Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Hungry Ocean Keynotes

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Just in case anyone needs more reasons to go to the Hungry Ocean conference in April, I’ll introduce our lineup of keynote speakers.

First up with be Margaret Cohen, who will talk on “The Imaginary Geography of the Sea.”  Professor Cohen’s great new book, The Novel and the Sea, which I blogged about a little while ago, has just been published, and we’re all eager to hear her further thoughts on maritime craft, the international sea-novel, and other matters.

Later that day, Bernhard Klein will give a talk on early modern maritime studies, with the great title, “Fish Walking on Land.”  Professor Klein has written widely on early modern maritime matters and has also edited two wonderful essays collections, Fictions of the Sea, and Sea-Changes: Historicizing the Ocean.

Rounding things out on Saturday evening will be Patsy Yeager, whose talk, “Oceanic Ecocriticism$” will expand upon some of her comments in the recent PMLA cluster she edited last spring.  I’m wondering if her talk will also connect to her recent work on the “apotheosis of trash” and perils of tossing our waste into the world ocean.

Many things to look forward to.

“Pacific”

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Grim oceanic news out of the Pacific early this morning.  8.9 is a horrifying number, & the images out of Japan are on an absurd, inhuman scale, like something out of an old movie.  We called cousin Lucy in Hawaii at 3 am her time, and were relieved to hear they’d moved to higher ground.  Deep rumblings crossing the deep Pacific today…

Everything, even horrible things, makes me think of books, and this morning it’s Kimberly Patton’s excellent The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils, a study of “Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean” (2007).  She’s a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, & she’s looking here at a tradition of an all-cleansing ocean she locates in Euripides, in Inuit mythology, and in ancient Hindu texts.  She also works closely with responses to the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

It’s a smart, resonant book that explores ancient ideas of pollution and cleansing and argues that they have real policy implications in the present, in our global unwillingness to come to terms with marine pollution and its consequences.  Her suggestion that “environmental science — and environmental advocay — ignores the history of religion at a case” (xii) certainly convinces me.   She also has interesting things to say about the Greek distinction between the salt sea, Pontus, on which Odysseus struggles, and the encircling fresh-water Okeanos, which is “full of eschatological peril” (63).

“The sea demands a reckoning” (123) she writes while exploring ancient Hindu texts.   A grim lesson on a day like today.  Sometimes it’s hard to separate moral and practical responses to our oceanic world.

Coriolis: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies

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For anyone’s who’s not see it yet, you should visit the website of Coriolis, an e-journal in Maritime Studies published by Mystic Seaport.  The most recent issue features a great article by Colin Dewey on the ocean in English poetry from Dryden to Coleridge, an article on Melville’s poem “The Coming Storm,” and a nice intro by literary studies editor Dan Brayton.

If you’d like to contribute material, here’s the description:

Coriolis: Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studies
A refereed forum on works of human interaction with the sea.

Named for the prevailing global force that shapes human maritime experience, Coriolis offers scholars and serious researchers a refereed forum in which to disseminate work on human interaction with the seas. We define “maritime” broadly to include direct and indirect influences on human relationships through the fields of history, literature, art, nautical archaeology, material culture, and environmental studies. Coriolis is open to discussion of maritime connections through all periods and human cultures, and it includes freshwater as well as saltwater marine environments. We encourage works that explore interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. The journal is international in scope and purpose, and we particularly welcome English-language scholarship from outside Europe and North America.

The principal contact is Paul O’Pecko <paul.opecko@mysticseaport.org> of the Blunt Library at Mystic, or you can contact anyone on the Editorial Team.

Future special issues on literature and the sea or other topics will follow!

Hungry Ocean Music

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Here’s another reason you want to go to the Hungry Ocean conference this spring…

Geoff Kaufman will be playing the JCB Library on Saturday afternoon —

Geoff Kaufman Appearing
at the
Hungry Ocean Conference at Brown University
Saturday, April 23 at 1:00 p.m., at the John Carter Brown Library
Geoff Kaufman began singing sailor songs with Stout at Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan for Op’ Sail  ‘76, and went on to perform with them at venues throughout New England.  In 1980, Stout was invited to the 1st annual Sea Music Festival at Mystic Seaport, which eventually led to Geoff’s employment there, where for fifteen years he supervised a staff of  seven musicians and oversaw the presentation of 19th-century sailors music at the museum and outside in schools or at special functions.  During those years he also directed the museum’s annual Sea Music Festival, the largest and longest running event of its kind in America, and he has now stepped back into the role of the festival’s Director.
Over the years Geoff has presented special sea music performances and lecture/demonstrations at the Maritime Center in Norwalk, CT, the U.S.S. Constitution Museum in Boston, the San Francisco Maritime Museum, the Wooden Boat Foundation in Port Townsend, WA and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, MD, as well as on board the tall ships Gazela in Philadelphia and Elissa in Galveston.  His first solo album, Fair Stood The Wind, released in 1987, is his tribute to the sea and its hold upon the human imagination as reflected in songs from the eighteenth century to the present.
Internationally, Geoff has helped develop strong ties between Mystic Seaport and Le Chasse Marée in Douarnenez, France, acting as a consultant for the use of chanteys at festivals in Brittany in 1989 and 1991, and being featured as a performer with his group Forebitter at festivals every year since.  One of the group’s recordings, American Sea Chanteys (Chants des Marins Americains) was commissioned by the French. Forebitter has also performed in Lisbon, Portugal, and in major festivals in England and Holland.  Geoff’s solo performances in Europe include several tours of Poland, festivals in Hull, England and Rotterdam, Holland, a special “Citoyen du Monde” concert in Dunkirk, and being featured at  the October  Shanties Festival in Workum, the Netherlands.
Back at home, Geoff’s many years of singing with the Sloop Singers for the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater resulted in his live concert album, Tree of Life, while work with the USS Constitution Museum in Boston lead to the release of his latest album, Huzza Old Ironsides!  Her Life and Times in Song. His most recent album,Geoff Kaufman’s Sea Song Sampler has met with great acclaim and he is now working on his next project, Restless Waters.

“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?

A Question from the Woods

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  • I used this image in my talk at Farleigh Dickinson today to talk about the purportedly living forest of Birnam Wood in Macbeth and, by extension, the dream of a green pastoral ecology — a place of natural stability and sustainability that can serve as a kind of model for human practices.

I then went on to talk about a “blue” or oceanic ecology based on change & disorder, using this image

As I was talking about these two visions of nature in the play, I admitted that they are caricatures or cartoons, but I also got a great question, after the talk, from a grizzly old guy who, apparently, hadn’t wanted to raise his hand in the full Q&A.

“I live in the woods,” he said.  “It looks nothing like that picture.  The woods are messy, chaotic, with things falling & breaking & dying everywhere you look.  That picture isn’t a real woods.  It’s something somebody planted.”

Sounds right to me.  The green world, the green pastoral utopia that will heal all our ills, is a fantasy projection.

I suppose that implies that the blue world is too.

The Green and the Blue in Macbeth

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As a quasi-reply to my first batch of student papers, here’s an offering of my own, a few paragraphs out of an oceanic reading of Macbeth that I’ve just finished.  This version will be published in a Forum on “Shakespeare and Ecology” next year in *Shakespeare Studies*.  I’ll be giving a slightly different oral version atthe Annual Shakespeare Colloquium at Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, this Saturday at 1 pm.  Come by if you’re in the area!  It’s free & open to the public.

The ecological humanities have been drawn to Shakespeare in part because he’s the biggest fish in the Anglophone literary sea, but also because his long and living stage history provides tangible evidence of canonical texts engaging contemporary dilemmas.  The current surge of ecocritical Shakespeare, however, risks seeing only the happier side of nature, a beach where the weather is always good. Sustained attention to the Shakespeare’s “green” should not occlude his dramatization of a harsher “blue ecology” that locates itself not in cultured pastures or even marginal forests but in the deep sea.  Shakespeare’s literary works can’t get us all the way into this massive blue body – the most basic feature of the world ocean is that humans don’t live there – but they can serve as a fictive beach house, providing us with a beguiling window onto an inhuman space.  The view from Shakespeare’s beach house shows the void next to which we perch our fragile bodies.  It locates us right at the boundary which we can only temporarily cross.  Like other beach houses, it’s vulnerable to coastal storms, and probably built on sand.  It’s a place to which we return because of (not in spite of) the disorder in front of it.

Shakespeare’s dramatization of this inhuman, oceanic ecology appears in two intertwined tropes in Macbeth.  The play’s “green” ecology imagines Scotland as a troubled agricultural land, husbanded by King Duncan, violated by the Macbeths, and eventually renewed by Malcolm.  Against this now almost-traditional eco-reading, a “blue” ecological countercurrent exposes the play’s fascination with the inhospitable ocean.  References to the sea teem in this land-locked drama.  The bloody Captain analogizes battle to “shipwracking storms” (1.2.26); the Weird Sisters assail the merchant ship Tiger (1.3.7-26); and Macbeth himself rejects the “sure and firm-set earth” (2.1.57) for “multitudinous seas” (2.2.66).  Even Lady Macbeth’s fantasy that water can wash away murder represents a fervent plea that the liquid element might serve human purposes.  The play’s blue ecology combines the Weird Sisters’ inhuman perspective with the topos of the mind-stretching sea, which, as Auden observes, “misuses nothing because it values nothing.”  The green and blue in Macbeth represent different visions of how humans live in the natural world, with green sustainability first displaced by Macbeth’s oceanic ambitions and then finally re-asserting itself after the tyrant’s death.  For twenty-first century Shakespeareans living in an increasingly oceanic and disorderly world – the summer of this essay was the summer of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico – supplementing green narratives with blue incursions feels urgent.