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The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life
Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization.
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.
Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.
240 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 4, 2022
There is a video by British multi-instrumentalist and altogether wunderkind Jacob Collier in which he re-harmonizes the song “Moon River.” By “re-harmonize”, I mean he takes the song apart on a molecular level and creates something from it that can only really still be discerned as “Moon River” if you have the corresponding molecular microscope on you, adding multi-layered jazz-chords, quarter-tone melodies, more than a hundred iterations of his own voice, dazzlingly difficult vocal feats, trippy video animations, and not a single instrument, even though he masterfully plays about two dozen of them. The result is astonishing. It is, if you have a personal penchant for that very particular type of musical extravaganza, as well as the theoretical training to halfway understand what he’s actually doing with all those chords chances and circle-of-fifths-spins, one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen. It’s charming, because you can tell just a few bars in what a beautiful human being Collier is, and how deeply he cares about the musical rabbit holes he goes down, as well as about rabbits, the intricacies of time pieces, music, and the whole hole-y world. It is also virtually unlistenable when one approaches it with none of that affinity, wonders what this still has to do with the original song, or on some level maintains the well-justified maxim that music, first and foremost, is about doing things with melodies that connect with other people.
Anahid Nersessian’s “The Calamity Form” is in its expectations, execution, and effects very much like that Jacob Collier re-harmonization of “Moon River.” And if that analogy now seems to you a little too far-fetched, too needlessly elaborate, or simply like trying to hard, that’s my point exactly.
On a very basic level, this book looks at Romantic poetry in the face of climate change. However, unlike what has become known as the vast academic field of ecocriticism, it starts by asserting early on that it is both misguided and positively preposterous to assume something as small and personal as poetry can have any actual impact on the vast geo-capitalist phenomenon that is anthropogenic climate change, and that whoever thinks we should look to 19th century British poets for either interferences in it or instructions on how we ourselves should interfere with it, is grossly overselling the political potential of literature, as well as underselling its properties that have nothing at all to do with any actual political impact. Instead, Nersessian argues that we can look to poetry by Wordsworth and Keats, of Hölderlin, Goethe, and John Constable’s cloud paintings, as engagements with, manifestations and futile confrontations of the impotence of poetry, and, by extension, of individual humans in the face of processes too big and too fast for us to understand, let alone pack into a 16-line sonnet. Over five chapters, she consequently tests figures and forms such as parataxis (the grouping of words, sentences, or concepts without any syntactic hierarchy or causality); obscurity, catachresis (the stretching of metaphors to a point where the words used have virtually nothing to do with each other), and apostrophe (addressing something that cannot plausibly respond) for what they imply, could hypothetically imply, have been said to imply, or most definitely won’t imply, about being in, writing about, a threatening and ultimately incomprehensible world. The range of texts Nersesssian draws upon in this endeavor is eclectic: there are plenty of Romantic poets and painters, but there are also Kate Bush songs, works by contemporary conceptual artists, panels from Wilhelm Busch’s notorious German children’s book “Max und Moritz”, snippets of modern poetry, historical letters, theory and etymology and personal considerations. It’s undoubtedly impressive, stunning even: Nersessian knows her literature and theory in and out; she works effortlessly in multiple languages, and her own use of English suggests nothing short of mastery – whatever can hypothetically be written in this language she is able to write; whatever word there is, she knows and has extensively thought about.
Her argument, however, is also of the sort that you need to be willing to bear with her for it to be convincing. She does her best with dazzling academic competence, writing that’s both extremely intellectual and surprisingly approachable (one of the chapters starts with “Let me put it bluntly: I don’t like Wordsworth.”), and with all the gravitas that comes from her being the child of immigrants become one of the youngest UCLA professors of British literature (which she never flaunts, but it is near impossible to engage with a book like this without being aware of the position it’s written from). A more traditionalist literary scholar might very quickly raise concerns that Nersessian blows up her personal intuitions about individual line breaks or word choices in individual poems by young British misogynists 200 years dead to global proportions, and nitpicking from two centuries of western art just that handful of random examples that fit her claim best. They might resort to truisms like “sometimes two words not quite fitting together isn’t a statement about the human condition, but just sloppy writing,” and really, there’s little in “The Calamity Form” that could hold up against such arguments: Either you’re into the kind of virtuosic cross-associations Nersessian makes, and then you’ll long ago have decided that what a poem actually *meant* has never been the point to begin with, or you’ll prefer to stay down own the ground, in which case Nersessian’s argument is just going to fly away without you.
Personally, I think this is one of the coolest books of theory I’ve read in a long time: It is extremely well written, it is challenging and caring and manages to make dusty old blank verse poems shine in a genuine light. There’s a chance Nersessian will convince you to, should all struggles against the apocalypse fail, sit and let it come with a book by Keats in your lap, which will not change anything about the state of things, not even make your feelings about them better, but keeping you company in bearing the burning world even while feeling horrible about it. There’s also a chance you’ll close “The Calamity Form” after a few pages on the basis that this has nothing to do with empirical research anymore, and you’d be neither a philistine nor a luddite for it, but very well justified. There’s other grandiose music beside Jacob Collier’s extreme re-harmonization out there. To each according to their preferences. In the end, “The Calamity Form” is simply one suggestion of how to find solace in existential anguish and a world coming apart, and if that way doesn’t work for you, I feel Nersessian would be the first to encourage you to not quarrel with that but find solace in whatever else, because the point here is not that we change our understanding of John Keats, it’s simply that, whatever happens, we will somehow be okay.
Anahid Nersessian’s “The Calamity Form” is in its expectations, execution, and effects very much like that Jacob Collier re-harmonization of “Moon River.” And if that analogy now seems to you a little too far-fetched, too needlessly elaborate, or simply like trying to hard, that’s my point exactly.
On a very basic level, this book looks at Romantic poetry in the face of climate change. However, unlike what has become known as the vast academic field of ecocriticism, it starts by asserting early on that it is both misguided and positively preposterous to assume something as small and personal as poetry can have any actual impact on the vast geo-capitalist phenomenon that is anthropogenic climate change, and that whoever thinks we should look to 19th century British poets for either interferences in it or instructions on how we ourselves should interfere with it, is grossly overselling the political potential of literature, as well as underselling its properties that have nothing at all to do with any actual political impact. Instead, Nersessian argues that we can look to poetry by Wordsworth and Keats, of Hölderlin, Goethe, and John Constable’s cloud paintings, as engagements with, manifestations and futile confrontations of the impotence of poetry, and, by extension, of individual humans in the face of processes too big and too fast for us to understand, let alone pack into a 16-line sonnet. Over five chapters, she consequently tests figures and forms such as parataxis (the grouping of words, sentences, or concepts without any syntactic hierarchy or causality); obscurity, catachresis (the stretching of metaphors to a point where the words used have virtually nothing to do with each other), and apostrophe (addressing something that cannot plausibly respond) for what they imply, could hypothetically imply, have been said to imply, or most definitely won’t imply, about being in, writing about, a threatening and ultimately incomprehensible world. The range of texts Nersesssian draws upon in this endeavor is eclectic: there are plenty of Romantic poets and painters, but there are also Kate Bush songs, works by contemporary conceptual artists, panels from Wilhelm Busch’s notorious German children’s book “Max und Moritz”, snippets of modern poetry, historical letters, theory and etymology and personal considerations. It’s undoubtedly impressive, stunning even: Nersessian knows her literature and theory in and out; she works effortlessly in multiple languages, and her own use of English suggests nothing short of mastery – whatever can hypothetically be written in this language she is able to write; whatever word there is, she knows and has extensively thought about.
Her argument, however, is also of the sort that you need to be willing to bear with her for it to be convincing. She does her best with dazzling academic competence, writing that’s both extremely intellectual and surprisingly approachable (one of the chapters starts with “Let me put it bluntly: I don’t like Wordsworth.”), and with all the gravitas that comes from her being the child of immigrants become one of the youngest UCLA professors of British literature (which she never flaunts, but it is near impossible to engage with a book like this without being aware of the position it’s written from). A more traditionalist literary scholar might very quickly raise concerns that Nersessian blows up her personal intuitions about individual line breaks or word choices in individual poems by young British misogynists 200 years dead to global proportions, and nitpicking from two centuries of western art just that handful of random examples that fit her claim best. They might resort to truisms like “sometimes two words not quite fitting together isn’t a statement about the human condition, but just sloppy writing,” and really, there’s little in “The Calamity Form” that could hold up against such arguments: Either you’re into the kind of virtuosic cross-associations Nersessian makes, and then you’ll long ago have decided that what a poem actually *meant* has never been the point to begin with, or you’ll prefer to stay down own the ground, in which case Nersessian’s argument is just going to fly away without you.
Personally, I think this is one of the coolest books of theory I’ve read in a long time: It is extremely well written, it is challenging and caring and manages to make dusty old blank verse poems shine in a genuine light. There’s a chance Nersessian will convince you to, should all struggles against the apocalypse fail, sit and let it come with a book by Keats in your lap, which will not change anything about the state of things, not even make your feelings about them better, but keeping you company in bearing the burning world even while feeling horrible about it. There’s also a chance you’ll close “The Calamity Form” after a few pages on the basis that this has nothing to do with empirical research anymore, and you’d be neither a philistine nor a luddite for it, but very well justified. There’s other grandiose music beside Jacob Collier’s extreme re-harmonization out there. To each according to their preferences. In the end, “The Calamity Form” is simply one suggestion of how to find solace in existential anguish and a world coming apart, and if that way doesn’t work for you, I feel Nersessian would be the first to encourage you to not quarrel with that but find solace in whatever else, because the point here is not that we change our understanding of John Keats, it’s simply that, whatever happens, we will somehow be okay.
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September 3, 2023“One of the things these lines do is identify poetry as a form of reasoning that is more than fallacious, not the opposite of causal reasoning but evidence of its limits, as well as a procedure for jumping to conclusions that might be visionary instead of just false.”
March 10, 2024
i think literary academia peaked when this book was published??
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews