Christchurch as Lisbon: The legacy of the seismic sublime

Abstract

In 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand, suddenly became possessed by something monstrous as a series of earthquakes began to shake the city to pieces. Some 3 years, 185 deaths, and over 13,000 aftershocks later, only 20% of the central city remains, and there are vast voids, houses crushed by rocks, and teetering on the edges of cliffs. Wracked by a geological version of Tourette 's syndrome, the land­ scape behaved unpredictably, shaking and shouting profanities . The simultaneous fascination and horror with the events and their impact exceeds comprehension ; the Sublime has come to Christchurch. Another city, another time: Lisbon, 1755, a massive earthquake of over magnitude 8.5 sets off a tsunami and the city is on fire. This calamitous event shocked Europe and brought vivid focus to the aesthetic of the Sublime. Already an emerging concept , the Sublime was amplified and mould­ed by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, providing a frame for the terror and strange beauty of the earthquake's power and devastation. Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke leveraged off the Lisbon earthquake to shape their theoretical positions on the Sublime, including Kant's term Erschiitterung, which describes the agitation of the mind from the Sublime - a word which can be translated as 'a shuddering vi­bration, disruption, blow, shock, trauma .' All of this resonates with the experience of Christchurch's earthquakes , and this chapter tracks this legacy of seismic Sub­limity from its origins in Lisbon's catastrophe to a contemporary disaster. Connec­tions are also made to other seismic events including Chile's and Japan's earth­ quakes and tsunamis.