Geoscience Reference
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once been a widespread, acquired habit of empirical observation, often as-
sociated with women and with feminine nervous sensibility. The modernist
writer as human seismograph laid claim instead to an innate and distinctly
masculine artistic genius, a poetry of “iron nerves.”
Conclusion
if one were only an indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse leaning against
the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one's
spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins,
and could barely see the land unfurl.
—Franz Kafka
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With Jünger we arrive at the heart of modernism's fascination with earth-
quakes. The earthquake's invisible human effects—whether described as
vertigo or as psychic trauma—mimicked the perceived effects of moder-
nity itself. Nineteenth-century observers experienced the transformations
due to modern science and technology as a “vertiginous violence” (Henry
Adams); they induced “dizziness” (Mary shelley) and “moral seasickness”
(Max Nordau).
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in the psychoanalytic language emerging at the in de siè-
cle, the earthquake pierced the modern psychic shield. its effects were thus
akin to the symptoms of neurasthenia and traumatic shock. Yet many of
the earthquake narratives of this period described fascinatingly ambivalent
reactions. Beside the tales of horror were others that insisted on a thrilling
sense of liberation, a glorious dizziness. The earthquake gave modern men
and women a tantalizing brush with a force they had trouble naming, some-
thing vast and primal. What their earthquake fevers shared was the fantasy
of relinquishing a defining ambition of the modern age: the quest to master
nature. The joy of the earthquake was the thrill of giving oneself up to a raw
natural power. it was a fantasy, in Kafka's terms, of dropping the “reins” of
progress. As scott spector points out, Kafka harbored an “explosive revolu-
tionary element,” the target of which was the materialism of his father's gen-
eration. That hostility expressed itself violently in his texts as a “contempt
for the earth” itself, a “struggle to release the dormant spirit from within the
comfortable but constrictive confines of the body.”
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in his fantasy of riding
like “an indian,” the motion of the subject is transposed to the ground, such
that the land itself “quivers” and “unfurls.” Like an earthquake, Kafka's race-
horse tears him free of the confines of gravity. shedding his spurs, dropping
the reins, he has shaken off modernity's claims on him. He gives himself up
to what Michael Taussig calls “the wild abandon of sympathetic absorption
