Natural Catastrophe in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle
29
des matières ardentes, fondues, calcinées, vitrifiées que la montagne rejette, est si
abondante, qu’elles enterrent les villes, les forêts, couvrent les campagnes de
cent & de deux cens pieds d’épaisseur, & forment quelquefois des collines & des
montagnes qui ne sont que des monceaux de ces matières entassées.
31
Obviously, such passages – and one could cite a number of them – do
not consist of “purely” scientific prose. The vocabulary used here, the
syntactical constructions, the scope of the rhetorical periods and the
richness of figurative turns of phrase all hark back to the “grand style”
of the Classical age. What we are dealing with here is a genuine “tableau poétique”, an instance of hypotyposis, that is, a description characterized by a particularly vivid evocation of its object, what the
Ancients called enargeia. According to Perrine Galand-Hallyn, this
last term (synonymous with the Latin euidentia and illustratio) “relève
de la rhétorique des affects”;
32 it designates an “effet descriptif très
particulier qui consiste à imposer à l’auditeur ou au lecteur l’image
d’un objet ou d’un être absent”.
33 This image is, so to speak, set “before the eyes” (ante oculos) of its audience. It is, of course, no coincidence that in the Histoire naturelle this rhetorical treatment is reserved
precisely for the depiction of raging elemental forces and scenes of
natural violence. By and large, this is in keeping with Galand-Hallyn’s
remark that “le catalogue des topiques propres à créer l’enargeia” centres precisely on “des joies et des craintes fondamentales de
l’homme”.
34
Buffon’s deployment of “poetic” or “enargetic” descriptions
indicates that natural catastrophes, even if they are initially presented
as objects of knowledge, can become objects of an aesthetic fascination. In other words, catastrophes can act as catalysts for the production of the “paradoxical” pleasure (paradoxical because mixed with
terror) that the beholder feels when confronted with the spectacle of a
vast and irregular natural vista or the natural forces unleashed in cataclysms on land or storms at sea, etc. This is, of course, what the eighteenth century calls “le sublime naturel”; and Yvon Le Scanff made an
important point when he suggested that the sublime landscape finds its
origin precisely in the ancient, rhetorical commonplace of the locus
___________________________
31 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, I, pp. 502-3.
32 Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence. Poétiques humanistes de
l’évidence (Caen: Paradigme, 1995), p. 99.
33 Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence, p. 99.
34 Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence, p. 126
29
des matières ardentes, fondues, calcinées, vitrifiées que la montagne rejette, est si
abondante, qu’elles enterrent les villes, les forêts, couvrent les campagnes de
cent & de deux cens pieds d’épaisseur, & forment quelquefois des collines & des
montagnes qui ne sont que des monceaux de ces matières entassées.
31
Obviously, such passages – and one could cite a number of them – do
not consist of “purely” scientific prose. The vocabulary used here, the
syntactical constructions, the scope of the rhetorical periods and the
richness of figurative turns of phrase all hark back to the “grand style”
of the Classical age. What we are dealing with here is a genuine “tableau poétique”, an instance of hypotyposis, that is, a description characterized by a particularly vivid evocation of its object, what the
Ancients called enargeia. According to Perrine Galand-Hallyn, this
last term (synonymous with the Latin euidentia and illustratio) “relève
de la rhétorique des affects”;
32 it designates an “effet descriptif très
particulier qui consiste à imposer à l’auditeur ou au lecteur l’image
d’un objet ou d’un être absent”.
33 This image is, so to speak, set “before the eyes” (ante oculos) of its audience. It is, of course, no coincidence that in the Histoire naturelle this rhetorical treatment is reserved
precisely for the depiction of raging elemental forces and scenes of
natural violence. By and large, this is in keeping with Galand-Hallyn’s
remark that “le catalogue des topiques propres à créer l’enargeia” centres precisely on “des joies et des craintes fondamentales de
l’homme”.
34
Buffon’s deployment of “poetic” or “enargetic” descriptions
indicates that natural catastrophes, even if they are initially presented
as objects of knowledge, can become objects of an aesthetic fascination. In other words, catastrophes can act as catalysts for the production of the “paradoxical” pleasure (paradoxical because mixed with
terror) that the beholder feels when confronted with the spectacle of a
vast and irregular natural vista or the natural forces unleashed in cataclysms on land or storms at sea, etc. This is, of course, what the eighteenth century calls “le sublime naturel”; and Yvon Le Scanff made an
important point when he suggested that the sublime landscape finds its
origin precisely in the ancient, rhetorical commonplace of the locus
___________________________
31 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, I, pp. 502-3.
32 Perrine Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence. Poétiques humanistes de
l’évidence (Caen: Paradigme, 1995), p. 99.
33 Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence, p. 99.
34 Galand-Hallyn, Les yeux de l’éloquence, p. 126