I’ll share the opening and closing paragraph out of my talk at EMU last week, which is the early stirrings of a project on Shakespeare and the Pacific that’s rumbling beneath the other things I’m working on now. After claiming that this play has Shakespeare’s “perhaps unique” reference to the Pacific via Mexico, I remembered Rosalind’s invocation of the “South Sea of discovery” in AYLI 3.2 — but that’s as a place infinitely far away and unreachable. Which may be part of what the Pacific means to the Elizabethans.

In any case, here’s the opening of the talk —

I’ll start by noting that The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare’s only play to mention “Mexico,” a word that came into English in the mid-sixteenth century via Spanish, probably from a Native American language (Nahuatl, OED). The play twice explains that Antonio has ships bound for this New World territory. The first time, Shylock includes Mexico among several destinations, including Tripoli, the Indies, and England. Later Bassanio elaborates an even wider network, repeating Shylock’s three and adding Lisbon, Barbary, and India. Spanish Mexico, with its gold mines and brutal history of conquest, spans the early modern Atlantic and Pacific worlds, so these references comprise not only one of Shakespeare’s rare mentions of the Americas but also perhaps his unique gesture to the Pacific.[i] Using worlds and oceans conjured by Mexico, I want to re-examine economic readings of this play. Merchant has long been the favorite play of economic critics, New and old, Marxist or not.[ii] I suggest that among the many binaries that distinguish the play – usurer and merchant, Christian and Jew, male and female, gift and market economies in Karen Newman’s essay – we should add the contrast between two different models of maritime trade. The first system, associated with Shylock’s Rialto, the economic history of Venice, and Mediterranean sea-lanes, establishes a local network of connectivity and inter-dependence. The second system, associated with Antonio’s dispersed fleet, Mexico, and the European encounter with the Americas and Asia, creates a deterratorialized, planet-sized oceanic world of immense potential wealth but little certainty. The play’s critique of economic exchange needs to consider the differences, as well as connections, between these two versions of maritime expansion.

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[i] The only use of the term “America” comes metaphorically in Errors (3.2). “Indies,” a term that could indicate both East and West, appears in Merchant, Errors, Henry 8, Merry Wives, and Twelfth Night. “Bermuda,” an ambiguously American island, famously appears in The Tempest only. Other New World names such as Virginia and Peru do not appear at all.

[ii] For a collection that surveys the field, see Linda Woodbridge, ed., Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism (London: Palgrave, 2003).

Here’s a few bits from an essay that will introduce a section of the forthcoming volume, Fluid Frontiers: New Currents in Marine Environmental History.  The book originated in this great conference, about which I blogged here. I’m introducing a cluster of essays on Steinbeck, Hemingway, and American Maritime Revivalism.

What makes an ecological hero? Can heroic self-assertion ever be compatible with ecological interconnectedness? These three essays on maritime literature and historical ecology suggest ways to bring the special insights of literary culture to bear on these questions. In a broad sense, the problem of the hero is the problem of human-centered thinking. All human heroes, by virtue of being human, exacerbate the problem of anthropocentrism. To the extent that humans want to see examples of ecological heroism in people like us, we resist the full force of the ecological thought that de-centers the merely human.  But literature, to a degree, may be flexible enough to respond to this dilemma. Literary works both reflect and modify existing ideas about what human beings are and how we interact with large-scale natural systems. The massive surge of ecocritical readings of literature since the 1990s suggests that the human-nature relationship has become an essential topic of literary interest in the present. Literary culture may help unravel, or at least illuminate, the conflict between the cultural force of anthropocentric narratives and the counter-pressure of ecosystemic thinking.

The problem of the hero remains potent for all strains of ecological thinking, but perhaps especially so in the blue oceans of maritime ecocriticism. While the green world of traditional environmental studies has always had room for the humans who till the soil and tend pastures, the oceanic world is less hospitable and, in human terms at least, less sustainable. The ocean is not really a home for people. But despite or perhaps because of the difficulties of living in or near the great waters, the sea has always been one of the most fecund sites of literary invention. To explore blue voyages instead of green kingdoms requires imagining ways for humans to endure hostile, changeable ecologies. The heroes we need, as I have argued elsewhere, are swimmers and sailors, not warriors or conquerors. These oceanic heroes, who exert themselves in intimate and dangerous contact with the fluid element, may provide models for surviving the present era of ecological crisis and disruption. Humans crave both heroes and ecological order, and it may be that we cannot have both, at least not in either’s current form. This cluster of essays suggests new currents of maritime ecological thinking that can do justice to the mind-challenging world ocean and find ways for humans to thrive in contact with salt water.

As both scientists and literary scholars know, ecology represents a system of relations in which no single part takes precedence over the inter-relating whole. To embrace ecological thinking entails refusing singularity, attempting insofar as it is possible to think outside solitary human perspectives. Heroism works in the opposite way. The hero, the example of human greatness, invites attention and focus, so that the heroic body itself becomes a vessel for transcendent values. The history of art provides probably our clearest examples of how heroism becomes embodied. Michelangelo’s famous sixteenth-century sculpture of  David, poised nude just before his combat with Goliath, visually presents the singularity and physical force of human heroism. The hero, the shepherd boy about to slay the Philistine giant, stands out from the crowd. Rather than being defined by relations, the hero exceeds them. Imagining this figure as just a participant in an all-encompassing network seems difficult, and perhaps undesirable. The tension between the human desire for exemplary heroism and an opposed but also strong penchant for harmonious exchange marks the field of ecological literary criticism. Literary scholars have no easy answer for this dilemma – we want both sides of this coin also – but literary culture contains a host of figures who try, and at times do not entirely fail, to combine these value systems.

It is tempting to answer these questions with some names from recent ecological activism: Rachel Carson. Bill McKibbon. Aldo Leopold. Sylvia Earle. Al Gore.  These and others combine in different ways human heroism and ecological insight. But the search for heroic models, for exemplary humans, on a basic level works in tension with ecological ideas that de-center human primacy and advance inter-relation rather than solitary exemplarity. To be heroic, to stand out from and dominate a crowd, on some fundamental level is a non-ecological act. Heroism, the human desire for power and display, may be part of what got our watery planet into its current ecological mess. Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick, in an ecological light, tells a story of human ambition in doomed conflict with the boundless sea. At the close of Melville’s novel, the waters close over Ahab and his whaleship and “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” A collective body drowns heroes. Only the philosophical Ishmael, who represents a different kind of heroism, poetic and speculative rather than epic and violent, survives to tell the tale. In Melville’s literary model, oceanic forces frustrate or reshape human ambitions. But in our age of climate change and ocean acidification, it no longer seems clear that the sea itself can remain what it has been.

1. Listening to poetry in Middle English is pure pleasure, though I’m a bit shy about performing it in public myself. Enjoying the slightly-different syllables as they wash over you is a particular joy of the culture of medieval studies.

2. The state of eco-play in medieval criticism is vibrant, and its green owes much to the forest otherworld of romance and also of pre-Christian mythologies. Not nearly as much pastoral as on my home turf. That’s a nice reminder for me.

3. The innovation of threaded panels snaking through the conference — the two I followed most were “Oceans” and “Ecology,” but there were several others including “Neighbors” of which I wished I could have heard more — created a wonderfully connected but variable labyrinth through the days’ events. A very well-executed idea that at some point I’ll want to steal.

4. Inspired perhaps by Portland’s shockingly good micro-brews, the circum-conference festivities felt like we were Olympic swimmers plunging in for a sprint. Exhausting but exhilarating, though I confess I wasn’t really ready for the karaoke. The night before my panel I had to duck out of the bar before the apotheosis of Eileen Joy, but I have no doubt it went off as planned. Or maybe better than that.

5. Someone I don’t know at one of Thursday’s (?) panels said that the essential virtue of The Canterbury Tales was “fellowship” — or maybe I’ve garbled that slightly, but in any case I was amazed by the good fellowship on display everywhere, and the willingness to welcome an interloping early modernists into both the intellectual and festive parts of the week. As Jeffrey Cohen noted in his post-conference blog, the mood was “future-oriented, not nostalgic,” and strikingly optimistic, which I like.

6. Too many great papers to name, but I was fascinated by Anne Harris’s talk on the making of stained glass in Allan Mitchell’s “Animate Objects and Ecologies” panel and also by George Edmondson on King Horn as sea-creature in Jeffrey Cohen and Patricia Ingham’s “Oceans/Neighbors” session. Anne also wrote a lovely meditation on the conference on her Medieval meets world blog.

7. It was a pleasure to meet Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and to locate his blog, which featured in the plenary talk.

8. I had wondered what sorts of fluid bodies medieval oceans might be, and whether the relatively local, Med and Channel and North Sea confines of English voyaging would change the way literary scholars read the sea. I’m not sure; my own talk was about maritime orientation across the medieval / early modern divide, via astrolabes, lead lines, ports, and poetry. I heard some great stuff on the multilingual English Channel from Jonathan Hsy, literal and spiritual turbulance by James Smith, and the “Man of Law’s Tale” by Ingrid Nelson. Bodies of salt water always exert disorienting pressure, whether of literally global size or not. Plus it’s all the same water, anyway, slowly circulating.

9. Portland is a great place for a conference: great beer, good food, plus  poetry readings at Mother Foucault’s and of course Powell’s. I especially loved the food trucks at which we ate lunch everyday, banh mi to pad thai to assorted mexican and other places. Any time NYC wants to license food trucks, I’m ready.

10. Hearing a bunch of conference delegates read their own original poetry was a real treat. Organized by Chris Piuma, who read an elaborate connecting poem about bananas, the reading brought together a few local poets — Chris used to live in Portland and knows the local scene — with intense and heartfelt poems by Eileen Joy, Dan Reiman, and a medievalist from SUNY Buffalo named David whose last name I don’t remember but who read great walking-around poems from his days in San Francisco. Sometimes academic conferences can play too close to the vest, but original poetry has a way of bringing the real stuff out.

11. Some great swimming in Oregon, too: I only got one early-morning workout at a nice local community pool (I blame it on the beer, or perhaps the good fellowship), but an icy dip in Crater Lake on the way north plus two swims in the cold Pacific, one without and one with a wetsuit, were as cleansing as could be.

12. Some might think that the highlight of my conference was throwing Jeffrey Cohen into the Pacific on Friday afternoon at Cannon Beach. It was memorable — plus, since I joined forces to corral Jeffrey with fellow early modernist Lowell Duckert, this event brought to a head the running Shakespeare-v-Chaucer gags that punctuated the week. (Btw: we made sure Jeffrey put his iPhone down before immersion. Really it was all very civilized, if wet.)

I loved the whole post-NCS coastal excursion with Jeffrey, Lowell, Dan, and Marcus: nothing like making one’s academic subject personal. The Pacific is cold in Oregon — for body-surfing the next day I used a wetsuit. But Friday night with the post-NCS crowd it was perfect: cold, frothy, clear, like a perfectly lucid thought that’s too sharp to be forced into words. I’m sure Jeffrey realizes now that it was worth going in.

Will I return to this biannual Chaucerpalooza? I hope so, time and travel budgets willing. But if  salt-water immersion is a necessary capstone, perhaps I should give Iceland 2014 a pass? Or is that a perfect opportunity for a maritime Beowulf panel?

Here’s a few lines that I retranslated from the great Old English elegy, “The Seafarer.” They are part of my paper for a conference I’ve not been to before, the New Chaucer Society, in Portland next week. Yes, I do also talk about Chaucer…

And now my heart turns

Out of my spirit-locker,

My mind goes

Out onto the sea-flood.

Over the whale’s road

It flies widely

Across the surfaces of the globe.

Then it returns to me

Ravenous and greedy (58-62a).

I also used this poem for the first line of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.

I’ve been thinking and chatting on Facebook with Jeffrey Cohen and others about this editorial in yesterday’s Times about the collapse of coral reefs. The key point, by Roger Bradbury from  ANU in Canberra, is that the catastrophe is today, not tomorrow:

IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.

It’s very sad to sea such beauty breaking, but the author is right that denial is no good response. There’s lots of fear and anxiety surrounding the new ocean that’s being built with plastics and jellyfish. But it’s important to remember that things are never what they used to be. The coral-filled wonders of Jacques Cousteau films are gone or going, but so are schools of North Atlantic cod and the incredibly dense oyster ecosystem that used to fill New York harbor. Oceans don’t stay the same, any more than anything or anyplace else. We need to stop expecting stasis out of natural systems.

We can still love an ocean full of “remnants” of coral wonders and a “algal-dominated hard ocean bottom.” A rapprochement with jelly is, I believe, already in progress. We don’t yet love jellyfish the way we love Nemo-fish or dolphins, but we’ve seen gorgeous jellyfish displays in aquariums from Monterray to Mystic, plus jellyfish sushi is making inroads, and not just in Japan. An ocean with a jelly-face is not what we’re used to, but it’s surely part of our future. I remember swimming through a cloud of non-stinging jellies the last time I swam in the Jersey shore where I grew up. I ended up thinking it wasn’t so horrible —

Jellyfish are the ocean’s future, scientists tell us.  They are the species that will do best in the ocean that’s coming: oxygen-deprived, warm, depleted of fish.  It’s a gruesome thought, a violation of our long shared history of ocean aesthetics.  But swimming through the jelly-cloud early Wed morning, with a solitary older fisherman just up the beach on a cloudless day, it seemed as if swimmers & jellies could manage.  The feel of them between my fingers was foreign, slimy, a little disturbing — but also something I could get used to.

The title of the Times editorial, I think, is too stark. Surely we know enough about ecology to know that things never go away. Our present and future appears less a world w/o reefs than a world with remnants.

I have some hope for fishing-free zones, which seem to be restoring reef habitat faster than predicted, though doubtless the restoration is less than full, and it is challenging to expand such oceanic preserves. But I don’t think our only response to oceanic change should be nostalgia.

For some more comments and commentary, including (at the bottom of the post), a great response by Carl Safina, author of Song for a Blue Ocean , here’s a link to the NYT blog follow-up, Reefs in the Anthropocene. Safina closes with a carefully measured point:

 The science is clear that reefs are in many places degraded and in serious trouble. But no science has, or likely can, determine that reefs and all their associated non-coral creatures are unequivocally, equally and everywhere, completely doomed to total non-existence. In fact, much science suggests they will persist in some lesser form. Bleak prospects have been part of many dramatic turnarounds, and, who knows, life may, as usual—with our best efforts—find a way.

Alongside which I’ll close with one of the most non-maritime poets I can think of, Robert Frost, in “The Oven Bird” —

The question he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Since PMLA has no embargo period, here’s the pdf of my article in the current Sustainability cluster. I think I’ll start self-archiving on this blog also.

After Sustainability Mentz PMLA 2012

The new Coriolis is out, with articles on the Pacific theater in the War of 1812 and the maternal ocean in Donna Morrisy’s recent novel, Sylvanus Now.