The Meteorological Device: the daily weather forecast, literary modernism and the productions of anxiety

Abstract

Modernist studies as the institutionalization of avant-garde culture– a repository for exciting futures – has a peculiar and self-conscious affinity to the devices of the modern weather forecast. Consider its structuring paradox: on the one hand, rupture, the opening up of commonsense perceptions of time and space, canonically exemplified by Mallarmé’s words scattered across a page; on the other hand, an increased focus on everydayness, standardised life, the homme moyen sensuel and so on. A language of breakdown and the novum coinciding with sciences of social normality, including statistics and probability, means that the shock of avant-garde aesthetics is eternally bound up with the anesthetic and institutional dimensions of disciplinary power, modernist life with modernist scholarship. This article argues that a focus on the science of meteorology as it developed especially in the early decades of the twentieth century can help resituate this predicament and evaluate its consequences for the intersecting histories of ecology and literary criticism. Indeed if there is to be a distinctive ‘anthropocene’ or ‘capitalocene’ criticism today, taking seriously economic and political determinations on a planetary scale, the ordinances of deep time, the exhaustion of natural resources and geopolitical unevenness, then, clearly, it will necessitate a full reckoning with those obdurate fantasies which animate the modernist everyday. The conspiracy of literature and meteorology in the early twentieth century, specifically their production of excitement and anxiety, exemplifies the grammar of canonical European modernism. As we shall see, this is a grammar based on the horizon of a single day, whose temporality remains ecstatic. Contemporary globalized cultures have not escaped the satisfactions of this grammar, and if they are ever to do so, we will have to spend yet more time trying to understand it.