Early Modern Clouds and the Poetics of Meteorology: an Introduction
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Romance Quarterly ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vroq20 Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction Jeffrey N. Peters & Katharina N. Piechocki To cite this article: Jeffrey N. Peters & Katharina N. Piechocki (2021): Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction, Romance Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/08831157.2021.1900690 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2021.1900690 Published online: 08 Apr 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vroq20 ROMANCE QUARTERLY https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2021.1900690 Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction Jeffrey N. Petersa and Katharina N. Piechockib aFrench and Francophone Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA; bDepartment of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Since antiquity, philosophers and poets have understood clouds to be Clouds; poetics; cosmology; principles of generation and procreation. They can turn, Aristophanes tells gender; mediation us, “into anything they want.” They are bound up with the act of beget- ting and giving birth, of bringing into being the new – hollow vessels, as Seneca would later put it, with solid walls. And yet the creative force of clouds is a strange, even counterintuitive, one: what they generate and bring forth is often evanescent, incorporeal, and unsubstantial. In this essay, we explore a poetics of clouds as a site of tension between the empty and the procreative, the material and the immaterial, the percep- tible and the imperceptible. Clouds, we suggest, are instances of convey- ance whose power of mediation gives shape to the unsayable, the unrepresentable, and the apparently unknowable. Their meteorological trickery draws our attention to the infinity of the cosmos by obscuring it. Their rhetorical obfuscations – what medieval tradition called the integu- mentum – draw us into their truths by turning us seductively away from them. Expressions of both cosmological and poetic becoming, clouds are therefore inseparable from epistemological and esthetic considerations of the ways meaning and knowledge are at once hidden and revealed. Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale. (Shakespeare 180–81) Clouds, as Hamlet knew, are tricky things. In their fertile evanescence, they are both full and empty, many and none. They are anything we can imagine, pregnant with possibility, and noth- ing at all, hollow and shifting, if not shifty, like the fawning sycophant Polonius. They have shape, but are shapeless. They are material, but of vaporous concoction. They are bodies without surface, forms without line. They are fleeting, sinuous, and transient, and for these reasons, have often been associated with an esthetics of the baroque. As Hubert Damisch put it in a 1972 book which no student of clouds can today ignore, Italian painting of the early sixteenth century dis- solved the formal enclosures of orthogonal space and bathed them in the painterly magic of light (4–5). Following Heinrich Wolfflin€ ’s influential account, Damisch identifies the characteristic CONTACT Jeffrey N. Peters [email protected] French and Francophone Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Kentucky, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA; Katharina N. Piechocki [email protected] Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Dana- Palmer House, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI indeterminacy of clouds as precisely the visual principle that draws the eye beyond the bounda- ries of linear perspective toward the infinite, toward that which exceeds the permanence and solidity of shape (145–48). In our introduction to this two-volume special issue of Romance Quarterly devoted to early modern clouds, we are especially interested in tracing the tension exemplified by Hamlet’s words. If they are often the condition and the origin of imagination, clouds are also insubstantial and formless, without being of their own. As Erasmus wrote of Durer€ and with reference to Pliny’s praise of the painter Apelles, clouds challenge the very act of painting. A second Apelles, Erasmus contends, Durer€ “painted what cannot be painted: even clouds on a wall” (Panofsky 1951, 36). Clouds, in fact, have the unique capacity to enable perspectival illusion while, at the same time, resisting representation itself. As such, early modern clouds gesture, the essays con- tained in this double issue show, to wider and more intricate esthetic and cosmological concerns. Not surprisingly, we may discern the origins of these cloud concerns in antiquity. In a passage that readily brings to mind Hamlet’s dialogue with Polonius, Aristophanes’s Clouds stages a dis- cussion between Socrates, the head of a sophistic educational institution, and Strepsiades, a wan- nabe rhetorician, on the topic of clouds. Socrates asks Strepsiades, if he has “ever looked up and seen a cloud resembling a centaur, or a leopard, or a wolf, or a bull.” Strepsiades indeed has, and Socrates goes on to explain: “Clouds turn into [gignontai] anything they want” (57). Aristophanes’s Clouds have the agency to take on any shape they want, thus stimulating and manipulating the beholder’s imagination. Situated halfway between heaven and earth, clouds also serve as powerful mediators between the macrocosm and microcosm: for Socrates, Clouds (Nephelai) occupy the intermediate position between “Void (Chaos)” and “Tongue (Glotta)” (71). These three building blocks—Chaos, Clouds, Tongue—are powerful enough, Socrates argues, to be elevated to a new belief system and to supplant the traditional gods. It is as though Socrates’s clouds, strategically positioned between chaos and the tongue, had the poetic force to transform the unruly and uninformed (Chaos) into entities articulated by the tongue (Glotta). Clouds are not only inextricably bound up with creativity—they stand for the poetic process itself. Machinic generation and the gender of clouds The ancient Greek word for “cloud,” meuo1 (nephos), is inextricably tied not only to Aristophanes’s ancient comedy, in which Clouds (Nephelai) are introduced as a female chorus, but also to the mythological figure Nephele, Athamas’s wife. Apollonius Rhodius, Hyginus, Ovid, and several other ancient writers tell the story of Nepheles’s children, Helle and Phrixos, who were forced to flee the ire of Athamas’s second wife, Ino—“veiled in clouds” (contectus nubibus) (Valerius Flaccus 24–5)—with the help of a flying ram (Nepheles’s gift to her children), whose golden wool resembled a cloud moving across the sky. While Helle fell off the ram and drowned in the strait between Europe and Asia that would be named after her (“Hellespont”), Phrixos arrived in Colchis unscathed: he sacrificed the ram to Poseidon and draped the animal’s Golden Fleece in Ares’s holy grove. We learn from Apollonius Rhodius that the “fleece had been hung … like a cloud that glows red from the fiery beams of the rising sun” (337–39). The affinity between clouds and wool was not lost on Lucretius, who wrote in On the Nature of Things that when clouds “take up a great deal of sea-water” they appear “like hanging fleeces of wool” (veluti pen- dentia vellera lanae) (531). Lending themselves as comparables, metaphors, and similes, clouds are like (velut) woolen fleeces, often imagined as vehicles sturdy enough to transport mythological figures such as Helle and Phrixos or deities across the skies. We learn in Apollonius’s Argonautica that Athena traveled to Colchis by means of a cloud: she “immediately rushed to set foot on a light cloud, which would carry her quickly, mighty though she was, and she hastened to the Black Sea with friendly intentions towards the oarsmen” (157). ROMANCE QUARTERLY 3 The seventeenth-century baroque stage transformed this vehicular quality of clouds into a stage prop: cloud machines, invented by stage engineers such as Nicola Sabbattini, who in his Pratica di fabricar scene e macchine ne’ teatri (1638) dedicated, in the book’s second part, twelve out of fifty-seven chapters explicitly to clouds. While the connection between theater and clouds was emphasized by writers such as Lucretius, who compared the clouds to “the canvas awning stretched over a great theatre” as it “cracks flapping between poles and beams” (501–03), seven- teenth-century cloud machines became so prevalent in operatic productions that they contributed in important ways to early modern meteorology and natural philosophy. The mechanistic concep- tion of clouds as cloud machines was powerful enough to invert metaphors such as that of the theater of nature. In “Clouds and Meteors: Recreating Wonder on the Early Modern Stage,” Frederique Aït-Touati contends that in his Meteores, published with the Discours de la methode as an “essay” illustrating his new method, Descartes unmasks “the metaphor of [the] theatre of nature” as a “piece a machines,” translating what had earlier been perceived as the wonders of a divinely ordered nature into mechanized “scenographic techniques” (195–96). We might pause before Descartes’s emphasis on meteorology and question its pertinence for his project. Yet meteorological phenomena, and in particular clouds, appeared central to Descartes, because “they are the source of the human feeling of wonder,” what the Latins called admiratio, which is “the first of all passions,” as he specifies in Passions of the soul (Aït-Touati 2020, 195). This is the point of departure for Alison Calhoun’s essay “What Cloud Machines Tell Us About Early Modern Emotions,” included in this volume.