Catastrophizing

Gerard Passannante opens the fourth chapter of his new monograph, Catastrophizing, with an anecdote from the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. One of the permanent exhibitions on display at the museum—which, despite its name and promise to advance “public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic” (http://mjt.org/), holds no dinosaurs in sight—is a display of microminiatures by the Armenian American artist Hagop Sandaldjian, who compiled dozens of sculptures upon tiny surfaces including the eyes of needles and strands of hair. Passannante cites Sandaldjian’s depiction of Mount Ararat, “where Noah’s ark is said to have landed” (147). The artist contracts the aftermath of that biblical archetype of natural disasters, the Great Flood, on to a single grain of rice. To do so is to seek creative mastery over an unfathomably catastrophic event. Sandaldjian’s extreme attempt to manage the plummeting depths of catastrophe through the control of a minute, microscopic space offers a parallel, Passannante claims, with the early modern artistic imagination. In a chapter that turns to Robert Hooke and seventeenth-century studies of the microscope, Passannante observes how “the artist generates the conditions under which potential catastrophes might be forestalled by carefully managing the body and the mind” (148). There was something about the toppling scale of disaster, he claims, that quite literally captured imaginations in early modern Europe. In the wake of recent natural disasters, upending ideologies and especially the resurgence of materialism, the early modern mind was at risk of being taken prisoner by overwhelming experiences or fear of catastrophe. It was the act of making art, with its careful “managing” of space and perspective that offered both a way out and a way of finding sense in the insensible.The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s playful blurring of fact and fiction forms an appropriate introduction to Passannante’s second book, which takes as its focus the history of an experience that both is and is not based in actuality: the experience of catastrophizing in early modern materialist thought. Passannante identifies a phenomenon in the early modern history of ideas, which he calls “catastrophic materialism.” He lists its general characteristics as “a reasoning from the sensible to the insensible, a precipitous shift or collapse of scale and perspective, a temporal compression of beginning and end, and an act of imaginative making that feels paradoxically like the evacuation of agency” (4). Unsurprisingly, this leads Passannante in a variety of complex directions, from wonder and terror at macro- and microscopic revelations to sensations of the pre- and post-Kantian sublime. He is correct to acknowledge, as he does in his introduction, that “[w]riting a book about disastrous thinking is a challenge, not least because the subject could potentially encompass a great number of other texts and topics” (22–23). Building on his previous work in the monograph The Lucretian Renaissance, the author’s primary interest remains the impact of philosophical materialism upon early modern European culture. Epicurean materialism, Lucretian analogies, and the depth of the “Democritean pit” haunt the pages of this book, which draws attention to the “reflexivity that often attends disastrous thinking” (9, emphasis mine.) The issues with this focus emerge directly from its interest. It is complicated, when an argument is presented as “cumulative” (23), to define its specific overall significance. Catastrophizing is demanding of its readership, tasking them to recognize “formal resemblances and echoes between examples” and to draw the bigger picture that Passannante leaves resonant and suggestive, but implicit (23). While the cumulative argument grows in strength as the book gathers momentum, the first half of the monograph reads as a series of case studies which, while individually compelling, do not immediately come together to form a cohesive whole.Despite these challenges, the lasting impression of Catastrophizing is of an immensely scholarly, wide-ranging study of early modern art forms and the imagination of disaster. The first chapter explores the workbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, who, though he was no atomist, Passannante considers a materialist in so far as he based knowledge in material analogy and sensory experience. He claims that catastrophizing was a “reflex” that peppered Leonardo’s work—from his riddling “prophecies” to his images of natural violence—and permitted the artist “to observe the action of the mind when it approaches the imperceptible” (29). This control of perspective via the art form is one of many catastrophe-related tropes to arise over the course of the book. Chapter 2 jumps forward over a century to consider the debates surrounding astrology and apocalypse in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Passannante begins with the unsettling “turn to the idea of infinity” in the writings of Thomas Digges, arguing that such thinking took form as an attempt “to transform the reflexive violence of a bad furor into an occasion for Christian wonder” (98). Infinity is of course a feature of divinity as much as it is a consequence of multiple Democritean words. Even as Digges actively sought to distance himself from the perils of atomism, he applied (or was “haunted” by, to quote Passannante) the “infinite possibilities and chance” of catastrophic materialism, the vocabulary of which he reimagined in different, theological contexts (102). The chapter concludes with a note on John Donne’s “little earthquakes,” the author’s relish of the physical crisis of illness as an opportunity for making sense out of doubt and instability (103). From there, Passannante’s focus shifts more deliberately toward literary interpretation and, specifically, the catastrophic consequences of the Renaissance commonplace quidlibet ex quolibet (“anything out of anything”) as manifested in the works of Shakespeare. This chapter offers the strongest passages of literary criticism in the book. In a compelling close analysis of disastrous logic in The Winter’s Tale, Passannante draws a parallel between the materialist’s fearful reliance upon the unstable atom—the “materialist is caught between a disaster that he makes and the disaster of uncertainty”—and Leontes’s near-tragic parody of this coping mechanism, “showing just how badly things can go when one holds on to one’s convictions about the insensible at the cost of everything else” (143). The attempt to control disasters of the mind leads the reader into Chapter 4, which explores Robert Hooke’s writing of the microscope to manage the “vertiginous view of the pit” (153) and to evoke catastrophe to both scientific and sublime purpose: to bring “an empirical emphasis to the speculative history of the earth” and to make “the groundlessness of knowledge more vivid” (186). Once again, fact and fiction converge in the act of creating knowledge, making unfathomable subjects not only more accessible, but more manageable to the limits and terrors of the confined mind. The final chapter takes the full plunge into the sublime, moving forward a century to the shaping influence of catastrophic materialism on the cosmogony of Immanuel Kant.In a way that parallels the creative approaches of the writers under study, Passannante’s Catastrophizing is at its most persuasive when it narrows its attention on to the catastrophic impact of specific details and images. A key strength of the book is its breadth and expansion of the critical focus on materialism, moving well beyond the increasingly well-trodden (if pervasive) influence of Lucretian atomism. Inextricably bound to this strength, however, are its difficulties. In an early modern world where, as the saying went, anything could be made from anything, there is no end to the connections that could be made between otherwise discrete discourses of experience. Anything, everything, or nothing could be linked to catastrophic materialism, and not merely in the years between Leonardo and Kant. Passannante concludes with a thought-provoking nod to the idea of catastrophizing in the present “age of climate change,” where “generating the image of disaster” continues to provide “a kind of laboratory for feeling that helps us mentally grasp the nature of things” (239). In a bold critical approach that expands methodologies and creative possibilities in the field of early modern studies, Passannante’s work dissolves boundaries between disciplines and time periods. It is perhaps a symptom of the very human need to apply limitations and, in so doing, to make more comfortable sense of the depths of catastrophe that the book seems to leave something unsaid. Catastrophizing is a valuable and ambitious work of criticism that invites its reader to grasp at the nature of “catastrophic materialism” and, therefore, to draw their own conclusions about the reach of its experiences

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