Storms and Torrents

This chapter describes the impact of innumerability and impossibility in Jonathan Swift's “A Description of a City Shower” (1710) and Daniel Defoe's The Storm; or, A Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which Happen'd in the Late Dreadful Tempest Both by Sea and Land (1704). It explores the vast impossibility of the human representation of climate to discover an ongoing crossfire between human authority and unpredictable other-than-human vitality. Well beyond and long predating “A City Shower” and The Storm, the representation of the weather has been used as a tool to shape, manage, and understand human being, consistently invoking a premise of human priority. From the classical period onward, and even to the present day, accounts of climate have focused on the equation of human ailments or character traits with climatic events. Though the representation of climate is conventionally framed around its impact on human “nature,” the “City Shower” and The Storm project the experience of weather through forms of confluence and turbulence that move all things and beings indiscriminately, reflecting an agency beyond any human certainty.