Ruskin’s Storm-cloud: heavenly messages and pathetic fallacies in a denatured world
International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)
No.1, 2013
Ruskin’s Storm-cloud: heavenly messages and pathetic fallacies in a denatured world
(Abstract)
Thomas H. Ford
How we speak can change the climate: this was John Ruskin’s astounding claim of 1884. Evil words, Ruskin argued, return to afflict their speakers as evil winds; blasphemy gives rise to baleful clouds. This article attempts to recover the rationality of Ruskin’s claim, which has most often been read as him lapsing into the pathetic fallacy, or even into madness. It does so by reinterpreting this claim as a retrospective amplification of an idea central to British Romanticism: that atmosphere forms the primary medium of human communication and perception, and that in consequence cultural self-understanding is climatic. Restored to these atmospheric terms of its historical inception, Ruskin’s claim can be shown to have been not metaphoric but literal, and not blithely animist or anthropomorphic but materialist. If atmosphere is a medium of communication, then communicative practices may plausibly have climatic effects. This largely forgotten chapter in the cultural history of climate change bears quite urgently on the present, when once again language is recognised to be changing the climate – a global climate responsive, for example, to the words of contemporary legislation, contracts, treaties and, most broadly, of the political and public spheres.