Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

“Experience is better than knowledge.”

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Maritime lit types like me have been waiting for a little while for Margaret Cohen’s new book.  It was worth waiting for.  She covers several centuries of English and French literature, with major treatments of Defoe, Melville, Hugo, Conrad, and many others.

The really great thing about the book, esp its quite amazing first chapter, is the focus on what she calls “mariner’s craft.”  Taking an episode in which Cook manages to get his ship off a reef in the South Pacific as the focalizing narrative, Cohen outlines the 14 central feature of the skilled labor that Homer called “metis.”  From Prudence and sea-legs through jury-rigging and collectivity to Providence and practical reason, she produces a wonderfully detailed  vision of how sailors imagined themselves working on the sea.

The bulk of the book connects that collective knowledge , assembled by generations of writers and sailors — the quote I use as a title for this post is from Champlain — to help understand the international maritime novel.  Her readings of Defoe, Conrad, and Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (which she rightly notes should be translated as “Workers of the Sea”) are especially good.  Conrad writes “craft’s eulogy,” she observes, and Falconer’s poem “The Shipwreck” attempts to connect maritime craft to the emerging aesthetics of the sublime (122-5).

I also appreciate the final gestures toward Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew.  Who will write the much-needed study of old Tom as sea-writer?

“Earth is a misnomer”

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Another plane book from my travels in January, this one is MIT anthropologist Stefan Helmriech’s travels and adventures with marine macrobial biologists in and under the oceans.  Some great stuff about what’s happening in Woods Hole and Monterey.

The takeaway is that the macrobial life in the ocean is much vaster and more complex that we’ve hitherto imagined.  A mililiter of sea water “in a genetic sense, has more complexity than the human genome” (53).

It’s also a story about the shifting of human interest in marine life away from anthropomorphic mammals, from whales to dolphins and now to microbes (5-6).

Some comments also remind me that I need to re-read Lem’s novel Solaris.

a living dumbe Speaking Library

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Now that I’ve retitled the blog — though I still like “Blue Humanities Blog” & may add it back in as a sub-title — I should explain the Bookfish just a bit.  Here’s what I had to say about it at MLA a few weeks ago —

Conclusion:     The Bookfish

That’s a fairly grim conclusion, and I don’t want to leave us floundering in dark waters on our voyages back toward the spring semester.  Instead, I’ll invoke one last maritime image that Shakespeare never saw but which draws out the promise of maritime symbology in his works, and perhaps also the value of maritime literary studies.  The last image on your handout is The Bookfish, also titled Vox Piscis, published in London in 1627.  It’s a favorite of mine, and it’s visible in the “Sermons and Prayers” section of the website for the Folger show from last summer (www.folger.edu/lostatsea).  If you can see on the small reproduction – the actual sextodecimo volume isn’t much bigger – it’s a codfish with a book in its belly.  This book represents the symbolic opposite of Wright’s legible and physical ocean surface; it’s a visual representation of the wisdom that comes up from the bottom in the human-ocean encounter.  The story begins off the coast of King’s Lynn in June 1626, when some fishermen catch a codfish and bring it to the Cambridge fish market.  To the surprise of Dr. Joseph Meade of Christ’s College, the fish when cut open has, as the picture shows, a tiny book in its belly, bound in sailcloth and covered with digestive “gelly.”  Down at the bottom of the North Sea, amid darkness and ooze, lay a volume of divine wisdom, penned by the Henrician martyr John Frith nearly a century before.  The oceanic pedigree of the Bookfish, even more than its textual contents, underwrites its theological truth.  Stories of holy relics returned from the deeps by sea creatures are common in coastal cultures, but the arrival of this fish in the early seventeenth-century suggests that maritime symbology was important for emerging religious polemic in England.  The story seems unbelievable on its face.  It’s barely possible, I suppose, that the tiny book fell overboard, was swallowed by a scavenging cod, and then discovered at the Cambridge fish-market, but it seems much more likely that Meade, who in 1626 was engaged in writing about apocalyptic events, invented the cod in order to use the ocean the same way Shakespeare did, as a powerful and flexible symbol of cultural change. Who would not want to read God’s news straight from the fish’s belly?

I’ll close my talk today by suggesting that the model of the bookfish can influence our own intellectual projects.  While Meade intervened in theological debates in 1620s Cambridge, a nascent “oceanic turn,” which I’ve elsewhere called a “blue cultural studies” or a “new thalassology,” is currently insinuating itself into our discourses about English literature and cultural history.  In writing about maritime literature, we should take the Bookfish as a model.  The volume from the sea-floor represents a gooey and imaginative mixing of scholarly writing and oceanic reality.  The prospect of stuffing our manuscripts into the bellies of deep-sea fish as a protest against the crisis in academic publishing has an attractively Quixotic air, though it’s worth remembering that the Bookfish is, among other things, a masterly bit of marketing.  The book’s preface names it “a living dumbe Speaking Library in the sea” (Vox Piscis, 17), calling out to England “like another Jonas…out of the belly of the Fish” (34).  This ocean-text captures the alluring fantasy of a truly maritime literary culture.  Perhaps we don’t want to write from fish’s bellies, or even pretend to do so.  But real wisdom emerges from human encounters with the slimy deeps, if we are willing to go down there after it.

I found this image for the first time back when I was at an NEH Institute at Mystic in 2006, and I included it in my Folger show and also in its opening lecture.  I do love that Bookfish.

Down there at the bottom of the sea, it’s my model for writing.

Histories of the Sea

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I ran out of reading material last week when facing a 8+ hours on the plane — LHR->DAA, DAA->JFK — so I ended up looking through the used book display in front of the British Film Institute on the South Bank.  Ended up with a couple of sci-fi oldies.  Arthur C. Clarke’s Dolphin Island was a fun & fast read laying out the ancient boys & dolphins love story.  Some improbably Cold War allegory about dolphins & orcas agreeing to live in separate parts of the oceans.  But the fun part for me was the scientist’s dream of a “History of the Sea” that dolphins would have handed down over generations orally.  An old story of a UFO was at the heart of it — sci fi in the 60s, after all — but also a glimpse of something we’re still working on, “historicizing the ocean,” some people call it.  Important stuff.

The other plane read was Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the title of which (I hadn’t remembered) refers to 20,000 leagues around the globe, measuring distance, not depth.

Very odd to remember that this book appeared less than two decades after Moby-Dick, to which Verne alludes early on, though Verne’s colorless harpooneers Ned Land makes a pale Queequeg indeed.  Verne, too, wants Nemo’s device to help his professor write “the true book of the sea” & he gestures hopefully toward the oceanographic work of “the learned Maury” as a model.  Nemo’s world-ocean is a fantasy about human potential, in which “the sea supplies all my wants” and oceanic life creates visionary possibilities.  “The earth,” says Nemo, “does not want new continents, but new men.”

The end of chapter 17, “Four thousand leagues under the Pacific,” contains a gorgeous description of an underwater shipwreck that the Nautilus finds —

The keel seemed to be in good order, and it had been wrecked at most some few hours.  Three stumps of masts, broken off about two feet above the bridge, showed that the vessel had had to sacrifice its masts.  But, lying on its side, it had filled, and it was heeling over to port.  The skeleton of what it had once been, was a sad spectacle as it lay lost under the waves, but sadder still was the sight of the bridge, where some corpses, bound with ropes, were still lying.  I counted five: — four men, one of whom was standing at the helm, and a woman standing at the poop, holding an infant in her arms.  She was quite young.  I could distinguish her features, which the water had not decomposed, by the brilliant light from the Nautilus.  In one despairing effort, she had raised her infant above her head, poor little thing! whose arms encircled its mother’s neck.  The attitude of the four sailors was frightful, distorted as they were by their convulsive movements, whilst making a last effort to free themselves from the cords that bound them to the vessel.  The steersman along, calm, with a grave, clear face, his grey hair glued to his forehead, and his hand clutching the wheel of the helm, seemed even then to be guiding the three broken masts through the depths of the ocean.

Good 19c sentimentality.

The misnamed

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Los Angeles is a good place to have MLA, and even though it was fairly cool and cloudy, I did sneak off to Venice for a few hours and a quick, cold dip in the misnamed Pacific on Sunday morning.  What a strange name for the largest and most powerful fluid body on the planet.  Though yesterday morning, as I ran south on the bike path & watched the surfers, I could see why the ocean can be calming.  I took this picture from Venice pier , as I watched a surfer catch one of the slow curling waves that evenly shouldered in from a vast still sea. 

After I was warm enough to make a ritual immersion — the wetsuited surfers didn’t even glance at me — I decamped to the Sidewalk Cafe, my favorite breakfast joint from my time living in Venice in 1991-2.  I lived in a basement apartment on Westminster Ave, with old beat-up windows that let sand blow into my sink.  I still remember coming up from underground after the MLK Day earthquake of 1994, when the whole neighborhood, from the New Zealand rugby players living in the closet across the hall to my skateboarding hippie landlady, ended up wandering down to the Sidewalk after the shaking stopped.  There was no electricity, but the gas stoves worked, & pretty soon chorizo and eggs were flowing.

Here’s the view looking out from the Cafe —

Kerouac’s Pacific

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A billion

years aint nothing —

…

These gentle tree pulp pages

which’ve nothing to do

with yr crash roar,

liar sea, ah,

were made for rock

tumble seabird digdown

footstep hollow weed

move bedarvaling

crash? Ah again?

Wine is salt here?

Tidal wave kitchen?

Engines of Russia

in yr soft talk —

from “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur” in Big Sur