on Torturé), written in 1777, published in 1804, and


This collective efFort to tell, remember, and transmit knowledge on a givendisaster does not proceed without debate among the people of the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries. On the contrary, the meaning attributed tocatastrophes is rarely univocal. Indeed, conflicts of many different kinds areoften central to these narratives and sometimes are what moves the narrativeforward. Since the end ofthe sixteenth century, catastrophe narratives havealmost always been marked by the expression of divergent interpretations ofthe phenomenon. French narratives ofthe plague (1620-30) underline therivalries between physicians as well as their opposition to the government:these delayed the announcement of the disease and the establishment ofsanitary measures for fear of the reaction of the population. They alsoevoke the people's lack of discipline and even their rebellion.^^ The motifofthe denunciation ofthe political authorities' insufficiencies becomes cen-tral once again in many ofthe accounts ofthe 1720 plague of MarseilJe,^^ somuch so that some were disapproved and even suppressed by the municipalauthorities for that very

2.3.3. Point of View and interpretation The growing presence of conflictsin catastrophe narratives favors the expression of an opinion by the narrator,as is clearly evidenced in the case ofthe plague epidemics which occurred inItaly and France in 1575, 1620 - 30, and 1720. The narrator-witness now has apoint of view in both senses ofthe term: he inscribes the anecdotes within achrono-logically organized narration, and he is an interpretative participantin the event concerned.

Braccini's narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates thenarrator-witness's need to • explain his personal, intellectual, and evenemotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuviusgave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between "thecuriosity" ofthe witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured

founded on an analysis ofthe trials ofthe alleged poisoners held responsible for the 1630 Milanplague. As for literary posterity) one obviously thinks of Manzoni, who will be discussed a littlefurther.55. See, for instance, Guillaume Potel, Traicté de la peste advenue eit ceste uille de Paris, l'an mil j^g6j 606 J6J g et 1623 avec les remèdes... (Vfo^J, or François Ranchin, Traité medical et politique de la peste.Avec l'Histoire de la peste qui affligea Montpellier es années 162g et ¡630. Les ordres qu'on y apporta; ladesinfection de la Ville ( 1721 [1629]) (see Coste 2007: 565 -610).56. See Bertrand 1723: 20 - 25; quoted in Coste 2007:570 - 79. This book was published again in

•779-57. Pichatty de Croissainte's narrative ofthe plague in Marseille [Journal abrégé de ce qui s'est passéen la ville de Marsélle depuis qu'elle est aßigee de la Contagion, tiré du mémorial de la Chambre du Censal del'Hotel'de-mlle) was suppressed by the municipal authorities when it was published in Marseille in1720. However, it was republished in 1721 in Carpentras. See Lou is-François Jauffret 1820, vol.1: 127; Coste 2007: 587. •


by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger'srV, 20) attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also byreference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruptionsite, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini's writing. Anotherpriest. Angelo Eugenii da Perugia (1631), compares his "experience" of the"natural effects" of the eruption to the "extravagant exaggerations" of hiscontemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of theApocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does thisprevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini (1632: 31) goes to alibrary in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny's letter about theeruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: "Here is adescription,^^ 1550 years old, that corresponds exacdy to what you havebefore your eyes today"^^ (my translation). In the case of the eruption ofVesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invitesbetween AD 79 and 1629 beg for démystification: at least, the repetitionsuggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not thelast and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini's rational point ofview thus pardy secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension isfundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several dmesaround 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northernItaly. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes inchronological order,^" focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past(especially the sixteenth century) whue ignoring biblical and mythicalaccounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

We have thus moved from myth to history, from allegory to narrativeproper. This shift, though vkddespread, is particularly well exemplified bythe Milan plague, which is indeed unrivaled in its nature and in the qualityof accounts to which it gave rise. In an unheard-of way, the discursive man-agement of the 1630 Muan plague led to it being interpreted and inscribed inhistory. This epidemic, contrary to the ones before it—all generating perse-cution, to a greater or lesser extent, of sorcerers, Protestants, Jews—waspresented as a catastrophe of a pohtical nature. For the first time, persecudonis the main aspect of the catastrophe that is discussed, as in the historianRipamonti's ( 1641) Z)ePeste quaefuit anno j6ßo libri V, demmptiexannalibus urbis.^'

58. He speaks about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.59. "Eccovi descritto 1550 anni sono, quello appunto, che oggi védete" (Braccini 1632: 31).60. The title of Braccini's ( 1632) treatise explicitly promises that the book will display The Story ofAtl the Other Fires That Occurred on the Same Mount [La Storia di tutti gti altri incendii net medesimo Monteavenutij.61. We could also mention two letters concerning the interpretation of the Milan plague, oneby a historian, Agostino Mascardi, and the other by a poet, Claudio AchiUini. Both were

276. Poetics Today 33:3-4

This narrative is an exceptional text in many respects. First, it involves a longnarration and a historical perspective that combine several temporalities:those related to the different plagues that afflicted Milan, those of the Mil-anese wars, and those of the plague itself. What marks the plague is not onlythe government's fight against the epidemic but also internal conflicts withinthe community, producing riots, lynching, and persecution. Moreover, theauthor distances himself from the dominant theory of the-plague's diabolicalor criminal origins. Ripamonti's remarkable use of irony and double mean-ing expresses ambiguously his opposition to the persecution that has takenplace.

Even narratives that adopt a more credulous point of view regarding theinfluence of the stars or the presence oïuntori (sorcerers)^^ testify to a histor-icization of perspective. Remarkably, most narratives about the 1631 plaguein Milan do not focus on its initial outbreak in the city, which would highlightthe role of chance through individual stories; they develop instead an expla-nation of the plague's outbreak based on historical facts—invasions, sieges,famine, population displacement. This approach, which favors the construc-tion of a causal system, results from a collective transformation of experiencenoticeable in these narratives written by priests, physicians, and historians.To cite Koselleck's analysis again, what is sketched here belongs to the his-torical texts that "rewrite" {annals, other narratives, accounts). In construct-ing their links of causality, these narratives have freed themselves from thebond of the eyewitness testimony. Even if he continues to use eyewitnessaccounts, Ripamonti makes clear in the very tide of his narrative that hisreal source is the city's annals.

We find narrativity developed in the most diverse corpus fi-om the end ofthe sixteenth century onward." Quenet (2005: 93-94) notes that beginningwith the end of the seventeenth century, priests compiled parish recordswith longer and more detailed annotations, sometimes containing catastro-phe narratives. Joël Coste (2007: 485-505) remarks that narratives of thesame period about the plague become more and more circumstantial: thequality of the medical observations improves, the sick are more and moreindividualized.

published several times, including in Bologna in 1630 by Catanio and in Rome in 1631 byGrignani. See Achillini and Mascardi 1630.62. The treatise by Tadino, for instance. In France, the narrative of Père Grillot, concerning theplague of 1628 in Lyon and published in Le Mercure François {x&i^-1^, illustrates the rise of apolitical and controversial point of view {Jouhaud et al. 2009: 19 iff.).63. See note 6 on the genesis of new textual forms in narratives produced in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries.


Two main forces operate for the development of narrativity in catastrophenarratives. On the one hand, we find the intention to set an example,^* whichis closely related to praising the actions of public authorities, secular or reli-gious, and, on the other, the representation of the different conflicts that arisefrom the various supposed causes, hence the interpretations, of the naturaldisaster and from the problem of how to fight it.''̂

This kind of narrative helps make the catastrophe memorable.''^ Since thebeginning of the seventeenth century, factual narratives have indeed beenmost serviceable to the construction of a collective memory: they have playeda role similar to that of the innumerable plague columns of eastern Europe,devotional and commemorative monuments erected in the same period.Treating the catastrophe as a singular and historical event makes afundamental transformation of experience and perspective. Starting around1630, catastrophe narratives also involve a new use of fiction to representcatastrophes.

In order to fashion a singular event out of what used to be considered, untilthe end of the sixteenth century, just another disaster, the point of view needsto shift toward the human (and so "unnatural") element in the natural disasterand to focus, more than factual narratives ever did, on individual destiny,empathy, and personal response. This is precisely what is accomplishedthrough the turn to fiction.

3. Fictional Narratives

The difference between fictional and factual accounts of disasters has so farnot drawn much attention.^' Critics are generally more interested in theartistic representations of catastrophes (especially the plague) in literatureand the arts.* '̂ The first question to ask is, to paraphrase the tide of Cohn1999, what distinguishes catastrophic fiction?

64. This is applied to the narratives of the plague of Milan in 1577, which praise Bishop-Borromeo, but also to the stories of edifying deaths imitating that of François de Sales(Jouhaud et al. 2009: 212fr.)65. The centrality of conflicts in the modern understanding of the disaster is even more notice-able in fiction. The Plague o/'y ffjo ( 1632) was written by Cinquanta as the titular plague of Milanwas raging. The play features all the conflicts of interpretation and power possible — betweendoctors, between priests and people, between local government and plague-stricken citizens,between foreigners and the people of Milan, between man and woman, and between socialclasses. On this play, see Lavocat 2011 a.66. This new oudook on disasters, as far as it concerns the plague, could probably be explainedin part by the reduction in their frequency, which makes them seem exceptional.67. See Lavocat 2012a.68. In addition to the recent collection of articles Le Roy Ladurie et al. 2007, one can mentionthe work on voléanos in Bertrand 2001, 2004,2005; Sylvos and Bosquet 2005. Not surprisingly,

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In romances, especially during the baroque period, its traits emerge easily:they are axiological in nature. Fiction, a world of norms and values accordingto Thomas Pavel (2003), places amorous paragons, virtue, and altruism at theheart of disaster. At the beginning of Madeleine de Scudéry's Legrand Cyrus(1656 [1649]), Artamene braves the flames from Sinope to find Mandane; inHonoré d'Urfé's UAstrée (2010 [1607]: part i, 7) Cléon risks her life takingcare of her sick mother during the plague. Fiction thus takes the oppositedirection toward stories and accounts that emphasize, as did Boccaccio, thedisintegration of fraternity, of family, and of social relationships, especially intimes of epidemic (Lavocat 201 ib, 2012b).

But instead of measuring the gap between factual and fictional narratives,I would rather fo'cus on their point of convergence, underscoring thelink between narrativity and historicity in terms based on Ricœur (1980a;1980b; 1984-88, 1).

The chronological coincidence of the rise of factual and fictional narrativeson the topic of catastrophes has not been emphasized in earlier research.Leaving aside mythology and legends and brief mentions of catastrophes intales, there are no fictional tales of disaster, to my knowledge, before the floodin Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron (2000 [1559]), since the plague in TheDecameron itself is given as a factual account. Fictional disasters arise parallel tothe emergence of the baroque romance in the seventeenth century. In thefollowing section, I will try to characterize the experience shaped by thesefictions of disaster, showing that this experience is related to time and history,as is also the case for factual accounts, albeit in a different way.

Fictional narratives seem to have the particularity of combining all three ofthe previously distinguished categories of catastrophic narrative: allegory,linked, as we have seen, to a mythical perspective, mixes there with anecdoteand history. We could even distinguish two ways they articulate them: the firstone, appearing in the baroque novel and also found in later examples,^^combines allegory and history. The second one, which arose at the beginningof the eighteenth century with Defoe, favors the subjective and ethical ap-prehension of a particular kind of event, one synecdochically represented byanecdotes that are inserted into a chronologically organized story of thedisaster.

the plague is the type of disaster that has elicited the most studies since Jürgen Grimm's ( 1965)pioneering book. Among other examples, see Alfano 2011; Boeckl 2000; Fass Leavy 1992;Garza 2009; Gilman 2009; Liaroutzos 2011; Picard 2011; Totaro 2005; Totaro and Gilman2011.

69. For example, Mary Shelley's 77« Last Man ( 1826).


3.1. Myth and Catastrophic NarrativeThe first fictional catastrophes to be evoked in detail, whue also direcdy andclosely linked to narrative action, are found in French romances during thefirst half of the seventeenth century. Catastrophes appear early, in most ofthese narratives, not as a conclusion to them: apocalypdc endings are rather aspecialty ofthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially after the 1970s(Walter 2008: 27).

The catastrophe operates as a threshold in The Decameron and L'Heptaméron,where it causes the devisants to retire temporarily from the world and tellstories. In great romances like Le grand Cyrus and Clélie (2006 [1654-60]),both by Scudéry, the catastrophe acts as a point of origin which gives impetusto the action and can therefore be construed as a triggering plot device whosedecisive and lasting chain reaction are propordonate to the sheer magnitudeof these roman-monde (Lavocat 2009). As a result, catastrophes in romancescreate a new world: at the beginning ofthe latter novel, Clélie, after the fioodand the earthquake that separate the lovers Aronce and Clélie, the hero,Aronce, walks on a now bare earth, changed into a tabula rasa by thesedisasters. In L'Astrée, Urfé (201 o [1607] : 35) describes a disaster—even thoughan artificial one — that creates the land of shepherds: Julius Caesar havingbroken through the mountains, the waters that covered the Forez—perhapssince the Flood?—were drained away:

But some fourteen or fifteen centuries ago, a Roman foreigner, who conquered allof Gaul in ten years, caused several mountains to be breached, through whichthese waters flowed away, and shortly afterward the heart of our plains appeared,which seemed to him so agreeable and fertue, that he decided to have them settled.To this end he made everyone living in the mountains and forests come down, andwanted the first edifice built there to hear the name Julius, like himself. Andbecause the wet, loamy plain grew a great many trees, some have said that thecountry was called Forez, and the people Forezian.'°

This transformadon ofthe landscape marks the beginning ofthe histoire inboth senses ofthe term—the story and the History. According to the nymphwho tells this story of origins, the country of the shepherds is named Forezafter the flood itself, taking its name from the uprooted and floating tree

70. "D peut y avoir quatorze ou quinze siècles, qu'un estranger Romain, qui en dix ans conquittoutes les Gaules, fit rompre quelques montagnes, par lesquelles ces eaux s'escoulerent, & peuaprès se découvrit le sein de nos plaines, qui luy semblèrent si agréables & fertiles, qu'ildelibera de les faire habiter, & en ce dessein fist descendre tous ceux qui vivoient auxmontaignes, & dans les forests, & voulut que le premier bastiment quiy fut fait, portast lenom de Julius, comme luy; & parce que la plaine humide & limoneuse jetta grande quantitéd'arbres, quelques-uns ont dit que le pays s'appelloit Foretz, & les peuples Foresiens" (Urfé2010 [1607], part I, chap. 2: 172-73).


trunks. As a result of this disaster, the gods move away, leaving the shepherds(the ancestors of Astrée and Celadon, the main heroes of the romante) topopulate the plains. This example illustrates the complex function performedby the representation of a catastrophe in one of its first appearances in ro-mance. Its symbolism derives from a prestigious bibUcal tradition: the floodmarks the beginning of the world of fiction, being at the origin of the countryof the shepherds, just as the Flood re-creates the real world according toGenesis. Fiction also strongly combines disasters and historicity. In UAstrée, itis a historical personage, Caesar, who creates the pastoral world of the shep-herds, and so the fictional world of this romance, by arranging a disaster.

Fictional catastrophes thus combine myth (the gods of mythology, theanalogy with Genesis) and history. Having no referent in reality, onewould not expect them to be performing the memorial functions character-istic of historical narratives. Yet here I will suggest that fictional disastersindeed offer the reader an artistic way of indirectly participating in collectivehistory. This indirectness can be seen as the hallmark of fictionality (Ricceur1984-88, 2). In the following examples, the indirect relationship to historymanifests itself in the construction of a temporal paradox involving a chrono-logical impossibility that is a strong indication of fictionality. The beginningof CUlie clearly illustrates this paradoxical type of relationship to history.

At the opening of this romance, a double disaster problematizes the char-acters' and the readers' relationships to the past." It manifests several incom-patible temporalities while suggesting even more of them to the seventeenth-century reader's imagination through that particular memory attached tocatastrophes: in 1650 a fictional eruption set in Capua will inevitably bring tomind Mount Vesuvius's eruptions in AD 79 and 1630.

The first disaster, a flood, has totally reshaped the landscape. It not merelybrings about a change of setting but rather dramatically unearths the remainsof the past:

But what is remarkable was that when the storm was over, we saw that the ravagesof water had unearthed the ruins of several magnificent tombs whose inscriptionswere half effaced; in some other places, it had uncovered large columns all fromone piece of stone, several beautiful antique vases of agate, porphyry, jasper,Samian earth and several other precious materials, so that this place, instead ofhaving lost something of its beauty, had acquired new ornaments. '^ (Scudéry 2006

[1654-60]: 34; my translation)

71. The romance was written during the troubles of the Fronde; Madeleine de Scudéry depictsthere an antiquity devastated by civil war, epidemics, and famine, as was France at the time.72. "Mais ce qu'il y a de remarquable, fut que lorsque cet orage fut passé, on vit que le ravagedes eaux avait déterré les ruines de divers tombeaux magnifiques, dont les inscriptions étaient àmoitié effacées; qu'en quelques autres lieux, il avait découvert de grande colonnes toutes d'une


But what past is this text referring to? The acdon is supposed to take place inthe sixth century BC, that is to say, during the early days of ancient Romeunder Tarquin. This period, which is the time of the romance, coincides withthat of the foundation of Capua by the Etruscans, and so there would not beany ancient remains to be uncovered, since we are dealing here with a time ofthe origins, when the Appenine Peninsula began to be populated. Thus ascould only happen in ficdon, these ruins and magnificent tombs that thecharacters so admire paradoxically belong to a time more recent thantheir own. For seventeenth-century readers, these ruins doubdess broughtto mind the contemporary Capua, the one dating from the first century AD,and perhaps even the ruins of Pompeii (destroyed in AD 79) which werebeginning to be uncovered.

Also, the eruption of Vesuvius, made famuiar by Pliny's letters, is perhapsrecalled here as suggested by the discovery of corpses in the ashes. It is likelythat the description of the earthquake in the romance (ibid.: 38-40) alsoreflects the accounts of the erupdon of Mount Vesuvius, such as that of1631, recorded in Théophraste Renaudot's Gazette (1632). Moreover, thissecond disaster, the earthquake, destroys everything but the ruins that theprevious flooding had unearthed. A striking eflect is produced here, as thecharacters who have found refuge in the ruins emerge from these tombs as ifin a rebirth. Through this image, the catastrophe assumes a metaphoricalstatus. It becomes a metaphor for the romance, which brings back ancienthistory and shows characters who could belong to that period, and, simul-taneously, an allegory of time that destroys and buries everything except whatthe ficdon decides to save by re-creating it.

Moreover, we might consider this a staging of the appropriation of Romanhistory by the French romance. The story of Cléhe, a historico-legendarycharacter," is told by Plutarch'" and is the subject of numerous represen-tadons in the seventeenth century, among them a famous painting byjacquesStella." The ficdon of origins—the French of the time fancied themselvesdescendants of .^neas —thus occurs together with the establishment of aclassical ideal bearing upon an antiquity that is construed as a "remotemodel" in the form of beautiful ruins (Pavel 1996). Both are found in this

pièce, plusieurs superbes vases antiques d'agate, de porphyre, de jaspe, de terre samienne et deplusieurs autres matières précieuses; de sorte que cet endroit au lieu d'avoir perdu quelquechose de sa beauté avait acquis de nouveaux ornements" (Scudéry 2006 [1654-60]: 34).73. Clélie is a young woman, hostage to Porsenna, king of the Tarquins, who escapes by crossingthe Tiber River with her captive companions.74. "Publicóla," in PttUarch's Lives, XIX, 551. See Plutarch 1982 (1914).75. Cletia Crossing the Tiber, around 1640 (in the Louvre). Nicolas Poussin dedicated an engravingto the same topic.


paradoxical representation of the catastrophe in Clélie and illustrate the pre-viously mentioned indirect relation to history.

3.2. (Hi)story and Anecdotes from a Fictional Point of View

Two of the most famous novels devoted to the plague, Depot's Journal of aPlague Tear (1990 [1722]) and Alessandro Manzoni's Promsssi sposi (1966[1830]), are primarily rewritings. As is well known, Defoe'^ and Manzoni"rely on numerous factual accounts, and the catastrophe is presented by themas a historical event. AJoumalofa Plague î̂ eûr describes the plague of tx>ndon in1665, and I Promessi sposi is reminiscent of the Milan plague of 1631. But theidentification of sources is not our main concern here. This analysis focusesinstead on the relation of catastrophe novel to history and the comparison ofthe treatments of disaster in factual and fictional narrative.

On the one hand, fiction strengthens and reinterprets some characteristicsof the corresponding factual narrative, such as the staging of a point of viewand the integration of traditional anecdotes of plague in a narrative. On theother hand, fiction distinguishes itself from factual accounts through the useof paradox. In these novels, the paradox of fictional disaster narratives liesmore in the construction of a fictional point of view, ethical and empathetic,than in the handling of temporality. These characters-witnesses who findthemselves at the heart of the disaster and who are emotionally involved inthe mourning of the community are indeed very different from the heroesfacing a catastrophe in baroque romances: love is not their sole motivation,and they pay much more attention to the catastrophe itself and to the fate ofthe people who find themselves in its midst than to their personal feelings(Lavocat 2012b).

How can we characterize the fictional point of view in these two novels andits relationship to time and narrativity? With Defoe, the disaster imposes itstemporality onto the entire narrative for the first time (the beginning and theconclusion of the novel coincide with the outbreak and the end of the epi-demic). However, strictly speaking, this first plague-centered narrative is acompendium of anecdotes about the plague, "some tragic, others comical"(Defoe 1990 [1722]: 106), related by a narrator who is above all, and at thehighest degree of intensity, a point of view: both an observing eye and aconscience. Beyond these, we know only his initials, H. F." The eyes of the

76. See Hook 2011; Nicholson 1966 [1919].77. See D'Amato 1924 on the sources of the chapters on the plague in The Betrothed; Galli 1903on Federigo Borremeo's and Manzoni's works; Vono 1966 on Tadino and Manzoni. AboutCinquanta and Manzoni, see Pierce 1998; Pizzagalli 1976 [1937].78. These letters are generally understood as the initials of Henry Foe, Defoe's uncle, who wasin London during the plague.


narrator reflect the diversity of cases encountered during the course of hiswanderings in a plague-stricken London, and his questioning embracesthe moral, social, political, and practical aspects of the epidemic all atonce. Most of these debates, such as those on the legitimacy of fleeing thecity and on the question of whether or not to quarantine people in their houses,had already been enacted in factual narratives and in moral and religioustreatises written about the plague during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies." Conflictuality, which has a privileged role in the narrative com-position of the factual accounts, is here pardy internalized in the characters'consciousness. Indeed, conflicts about moral norms reach a new level of im-portance in Defoe's novel owing to the highly ethical viewpoint of a character-narrator who problematizes even his own relationship to the event. Reflectingthe narrator-witness's dilemmas, "curiosity" becomes a central issue in thenovel: is it morally acceptable, for example, to contemplate a mass of nakedbodies? And why would one desire"" to do so? Can the spectacle of horrorbe construed as exemplary and, should this be the case, exemplary of what?

In Defoe's novel, anecdotes about a variety of cases are used primarily todemonstrate the tension between general and particular interest. Chrisdancharity often prevails over sanitary concerns. A good example is the case of ayoung orphan which raises the question of whether people are supposed toadopt him despite the risk of contamination: the narrator's answer to thisdilemma is in favor of the charitable but potentially fatal adopdon. Some-times, however, self-interest is the first consideration (the narrator-witness isvery indulgent toward those who flee from their shut-up houses). Otherstories highlight the merit of reconciling conflicting interests, as in the caseof three poor men, fugitives from the London plague, who set up a refugeecommunity outside the village whose inhabitants had refused them entry(125-51). Defoe's choice to tell a multiplicity of anecdotes that focuson the interests of individuals and their particular fortunes is probably con-nected to the heightened relevance of the issue of the rights and freedom ofindividuals in such a context: one of extreme situations, where they are likelyto be ignored—if not worse —by the community. Fiction also shows thediversity of human experience through the anecdotes told and the sharpproblematization of the event as viewed from an empathetic standpoint.

Moreover, the collecdve memory is expressed through the narrator's indi-vidual destiny..He does not fail to note the locations of mass graves, now

79. An example would be Variarum tractatus theto^ de peste, published in Amsterdam in 1655. It is acompendium of moral treatises written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bythe Protestants Théodore de Béze, André Rivet, Gisbert Voet, and Johannes Hoorebeekabout various moral issues that regularly arise when a plague epidemic occurs.80. The narrator speaks about his own "curiosity" (Defoe 1990 [1722]: 60-61).


invisible, in an urban area that has been redesigned and reconstructed afterthe fire of 1666. The narrator even goes so far as to identify the cemeterywhere, he explains, he was himself buried (233): this time paradox dearlyplaces the narrative in the realm of fiction.

In order to suggest some additional points about the fictional reference tohistory through catastrophe narratives, I will touch on the novel by Manzoni,so often discussed. From my standpoint, the most important thing is to stressthe paradoxical nature in the novel of, first, the relationship between factand fiction; second, the status of the plague; and finally, the hero's pointof view.

Manzoni's novel establishes the plague of Milan as a historical eventthrough a shift in the modes of writing: the narration of the plague®' issometimes factual (chapters 31 and 32)®̂ and sometimes fictional (chapters33 to 36)-̂ ^ In chapters 31 and 32 oïPromessi sposi^ the author-narrator explic-itly conflates several historical accounts ofthe Milan plague: among them arethose by Ripamonti and Tadino, which, according to him, suffer from adeficiency in the sequence of cause and effect. Consequendy, what is pre-sented by the author-narrator as a reconstruction provides missing chrono-logical connections, but by doing so it also puts forward a history ofthe plaguethat is solely based on human agency. Manzoni's version of events drawsattention to the widespread corruption ofthe Milanese people, evoked by hisdepiction ofthe contagion that spreads in the wake ofthe sale of tainted goodsobtained through the looting ofthe deserted contaminated houses; to thecollective denial of reality, which paralyzes the action ofthe authorities andallows the disease to progress unimpeded; and to the superiority ofthe eccle-siastics—especially those of the Capuchin order—in terms of ethics andaction. These elements, in the guise of providing a historical picture oftheearly seventeenth century, offer an explanation ofthe progress ofthe diseaseand commend the behavior of some institutions and individuals (such as thedoctor Tadino) as exemplary. It is in this light that the plague is "a historical

81. As is well known, this relation covers only the last eight out ofthe thirty-eight chapters ofthenovel.82. Manzoni's historical discourse, which focuses on the persecution ofthe so-called untori bythe authorities during the plague of Milan, continues \n-La storia della cohnna irifame [i 84.0). Onthe representation ofthe plague in general in the works of Manzoni, see, for instance, Citriniti1992; De Ciaccia 1987. Giorgio Ficara {1981) sees the plague asan allegory'(in a broader sensethan the one used in this article), a metaphor of evil and death.83. In the vast bibliography on Manzoni, many studies are concerned with the relationshipbetween history and fiction. See Daniela Brogi ( 1999), who insists upon the novel's separationbetween fact and fiction, anticipating that ofthe later literature; Christina Delia Coletta ( 1996),who claims that Manzoni anticipates Braudel's social history and has a conception of historysimilar to Ricœur's; David Forgacs (1984785); Hal Gladfelder (1993).


trait of the fatherland""* (Manzoni 1997 [1827]: 429) and an episode of the"history of the human mind"°^ (458)- This novel fully succeeds in constructingand explaining the Milan plague as a historical event̂ ^ and so illustrates athoughtful ("reflecdve," in Koselleck's terms) concepdon of history.

The metahistorical and metaflcdonal discourse (which also requires thatthe chapters devoted to history and to the novel be adequately delimited andidentifled as such) is in this novel very clear. However, the representadon ofthe plague is nevertheless marked by several paradoxes. The first one doubt-less lies in the fact that this novel strives as much to establish a historicaldimension as to eliminate it. In this regard, the initial recourse to the topos ofthe found manuscript is highly ambiguous. This topos, which had turned intoits opposite (a typical clue of ficdonality) since the eighteenth century,"' getsinverted again in this novel: the chapters dealing with the plague are indeedclosely modeled on seventeenth-century narradves (mainly Ripamonti's andTadino's).

Other types of paradoxes, these axiological (is it ethically acceptable toturn a collecdve disaster to one's own benefit?), also characterize the chaptersdevoted to the plague in the novel. Indeed, this plague is presented—at leastregarding its main characters — in an uncharacterisdcally positive light, as ifin complete reversal of its usual depicdon with attendant woes. For the loversin fact, the plague is beneficial and not only because it sweeps away allobstacles to their union by killing their enemies. It also enriches them: theprices fall, thus enabling the newlyweds to set up house together. The nar-rator brings out the role of deus ex machina assigned to the disaster whilepretending to be offended by the fact that the hero considers the plague to be"a fine opportunity" (Manzoni 1997 [1827]: 467)."» Finally, it is the hero'sviewpoint on the disaster that turns out to be somehow paradoxical: not onlyis Renzo not familiar with Milan (he gets lost in the city), but, moreover, heshares none of his fellow cidzens' opinions about the criminal origin of theplague, perceived by him as so many aberrations. As much a stranger tofear as he is to preconcepdon, Renzo abstains from any speculadon onthe nature, meaning, and causes of the plague. He is so foreign to histime that he wonders about the presence of a torture device in the streets

84. "Un trato di storia patria" (Manzoni 1966 [1827]: 459).85. "E storia dello spirito humano" (488).86. The novel indeed offers an interesting viewpoint on how a plague narrative serves toconstruct an event. As an example, according to the author-narrator, giving the name of thefirst victims of the plague turns insignificant details into "something fatal and memorable" (434).87. See Herman and Hallyn 1999.88. "If I miss such a fine opportunity — (the plague! Just see the use to which words are some-times put by that blessed instinct of ours to refer and subordinate everything to ourselves!) — I'llnever get another one like it!" (Manzoni 1997 [1827]: 467-68).


of Milan,^^ the use of which, as is explained by the narrator, is intended for thepunishment of all who dare break the rules established by the police in thesetimes of pestilence. This anachronistic distance makes it possible to endowthis character with a fully ethical perspective. Hence his activity as a plaguewalker is similar to that of Defoe's H. F,, with the difference that his steps areoriented toward a goal, which is to find Lucia. He wanders in the streets ofMilan and encounters different situations that serve as anecdotes about theplague: the locked up woman \asible at her window to whom he gives alms;the dying mother who buries her children with dignity, a "remarkable objectof pity" (487).̂ ° The latter cari be read as a synecdochic and emblematicembodiment of the disaster as it was conceived in the nineteenth century.The text depicts it in such a way as to elicit "a pity that moved one's mind to itscontemplation" and meditation, with a doloristic and pious tonality bestillustrated in the hero's "overpowering emotion"^' and in his appeal to

God, "O God, answer her prayer They have suffered enough! Theyhave suffered enough!" (488).̂ ^ Manzoni elevates the plague to the statusof a historical event and an exemplary landmark, though in a way somewhatdifferent from the one chosen by earlier novels and by seventeenth-centurynarratives, in order to achieve the same effects: the exemplarity resides less inthe immutable character; in the midst of the disaster, of the feelings of the herotoward his beloved, than in the compassion that he shows to other victims ofthe catastrophe.

All fictions of catastrophe have relationships to History, albeit differentones. For Scudéry and Urfé, this (hi)story is inseparable from a representationof origins (of the Roman —thus European—civilization; of France); forDefoe and Manzoni, the reference to a pestilence is more oriented towardcommemoration and can be seen as the building of a verbal monument aptto convey lessons drawn from History.

89. Significantly, Lhe internal focalization not\vithslanding {"the firsl object that he laid his eyeson were two standing beams, with a rope and pulleys"), the narrator first describes the instru-ment as an object unknown to the character. This reaction being unlikely for a seventeenth-centur)' man, the narrator adds: "He was quick to recognize —as it was something familiar tothese times — the abominable execution machine" (482). This toriure dex-ice seems to be what iscalled "a pulley."90. "Un oggetto singolare di pieta" (^'Ianzoni 1966 [1827]: 518).91. "Commozione straordinaria" (519).92. "O signore . . . esauditela! hanno patito abbastanza! hanno patito abbastanza" (ibid.).


4. Conclusion

I have pursued two objectives in this article, the first one pertaining to nar-rative and the second to fiction.

My first concern was to trace the emergence of a new form of catastrophicnarrative —a development that I locate at the beginning of the seventeenthcentury—and to propose some explanations of this novelty.

This new form could be defined as a chrono-logicaUy organized relationfeaturing the introduction of a plot, the expression of an author-witness-narrator's point of view, and the play of opposing interpretations of thecatastrophe, otherwise referred to as conflictuality. I have analyzed thesetraits^^ together as the manifestation of a reinforced narrativity and the un-derstanding of the catastrophe as a historical event. This suggests, in line withRicœur's thought, a close link between narrativity and historicity.

As for the explanation of this new phenomenon, it is doubtless to be foundin multiple factors, three of which I have presented here.

(1) A change in people's relationship to the catastrophe itself, probablyattributable to the marked rise in crisis management by the authorities.This collective involvement leads to the expression of antagonisticpoints of view, the politicalization of the event, as well as a concernto safeguard and transmit its memory.

(2) The long-term change in the relationship to history and to the event,that is to say, the emergence of a historical perspective proper—such asthat defined by KoseUeck, marked by rewriting (other narratives, an-nals, testimonies) and reflexivity.

(3) A more general modification of the hermeneutic framework, whichenables us to locate in this early modern period a decline of allegoryand the birth of a fact-based culture.

It would evidently be possible to emphasize other factors, such as the changein status of the witness, '̂* who progressively abandons his position as a spec-tator, distant from the misery observed, to view and represent himself asbeing "onboard," as was masterly shown by Hans Blumenberg (1997[1979]); or the emergence of new codes in the expression of subjectivityand of a heightened valuation of human life, a developrnent that is alsogenerally situated at the beginning of the early modern era, the end of theRenaissance (Taylor 1989).

93. Although this aspect has not been studied here, it is worth noting that these narratives arealso characterized by a concern for textual aesthetics.94. See Duprat 2008; Lavocat 2010.


Such a transformation, which we might call an early modern "narrativeturn," could also be found in discursive fields other than catastrophe narra-tives, as suggested by the development of historical writing as well as that ofthe novel.

Second, this study has attempted to characterize the representation of thecatastrophe in fictional narratives published between the seventeenth andnineteenth centuries in order to stress some of the differences between factualand fictional narratives. Amid a convergence of the two types, my remarksalso point to characteristics that are particular to narrative fiction. The lattercombine narrative's paradoxical temporality with fiction's paradoxical char-acter and ethical concern.

In fact, I have sought to underscore that the fictional representation ofcatastrophes involved a different relation to history. The history present inmany seventeenth-century romances is that of antiquity, surrounded withthe mythical aura of origins. The romance includes ancient and mythicalcatastrophes in order to construct itself as a world. In Defoe and Manzoni'snovels, the catastrophe which serves as the historical referent is far morerecent (about fifty years in the first case, two centuries in the second).Fiction then comes to serve a memory function both by rewriting old factualnarratives and by recycling anecdotes, which are taken as the mobile frag-ments of collective memory. In catastrophic fictions, historical distance getsboth underlined (such catastrophes all belong to the past) and abolished(through fictional immersion). This double movement brings out one ofthe paradoxes unique to fiction itself. In most of the texts dted above, thisparadox manifests itself through what can only be regarded as impossibilia(for example, the narrator in Defoe's novel evoking the cemetery where hehimself was buried)."

The relation of similarity and difference between factual and fictionalaccounts of catastrophe also appears in the handling of point of view.There too, fiction seems to extend and to accentuate features of factualnarrative or of testimony. Fictionality of the witness-narrator, or the witness,makes it possible for disputes to arise from conflicting interpretations (as seenin Defoe) and for an ethical standpoint to be embodied within the disaster—atendency that doubtless comes with its own paradoxes (as does Renzo'sanachronistic point of view on the persecutions during the Milan plague inManzoni's novel).

My argument's insistence on the paradoxical in fiction also links up withRicœur's (1978 [1975]; 1984-88, 2) idea regarding the indirectness of thefictional referent. This indirectness characterizes the relation to time, whenfiction fashions the memory of a catastrophe as a historical event. The affir-mation of an ethical standpoint is also at issue in this indirectness. The fie-


tional point of view is that of an impossible witness, who is as much a part ofthe disaster as he is a stranger to it. It is this double position ofthe novelistichero that allows for the incarnation, through empathy and concern, ofhuman interest in the disaster.

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