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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Everyone knows the wind’s touch, its presence, its force. Sometimes it roars and howls, at other times we hear its wistful sighs and feel its soothing caresses. Since antiquity, humans have borne witness to the wind and relied on it to navigate the seas. And yet, despite its presence at the heart of human experience, the wind has evaded scrutiny in our chronicles of the past.
In this brilliantly original volume, Alain Corbin sets out to illuminate the wind’s storied history. He shows how, before the nineteenth century, the noisy emptiness of wind was experienced and described only according to the sensations it provoked. Imagery of the wind featured prominently in literature, from the ancient Greek epics through the Renaissance and romanticism to the modern era, but little was known about where the wind came from and where it went. It was only in the late eighteenth century, with the discovery of the composition of air, that scientists began to understand the nature of wind and its trajectories. From that point on, our understanding of the wind was shaped by meteorology, which mapped the flows of winds and currents around the globe. But while science has enabled us to understand the wind and, in some respects, to harness it, the wind has lost nothing of its mysterious force. It still has the power to destroy, and in the wind’s ethereal presence we can still feel its connection with creation and death.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
Acknowledgments
Prelude
Notes
1 The Inscrutable Wind
Notes
2 The Winds of the Common Folk
Notes
3 The Aeolian Harp
Notes
4 New Experiences of the Wind
The Balloon “At the Head of the Wind”
The Sandstorm in the Desert
The Wind in the Sequoias
Notes
5 The Tenacity of the Aeolian Imagination in the Bible
Notes
6 The Epic Power of the Wind
Notes
7 The Fantasy of the Wind in the Enlightenment
Notes
8 Gentle Breezes and Caressing Currents
Notes
9 The Enigma of the Wind in the Nineteenth Century
Notes
10 Short Strolls in the Wind of the Twentieth Century
Notes
11 The Wind, the Theater, and the Cinema
Notes
Postlude
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1
Matthew Fontaine Maury, Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic, 1848.
Figure 2
Léon Brault, General Movement of the Winds during the Summer Season, 1885.
Chapter 3
Figure 3
An aeolian harp.
Chapter 11
Figure 4
Wind machine. M. J. Moynet, L’envers du théâtre: machines et decorations / The Other …
Figure 5
Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, Une histoire de vent / A History of the Wind, 1988.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
Acknowledgments
Prelude
Begin Reading
Postlude
Index
End User License Agreement
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A History of the Wind
Alain Corbin
Translated by William A. Peniston
polity
Originally published in French as La Rafale et le zéphyr: Histoire des manières d’éprouver et de rêver le vent by Alain Corbin © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2021
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5207-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940495
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Translator’s Note
Fundamentally, this book is a history of the imagery of the wind in literature, from the Bible and the ancient Greek and Roman epics, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to the modern era. There is a wonderful section on the mythology of the early modern nations and a heavy emphasis on nineteenth-century Romanticism. For the most part, Corbin uses modern editions for the French writers and modern translations for the sources originally published in Portuguese, Italian, German, and English. Whenever possible, I have used existing translations of the foreign-language materials, and, of course, I have tracked down all the original quotations for the English and American citations. Given my limited access to libraries during this time of social isolation, I have relied on online sources, especially the Internet Archive and the Hathri Trust. Consequently, for better or worse, I have cited eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publications.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who help polish the final draft of this translation. George Robb read very carefully the initial draft and gave me some very thoughtful suggestions for improvements.
William A. Peniston, September 2021
Acknowledgments
I thank Sophie Hogg-Grandjean and Pauline Labey for having assisted with the development of this manuscript, and Sylvie Le Dantec for having accepted it.
Alain Corbin, April 2021
Prelude
In the nineteenth century, scientists began to understand the wind. Before then, this noisy emptiness was experienced and described only according to the sensations that it provoked. Inconsistency, instability, and imperceptibility defined this invisible, constant, and unseen flow. The fleetingness of the wind – and the immense scale of its power – explained why not much was known about where it came from and where it went.
Everyone could experience its presence, its force, and its influence: the wind blew at times, and sometimes it cried, roared, or howled. It was, above all else, the sound and the fury. Occasionally, it seemed to moan and groan like a soul in pain condemned to an eternal damnation. Its energy aroused dread: it assailed, it brutalized, it whipped up, it knocked down, and it uprooted. That is why it was identified with anger. Furthermore, it swept away, it carried off, and it dispersed things in its flight. It both dried the countryside and fanned the flames of fire. Nevertheless, the wind also sighed, caressed, and seemed sometimes to play the role of the lover.
The wind’s action on man’s body is contradictory: here it freezes, there it stifles. Since antiquity, it was thought that it purified and improved health, but it could also stink and poison in the literal sense. Briefly, the wind – what Victor Hugo called “the sob of vast expanses, this breath of space, this respiration of the abyss”1 – could, in the course of time, arouse fear, dread, and hatred.
These notions give rise to the thought that the wind with its immutable traits has escaped history. This is far from being the case. Beginning to understand it, however, being persuaded of its far-off origin, and perceiving its mechanisms and its trajectories are all historical facts dating to the dawn of the nineteenth century. The same is true of new experiences of the wind at the summit of a mountain, or in the desert, or in the depths of an immense forest, or, more than any place else, in the air.
Moreover, at the same time, the ways of perceiving and feeling the wind were enriched by the rise of a “meteorological self.” From that time onward, the wind as a literary object has not ceased to inspire writers. The ways of imagining it, or speaking about it, or dreaming about it were modified and enriched by the code of the sublime, by the exaltation of nature in German poetry, and by Romanticism itself. And let us not forget the successive reinterpretations of the wind in the epics that have, in the course of the centuries, conferred upon it an essential place in modern culture.
It is necessary to highlight right from the start the level of knowledge or ignorance concerning the wind if we are to understand clearly the various ways of experiencing it. That is why we will begin by reviewing the scientific turn that took place at the very end of the eighteenth century, notably the discovery of the composition of air. We will then describe the new understanding of atmospheric circulation and the new experiences involving the wind. We will not neglect the aesthetic forms that governed the emotions aroused by this elemental force.
After having placed the wind at the heart of these experiences, we will explain in rough outline the manner in which artists, writers, and travelers have, since antiquity, interpreted and, above all, dreamed about this force that has no equal, this indecipherable enigma that was formed by the wind. These references are related to the new knowledge and the new experiences that brought about a renewal of the imagination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In summary, an immense field of research is sketched out for the historian, all the more so since the wind is also, perhaps above all else, a symbol of time and oblivion. That is why we should meditate on Joseph Joubert’s formula: “Our life is made of woven wind.”2
Notes
1.
Victor Hugo,
Oeuvres complètes
, ed. Paul Meurice (Paris: Ollendorff, 1904–24), vol. 3:
Les Miserables
,
Préface philosophique
, p. 324.
2.
Joseph Joubert,
Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert
, ed. François-René de Chateaubriand (Paris: Le Normant, 1838), p. 323.
1The Inscrutable Wind
During the night of July 4–5, 1788, Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799), who had climbed Mont Blanc the year before, experienced a wind with an intensity until then unknown when he made an excursion to the Col du Géant [Giant’s Pass]. It seemed to him to be so new that he described it in detail in his book Voyages dans les Alpes. Having taken refuge in a little cabin with his comrades, he wrote:
This wind from the southwest rose up at an hour after midnight with such violence that I believed it was going to carry away at any moment the stone cabin in which my son and I were sleeping. It was one of such uniqueness that it was periodically interrupted by intervals of the most perfect calm. In these intervals, we heard the wind blow below us in the depths of the Allée Blanche, whereas the most absolute tranquillity reigned around our cabin. But these periods of calm were followed by gusts of an inexpressible violence; they were repetitive blows, like artillery fire, or so it seemed. We felt as if the mountain itself was shaking under our mattresses. The wind came in through the cracks in the cabin’s stones; it even lifted up my covers and froze me from head to toe. It calmed down just a little at the break of dawn, but it picked up again soon and returned with snow that entered every part of our cabin. We then took refuge in one of the tents … There we found that the guides were obliged to hold up the poles continually out of fear that the wind would knock them down and sweep them away, along with the tent.1
Saussure then described the “hail” and the “thunder” that assailed his party.
In order to give an idea of the intensity of this wind, I will say that twice our guides, wanting to check on the men in the other tent, chose an interval when the wind seemed to have calmed down. Half way there, despite the fact that there were only sixteen or seventeen steps between the tents, they were struck by a gust of wind so strong that, in order not to be carried over the cliff, they were obliged to cling to a rock that was happily located nearby. They remained there two or three minutes with their clothing flapping over their heads by the wind and their bodies riddled with hailstones until they could resume their task.2
In that summer of 1788, such an experience of the wind seemed new to Saussure, even though it must appear very ordinary to readers today. It is this assessment that is a historical fact, and we will see that, in the decades to come, there were other experiences of the wind that seemed new. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the study of air was becoming fashionable, the wind was still seen, for the most part, as an element. Several decades later, the nature, the origin, and the circulation of the wind would be better understood.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, we possessed very few scientific facts about the wind. New experiments undertaken in the course of navigation or, periodically, during the exploration of different regions added new proofs, often terrible proofs. For the most part, the wind was described in its local manifestations, and we will come back to this point. Sailors accorded it an extreme importance; they used a number of words and expressions to describe it. Its nature was understood, however poorly, through the methods of recording it used by amateurs who had at their disposal various measuring instruments: the anemometer, the thermometer, and the barometer sometimes figure in the small laboratories of these men who were passionate about meteorology. And we should not forget about the installations of weathervanes, designed to indicate the wind’s direction and placed on the towers of churches and castles, because they were a sign of feudal privilege.
The most educated individuals continued to perceive the wind according to the religious and literary representations that emerged from the mists of time; that is to say, the wind was perceived as an essential fact of human life, and yet it remained inexplicable. Certainly, since the Renaissance, navigators had discovered the regular circulation of the trade winds in the tropics, and some sea charts from that era took into account these observations. Moreover, certain local winds, such as the mistral, the tramontana, and the northwester (maintaining our focus on France), had been described with great precision. And let us not forget that, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the salons, small demonstrations were held in the course of which scientists, or so-called scientists, reproduced the blowing of the wind. However, to understand this last fact requires knowledge of air and its composition. Was it an elemental fluid, alongside water, earth, and fire, as was thought since Aristotle’s time? Or was it a mysterious phlogiston?
Whatever it was, from then on, the specialists thought that air acted in many different ways on the body: through simple contact with the skin or with the pulmonary membrane, through exchange across the pores, or through direct or indirect ingestion since food contained it. Scientists of this time stated repeatedly that, according to the seasons or the regions, air regulated the tautness of the body’s fibers; this was an essential fact. It was observed that a precarious balance was established between external air and internal air in the body, constantly restored by exhalation, expectoration, belching, or the “winds.” Two centuries earlier, Rabelais had invented the Island of Ruach, whose inhabitants lived off nothing but the winds.3
All of this contributed to the conviction that air was animated by a force, an elasticity, large enough to equal the force of gravity. In this perspective, when air loses its elasticity, only the movement of it, its agitation – and we will return to this point, too – could restore it and thus permit the survival of the organs. In the opinion of doctors, this balance between the body, the internal organs, and the atmosphere constituted an essential fact: hot air caused an elongation and a relaxation of the body’s fibers, whereas cold air caused a tightening of the fibers, and fresh air was revealed to be particularly beneficial. It should therefore be studied. And so it is understandable how these scientific representations of air constituted the foundation for an interest in the winds.
This concept of air led to the idea of air as a frightening broth in which smoke, sulfur, and vapor, whether watery, oily, or salty, were all mixed together. Indeed, all inflammable materials exhaled by the earth, such as the emanations from swamps and the miasma arising from decomposing bodies, were suspect. All of this compromised the wind’s elasticity, sometimes through the strange fermentations and transmutations that were accompanied by thunder, lightning, and storms.
The atmosphere of a place constituted a menacing cistern from which epidemics risked breaking out. All of this led to the conviction that the wind, the agitation of the air, was capable of clearing out its noxious charges. Neo-Hippocratism – the doctrine dating to Hippocrates in the fifth and fourth centuries before the Common Era and laid out anew in the eighteenth century – led to the advocacy of an atmospheric vigilance and a mistrust of times of great calm. The praise of ventilation extended across a long period of time: from the period during which air was conceived as an element or a phlogiston to the era when it was believed to be composed of chemicals. And now it is this concept that we must consider.
The concept of phlogiston was once considered one of the greatest forces in nature. It was thought that it comprised a particular fluid, inherent in all beings, one that produced combustion when it abandoned the body. This theory, sketched out in the seventeenth century, had been taken up again and developed by Georg Stahl (1660–1734), one of the most eminent scientists of his time. According to him, phlogiston existed in all combustible bodies, and combustion itself was only the passage of phlogiston from a combined form into a free form.
Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), as we know, destroyed this false interpretation of combustion. Like Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) – and we are going to come to him later – who had described the composition of air in his own way while still remaining caught up in his fidelity to the idea of phlogiston, Lavoisier demonstrated that air was composed of nitrogen – as acknowledged by Daniel Rutherford (1749–1819) since 1772 – and oxygen and hydrogen – as identified by Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) in 1781.
Priestley’s discoveries, published in 1772 and 1778, were important but incomplete. According to this scientist and clergyman, in studying respiration, there was a “common air,” a “phlogisticated air” (nitrogen), and a “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen), which was “vital.” This last kind of air was excellent for breathing. In brief, then, Priestley’s partial fidelity to the idea of phlogiston prevented him from succeeding in describing perfectly the composition of air. Nevertheless, in his work, air ceased being an element and began being perceived as a combination or a mixture of gases. According to Priestley, along with other scientists from his era, the chemistry of gases and organic processes were directly linked together. To study the different kinds of air was to study the mechanisms of life, and to ventilate public spaces was to purify them. It was then understood that wind was at the center of this emerging concept of public hygiene. Ventilation was thus the axis of the hygienic strategy, since it was guided by the fear of stagnation and fixity.
Even before Lavoisier’s discovery of the exact chemical composition of air, the neo-Hippocratic understanding of air led to the advocacy of ventilation as a restorer of the elasticity of air as much as an antiseptic. The wind swept away the hidden parts of the atmosphere and purified and deodorized the polluted waters. In a word, to survey and to master the winds and the currents was considered an essential practice.
With this perspective in mind, the bellows and all ventilators revealed their usefulness. Many objects were capable of stimulating the beneficial effects of wind – that is, the circulation of air – or so it was thought: fans in private places, trees next to marshes, rotating windmills on sleds, vehicles of all kinds inside cities, the disturbance of the atmosphere by bells, the explosions of cannons, sails on ships, and so on. In the hulls of ships, merchandise suspected of transmitting diseases was ventilated.
The architecture of the Enlightenment was obsessed with the need to circulate air and to create rising currents of air. A healthy town should not be surrounded by walls because they would hamper this means of purification. Streets should be wide and squares vast in order to encourage the circulation of the winds. Similarly, it was advisable for buildings to be distant from one another, and hospitals were conceived as “islands in the air.” For example, the goal of a decree by Louis XVI was to promote the ventilation of spaces and the circulation of air inside cities.4
In England, as in France, royal societies of medicine extolled the creation of the “medical regime” in several localities. In particular they advocated the better detection of sanitary conditions, especially in regard to the risks of epidemics. This practice, in the French case, was presented in the famous report of departmental statistics by Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756–1832) under the Consulate and the Empire, and it continued to be the object of innumerable brochures during the first third of the nineteenth century. It constitutes an important element in the history of local winds. All of this is very well known.
Let us return to the key theme in question. Between 1800 and 1830, knowledge about the wind progressed only very slowly. Nevertheless, we can note two major concepts which emerged during this period. Scientists became convinced of the existence of an “aerial ocean,” while awareness of the distant geographic origins of its related phenomena grew. These two concepts bore the mark of one of the greatest scientists of the era, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Let us cite a couple of passages from his great book Cosmos, which was published in 1845 and summarized his earlier thought. Having outlined the contemporary knowledge concerning the “aerial ocean,” he wrote:
The second and external and general covering of our planet, the aerial ocean, in the lower strata, and on the shoals of which we live, present six classes of natural phenomena, which manifest the most intimate connection with one another. They are dependent on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the variations in its transparency, polarization, and color, its density or pressure, its temperature and humidity, and its electricity.5
A few pages further on, Humboldt highlighted this fact, which was essential in understanding our subject, the wind. He stressed geographic distances as causes for atmosphere events. From him we learn:
Important changes of weather are not owing to merely local causes, situated at the place of observation, but are the consequence of a disturbance in the equilibrium of the aerial currents at a great distance from the surface of the earth, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, which bring cold or warm, dry or moist air, rendering the sky cloudy or serene, and converting the accumulated masses of clouds into light feathery cirri. As therefore the inaccessibility of the phenomena is added to the manifold nature and complication of the disturbance, it has always appeared to me that meteorology must first seek its foundation and progress in the torrid zone, the course of hydro-meteors, and the phenomena of electric explosion, which are all periodical occurrences.6
As we can well understand, these cautionary lines were written on the cusp of the discoveries which we will shortly examine.
