Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and The Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis

Author:Mike Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

2. URBAN ESCHATOLOGY

__________

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West

Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea”

A starting point: Lisbon was the Hiroshima of the age of reason. Goethe, six at the time of the destruction of the Portuguese capital by earthquake, tsunami, and fire in 1755, later recalled how Lisbon’s “Demon of Fright” undermined belief in the rational deity of the philosophes. “God, said to be omniscient and merciful, had shown himself to be a very poor sort of father, for he had struck down equally the just and the unjust.” 5

The Lisbon catastrophe, together with the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum only a few years earlier, were profound shocks to the philosophical “optimism” (a word coined in 1737) that had infused the early Enlightenment under the influence of Newton, Leibnitz, and Pope. The “best of all possible worlds,” it seemed, was subject to inexplicable and horrifying disasters that challenged the very foundations of reason. Following Voltaire’s famous lampoon of Leibnitz as Dr. Pangloss in his skeptical masterpiece Candide , Lisbon and Pompeii—and, later, the French revolutionary Terror of 1791—became the touchstones of a fundamentally modern “pessimism” (a word first used by Coleridge in 1795) that found its inspiration in historical cataclysm rather than the Book of Revelation. 6

One influential literary template for this anti-utopian sensibility was Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Crainville’s Le Dernier Homme. Written in 1805 at the apogee of Napoleonic power, this strange novel by a bitter enemy of the philosophes depicted mankind’s disappearance as the result of soil exhaustion, human sterility, and a slowly dying sun. Although Crainville had been a cleric under the ancien regime and religious motifs are present, his book is likely the first in any language to sketch a realistic scenario of human extinction. Moreover, it inspired Mary Shelley’s three-volume epic of despair, The Last Man (1826), which chronicles how a late-twenty-first-century utopian age of peace and prosperity is transformed, by plague and religious fundamentalism, into a terrifying End Time whose sole survivor—the Englishman Lionel Verney—is left at book’s end in the howling ruins of the Roman Coliseum. The Last Man , although a bad novel, was an intellectual watershed, the first truly secular apocalypse. 7

From the dandified fringe of Shelley’s circle also came the most popular urban disaster novel of all time, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Bulwer-Lytton, who began his political life as a Godwin radical and ended it as secretary for the colonies, eulogized the cultured and cosmopolitan decadence of the doomed Roman summer resort in the shadow of Vesuvius. Written during the turbulent days after the passage of the first Reform Bill and the rise of Chartism, the novel can also be read as a premature elegy for the equally decadent British upper classes, whom Bulwer-Lytton saw as threatened by their own (sociopolitical) catastrophe: the coming of universal suffrage. In the century-long run of its popularity, however, the novel offered its readers the typically Victorian titillations of orientalized sensual splendor followed by sublime, all-consuming disaster.

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