Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Swervin’: Modernity is not History

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Last weekend’s periodization discussion made a sharp turn when Stephen Greenblatt’s modernization parable, The Swerve, won the MLA’s first annual Lowell prize for fiction. Those who, despite the seasonal upwelling of darkness-into-light stories at  this time of year, remain unconvinced by zombie myths of Dark Ages and sudden lurches into modernity, have been outraged. Much cleverness and knowledge on display in the aftermath, including some lively FB & blog threads and on twitter, where Bruce Holsinger (@burnablebooks) warmed up the wires with a brilliant series of self-immolating tweet-quotations exposing the sillier claims of the book: see #TheSwerve.

The heart of this swervin’ exchange lays bare the conflict between two things: an objectively false feel-good story of “how the world became modern,” and a better-informed sense of what went on before Poggio found that copy of De rerum natura. The first thing is narrative, or perhaps myth; the other draws on the historical record.

I wonder what happens if we disentangle these threads? What if we rethink “modernity” as something other than a historical phenomenon? What if it’s a story?

The modern might not be a thing that “begins,” but a narrative humans tell about the felt experience of change. Discontinuity challenges any kind of systemic thinking, and “modernity” as a story makes sense of discontinuous change through the metaphor of the Break, the once-and-for-all transformation of what was into was is, or at least what is-becoming. This story gets told in crude and less crude formulations — The Swerve deserves mockery b/c it’s careless in its characterizations — but the modern-story can, perhaps, be retold to accommodate better representations of what precedes a modern-moment. A richer modernity story should also embrace the post-break fluidity that we mostly call postmodern. As Jameson sagely observes, any conception of modernity that cannot also explain postmodernity is pretty useless.

The four maxims Jameson lays out in A Singular Modernity (2002) are all pretty thought-provoking, actually. A quick paraphrase:  “We cannot not periodize” “modernity is a narrative category” “modernity is not about subjectivity” “we need a modernity that also understands the postmodern.”

History itself does not and need not follow this modern parable. Any narrative about historical change-and-continuity must, in order to be a narrative, do some violence to the plenitude of the historical record. Some narratives  are better than others; some work and others do not. I always prefer the flexible and recursive to the abrupt and enlightening, but that may be as much a generic preference for complexity and connection as an affinity for “reality,” that elusive thing. History overfills all human narratives; that’s why in addition to “facts” we need poetry — and geometry, statistics, economics, plasma physics, interior design, geoclimatology, the Hubble Telescope… Objects and alliances of all sorts, human and not.

I’m deeply sympathetic to the many eloquent defenses of medieval plenitude and cultural brilliance — the latest ones I’ve read include Anne Harris’ letter to the New Yorker when the pre-Swerve exerpt appeared, and Kellie Robertson’s scholarly prebuttal of Greenblatt before the book reached print (Kellie Robertson)– but I retain interested in something like “modernity” (maybe we need a different word?) as a flexible narrative category that responds to cataclysmic change. The narrative of modernity, of course, needn’t be new in 1517 or any other special time; we can see its traces all over the literary-historical record, from Boccaccio to Chaucer, in Ovid, Lucian, and Achilles Tatius, and many others. I’m not an Anglo-Saxonist, but I read The Wanderer as a lament about the human pain that attends cultural change.

Whatever heroic story of “the modern” you want to tell — bold explorers, brilliant textual scholars, brave Lutherans, lethal viruses, high-caloric American food crops feeding China or Ireland — will exclude and misrepresent aspects of the historical record. That’s a reason to tell more complex and less triumphant stories.

My own favorite story about what it feels like to live inside modernity is shipwreck, which might be a Break but usually isn’t a triumph. Or at least it doesn’t feel like one at first.

 

Messy Transitions

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What to do with a problem like periodization? How can we historicist literary types do justice to both the messy abundance of the past and our professional habit of transforming it into period-centered narratives?

I’ve been enjoying some lively periodic-chatter over the past three days, starting with Jeffrey Cohen’s short essay on the problems with “early modern”, to which I made a few comments & was joined by the always inspiringly polyglot Jonathan Hsy. Then came a Facebook flutter over a smart hatchet job in the LA Times Book Review of Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which ends with a utopian wish for a non-telological “history without transitions.” I don’t like cartoon versions of post- Middle Ages historical change any more than anyone else,  — they don’t serve early modernists any better than they do medievalists — but I do like transitions, and don’t think we can do without them. We just need better, messier ones than the ones we’ve inherited.

The conversation continued yesterday with Rick Godden’s  response to both the above links, with coda in favor of Hinch’s transitionless history. “I can think of worse things,” says Rick. Today Jeffrey’s taken to the twitterverse, insisting that Greenblatt give back his awards from The Swerve. (It really is a revolutionary medium…)

Without in any way defending heroic conceptions of early modernity that insist on leaping high by stomping on medieval plurality, I don’t want history without transitions. I like plurality, multiplicity, radical difference, but I also want narratives of change, transformation, discontinuity. I think both those things are historically true, in terms of recoverable facts and records of human experience. But how to have both at once?

Two quick ideas about different ways to do periodization:

1. Historical transitions are myths at least as much as history. The felt shape of historical change, as recorded in many different cultural forms, responds to but also itself re-shapes historical experience. The idea of a “break” into early modernity doesn’t fit recorded facts, but it does express a lasting fantasy about patterns formed by accumulated historical events. Greenblatt didn’t invent that myth any more than Petrarch did. I don’t think either of their versions of the break does full justice to the historical record — I prefer shipwreck as a representation of early modern cultural change — but myths are always grist for our interpretive mill.

2. Always periodize — at least twice! With apologies to Jameson, we need periods and transitions, but also need to remember that we should not believe in them too much, that they always do some violence to the full (unknowable) plurality of historical experience. So what about a double (or more) system of periodization, which might be as simple as recognizing that all 21c critical work responds to 21c claims (“presentism”) as well as the demands of historical sources, or as sophisticated as remembering that historical periods never end in any conclusive way, that cultural habits of responding to historical stimuli layer themselves atop and alongside each other, intersecting and accumulating and recombining. With legible but messy transitions.

 

 

The Roman Tragedies

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The genius started with Virgilia. Virgilia!

Coriolanus’s Press Conference

She was lounging onstage before the start, as we all tried to figure out how it would work. The stage at the BAM opera house was deep, wide, and busy, full of modular furniture, couches, tables, and at least a dozen large TV monitors. The audience started out seated, looking up at a huge screen above the stage with a gnomic Dylan phrase on it. We also watched a digital crawl that provided translations from the Dutch and other useful facts — 297 minutes to the death of Cleopatra! — for anyone who could see it. Later, when we (the audience) took the stage we stood or sat or craned our necks looking at the action, or taking a break to order at the bars backstage right or left. I asked for a rum and tonic while Coriolanus was dismembered 20 feet away. The stage also contained make up tables for the actors on one side, and public email/twitter terminals on the other side. It got crowded, as the night wore on.

Before the opening curtain

Virgilia started it, before I knew who she was. She sat on the couch as the play opened, staring up at the imposing face of Volumnia, praising her warlike son on the big screen. All the war scenes in Corioles were compressed into strobe lighting, so the first time we see the hero upon his return from the battlefield, he’s caught between mother and wife. His words give priority to his mighty mother over the wife he calls “my gracious silence,” but this performance punctuates Virgilia’s tears with lingering kisses. The deep physical pull between the lonely dragon and the upstaged wife — Virgilia cannot control her husband the way his mother can — activates the agon between sex and politics that finally explodes, almost five hours later, with Cleopatra. During the show I thought these two parts were played by the same actor, but now that I check the cast list, Janni Goslinga played Virgilia and Chris Nietvelt played Cleopatra. The two performances shared an explosive mix of eros and warplay that sits near the heart of director Ivo van Hove’s vision of politics.

Lonely Dragon

Van Hove’s notes call the political vision of his production of these three Roman Tragedies “action in public,” and here the decision to open the stage to the audience — not really a new innovation, as the Village Voice notes — represents not just avant-garde dramatic play but an experiment in seeing what “free action” can mean in practice. Van Hove claims that Shakespeare “shows that politics is made by people.” His set designer and long-time collaborator Jan Versweyveld writes that the set for these plays “transforms the theater into a political conference.” Their show immersed all of  us in political news, with the the digital crawl quoting headlines from Gaza and tweets from the  audience, while a few of the on-stage monitors projected images of 21c century heroes during the show: Barack Obama during Coriolanus’s encounter with the people, Michael Phelps’s 200m freestyle triumph during the ascent of Julius Caesar, and John Edwards (!) when Antony heads back to Rome to marry his rival’s sister.

One of the best tweets on the #romantragedies thread, to which we were all encouraged to post tweets and pictures during the performance, noted, accurately, that the best part of van Hove’s high-concept theatrical flourishes was how well each one embodied the deeper metaphors of the plays. I read that sometime during the production and thought — exactly. That’s how the show worked  I’ll try to explain a few of these moments.

Coriolanus’s melt-down press conference, in which he denounces the manipulative Tribunes in front of a TV audience, was a study in anger. “You speak as a punitive god,” protest the Tribunes, at which the general rages further. His denunciation of the corrupt “two-party system” drew applause from the high-minded Brooklyn crowd, but I kept recalling the opening kiss his mother had prevented him from enjoying with his wife after the battle at Corioles. The military hero raged against all distraction, against anything that moved away from his solitary warrior self — but on this stage there was no single center, only competing forces, mothers, wives, children, Tribunes and Senators and even the talking head of Barack Obama backstage. Plus lots of extras, including me.

The political world eats up this kind of solitude — this is what I take to be the meaning of the implied connection between Coriolanus and Obama, though our President seems to have managed the dissolution of his solitude better than the Roman general. Aufidius, who appeared twice on stage being interviewed by a Roman TV station, the second time when his armies were outside the gates of the city, was impassive and implacable, biding his time before consuming his ally-enemy at last. In a play about political failure and consumption, Virgilia’s almost-silent stage-plea for a more feeling world cannot stand before her mother in law’s dictum: “Anger’s my meat. I sup upon myself.”

From the inchoate rage of Coriolanus the production moved seamlessly — no set change between the death of Coriolanus and start of Julius Caesar  — to the high-stakes competition of Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar. Playing Cassius as a woman and then later playing Octavius Caesar as a woman in the final play suggested the slow integration of the Roman political world, from the violent masculine prehistory of Coriolanus’s Republic to the quasi-matriarchal empire of Octavius that follows the death of Cleopatra. The middle play, Julius Caesar, highlighted its female characters with a great stage coup, in which the tete-a-tete scenes of Caesar and Calpurnia and Brutus and Portia were played simultaneously across each other, such that each actor appeared to be answering both conversations at once. Calpurnia, played by Janni Goslinga, the actor whose Virgilia had failed to re-claim Coriolanus in the first play, was no more successful here in keeping her husband from being killed, but she and Portia provided a powerful template against which the Roman super-heroes measured themselves.

But the show-stopper in the middle play, perhaps predictably, was Mark Antony’s funeral oration. After a measured, polished, really quite beautiful speech by Roeland Fernhout’s Brutus — I was sitting about 5 feet behind him at center stage — Hans Kesting’s Antony swaggered to the podium, looked at the audience (I watched via video feed, since I was behind him), picked up his notes, and threw them away. Then he slouched around to the front of the podium, fell down, and sat still for almost two minutes.

We stared in near-silence at his stricken face, and I was thinking about media resources. In most plays, watching from seats, you can’t see close facial expressions unless you’re in the front row. But the video screens enabled this production to use the emotional resources of the close up as well as the shared emotional power that only crowded theaters can produce. Antony drew us to him by sitting exhausted and quiet, so that when he took up the microphone — “Friends, Romans…” (the words were in Dutch, of course, which meant I mostly couldn’t understand them, though a few old Germanic roots carried through) — we were all with him. And then he did with rage what Coriolanus hadn’t been able to do: he brought all of us all along with him.

I don’t think my description can do justice to the rippling force and mania of the speech: Antony ran through the theater screaming his lines (in Dutch), he carried the body of Caesar back on stage, he marked up a photo of the corpse with a red sharpie (which almost hit me when he discarded it behind him), he spat and dripped and cried. He waved around the paper with Caesar’s will.  And we were all with him — because we were on stage, most of us, we were the plebeians. We were the ones who wanted the honorable Brutus to pay, the ones who, deep in our stomachs, felt that being reasonable makes a poor politics.

Before Brutus’s oration

A six-hour production needs multiple high-lights, and Antony’s funeral oration wasn’t the only one. I’ll hit two from Antony and Cleopatra: the night before the battle of Actium, and the death of Enobarbus.

Before the battle, on Cleopatra’s birth-day, she and Antony perform “one other gaudy night” (3.13) as an elaborate kiss-and-dance that fulfills the erotic promise that Virgilia had offered some 270 minutes before with her husband Coriolanus. The “soldier’s kiss” and the reunion of the lovers — Antony has spent a fair amount of the play thus far making and breaking a political marriage with Octavia, Caesar’s sister — gestured toward a theatrics of personal connection, one that didn’t care much about world-shaping battles just a few hours away. As we looked at their happy faces explaining to a furious Enobarbus that they would fight by sea, not by land, no matter what “absolute soldiership” Antony had on land, it didn’t matter that they were throwing away the world. The soundtrack was lovely late Dylan: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s, gettin’ there…”

Age cannot wither her

Even better, perhaps, was Enobarbus himself, played by Bart Siegers, who’d also been the inexorable Aufidius. Having betrayed Antony, returned to Caesar, and then had his treasure sent after him by his former master, Enobarbus runs mad. He also ran through the theater out onto Lafayette Ave. around 11:15 pm, howling and writhing his Dutch rage at the taxis and bike messengers. Again, it was both a great theatrical coup and a brilliant reading of the dramatic metaphor: the great Roman soldier, who knew to leave Antony because he knew Antony had ceased to be an effective leader, has found back in the Roman camp that the world of emotions and passion, of bodies and feelings, that he loved in Egypt has gone. So he ends up lying on cold pavement, with cars and pedestrians ignoring his madness, walking by him. So fares the feeling man in the cold Roman world. You taxis, you cyclists, you worse than senseless things!

I could go on about this show, talking about the brilliant bits of humor, as when Mark Antony almost forgets his new wife’s name, or the backstage hi-jinx, as when Octavia spilled a beer at the bar between scenes. But the full force of the production seems to me best captured by that image of Enobarbus on Lafayette Ave, crying out his pain to the uninterpreting streets. A brilliant metaphor for politics at an impasse.

“By sea, by sea!”

If and when Toneelgroep does Shakespeare’s Histories, 8 plays in 12+ hours, I’m buying a ticket to Amsterdam.

Big Tree Down

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Some approximate numbers: about 40 feet tall, 60″ around at chest-height, 20″ in diameter. According to the growth multiplier for white pine, that means roughly 100 years old. Which takes us back to 1912, before my parents were born and before our house was built. I imagine the tree was planted to mark the northeastern corner of the rock wall that now borders our property. When it was built it marked the edge of the estate that then filled up almost all of our neighborhood, before smaller properties were carved out of it after WWII.

This tree’s life was not quite on a nonhuman time scale, but it’s been through a lot of storms, including some bigger than Sandy: Gloria in 1985 and the great storm of 1938, among others. 

I’d been worried about storm surge, which turned out to be a bit less than Irene, though it still produced major flooding just a bit downhill from us. We’re all fine, but it’s odd that our damage came from being high, not low. This tree was probably one of the highest points in our little neighborhood, which exposed it to the full force of the east wind. We’re very lucky it didn’t fall on the house, though a little playhouse we put in for the kids years ago is underneath it. Still standing, as far as I can tell.

The tree came down around 7 pm, two hours after the power cut out. I was sitting on that side of the house with the kids telling stories when we heard a muffled thump and then a sharp bang. We jumped up away from the window, but the bang turned out to be just the power cable getting ripped off the wall. It was dark and hard to see, but as we peered through the glare of our flashlights, we eventually could make out the dark outline of a huge shape, lying sideways along the yard. We figured out what it was by looking at the hole in the skyline, visible by the full moon, on the corner of the property where the tree had been.

A few hours earlier, in the last of the power, I’d watched the Fangorn scenes from The Two Towers with the kids. Eald enta geworc, goes the Anglo-Saxon verse line from which Tolkien invented his tree-herders. The old work of giants.

We’ll miss that tree. 

Globalization and Ideas of Mexico in “Merchant of Venice”

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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.


[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).

And here’s the truncated but eventually will become rousing conclusion, via Charles Olson —

I’ll conclude my talk with a very brief suggestion about what a “Pacific Shakespeare” might look like, taking Merchant’s gestures toward Mexico as points of departure. In asking for a reading of Shakespeare that embraces our planet’s largest ocean, by far the biggest single thing on our watery globe, I’ll employ the poet Charles Olson’s visionary reading of “Pacific Man.” This figure represents “the NEW HISTORY,” a radical expansion of space, reconfiguration of the past, and “confirmation” of a new future.[i] Olson celebrates Magellan’s discovery of the Pacific as exceeding Columbus’s of America, because in that new ocean “3000 years went overboard” (116). Against ancient worlds that were “locked tight in River Ocean which encircled it” – here Olson draws on classical geography – the Pacific represents the last opening, “the end of the Unknown” (119). This expansive vision inverts the anxiety and disorientation that both Shylock and Bassanio figure through Mexico. The global expanse that Shakespeare invokes only obliquely becomes, for Olson, an ecstatically globalized trajectory. Antonio’s ships, after sailing Pacific waters, come to road mysteriously, bringing nothing we hear of to Belmont. But the play also gestures toward a Pacific future, a world joining Mexico to Venice to England, and all of these waters to the English merchant ships that float, then and today, on all the world’s oceans. The imaginative presence of these alien waters suggests that hidden paradises cannot remain forever in isolation. I wonder what the merchant’s ships brought back from Mexico.


[i] Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael: A Study of Melville (San Francisco: City Lights, 1947) 116.

Very Like a Whale

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“Shakespeare thought in pictures,” reports Mike Witmore in his oracular voice, and a swirling array of books, photographs, and objects that have grown out of that perception are now overflowomg the Folger gallery. I made a quick trip to DC last Monday for the opening of the show he’s co-curated with Rosamond Purcell, “Very Like a Whale.” Now I’m speculating about whether I can get back there before the show closes in early Jan 2013.

I knew what to expect because I taught an undergraduate class last spring using their collaborative book of photographs and Shakespearean snippets, Landscapes of the Passing Strange. The magic, as Rosamond explained to the audience in the Folger theater, is in the bottles. Her large framed photographs, which were on display throughout the hall, were all taken of the reflections of ordinary objects in these old mercury-lined glass bottles, which were originally used to store light-sensitive dyes. The results dance right up to and past the line between representation and abstraction: they are photographs, which is to say real visible things, but also changed, sometimes beyond recognition.

The book contains just the images and fragments from Shakespeare  but the show adds objects from assorted collections and from the Folger Library. Highlights include a case entitled “All the Whale’s a Stage,” which gets its title from an image of a man playing bagpipes on top of a massive cetacean body, a burned page of The Tempest from one of the Folger’s many Shakespeare Folios, an automaton (!), and many other things.

“Wood from Shakespeare’s house in the Caliban case,” claimed Rosamond during the curators’ talk. “From the property behind the house,” clarified Mike. Which led to a wonderful exchange in which Rosamond admitted her own identification with the poetic monster who finds scamels in the rocks, and suggested that Mike be cast as Prospero. 

After discovering the book at MLA back in Jan 2010, I built an undergrad Shakespeare course around these strange images during the fall of 2011, including setting up an exhibition of photographs at St. John’s and having Mike and Rosamond come for a memorable visit in October. The charge of these images is the strange push they give to your imagination as you look at them, the mobile and unexpected ways they ask us to reconsider Shakespeare’s language and the imaginative art of seeing. As I said when reflecting on the visit to Queens last year around this time, it’s good to share strange things.

That sense of radical play dominates the larger exhibition at the Folger right now. It’s a hard show to take in, especially on opening night when the hall is full of people to catch up with, meet, and congratulate. But when I stood there making academic small talk and looking at the automaton, or peering into the gorgeous array of books on objects in the “Wind” case,” I considered the larger project of putting such strangeness inside an academic institution. I remember my students being at first amazed, then a bit bewildered by the photographs in Passing Strange. But when we lingered in front of an image — I remember a great liquid desert portrait paired with lines from Antony & Cleopatra, which I did not see at the Folger Monday — things would swim into the imagination. The gambit is that such strangeness speaks to the same part of the mind that’s moved by Shakespeare, and it certainly works for me.

You could make a case that the Folger exhibition hall is overfull right now, with photographs and objects spilling out of every window-nook. But if you have all this wonderful stuff, why not give us excess of it, and more besides, and something else we’re not expecting?

If you can’t get to DC during the rest of the fall, here’s the mobile tour of the show. But you really should get there if you can.

 

 

More on Dylan’s Tempest

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A few weeks ago I noted that Bob Dylan just released a soundtrack for my work in progress on shipwreck. Now that I’ve been through the album a half-dozen times, plus had a look at the lyrics for the long title track about the Titanic, I think my joke was pretty right on. I’m sure I’m not the only academic of a certain age for whom Dylan’s been providing an intellectual soundtrack for some decades, but it’s quite amazing to find that razor mind directed at my current obsession.

I’m tempted now to hijack the song “Tempest” for my shipwreck project, and maybe weave it into an eco-presentation for GWMEMSI this coming spring.  Who knew that shipwreck ecologies was a waltz?

So: a few preliminary notes on the song, and incidentally on Shakespeare too.

Amid the usual character-salad the song presents, from “Leo” (we know who that is!) to Wellington to Jim Dandy to the gamblers “Calvin, Blake, and Wilson” (also theologian, poet, and soon to-be US President when the great ship went down?), the key figure in the song is “the watchman.” He’s the one who appears four time as semi-chorus and structures the long narrative ramble. None of the other figures gets a return visit, except Leo by which point “he’d lost his mind already / Whatever mind he had.”

Each watchman verse starts the same way, “The watchman, he lay dreaming…”, which of course sends us Shakespeareans right to Prospero in Act 4. When this eyes-closed figure “dreamed the Titanic was sinking,” in the other repeated line, 3rd in the 4-line stanza, he sounds like a magus who’s lost his art. Familiar? I thought so.

The movement across the four watchman stanzas takes us from “ballroom dancers” and a vision of “the underworld” (stanza 6) to the watchman’s and ship’s bodies tilted together “at 45 degrees” (stanza 16) to recognizing that “the damage had been done” coupled with a futile desire at this point “to tell someone” (stanza 37) to, in the concluding stanza, a vision of loss and possibility:

The watchman he lay dreaming

Of all the things that can be

He dreamed the Titanic was sinking

Into the deep blue sea.

The watchman traces the disaster from distant knowledge to bodily experience, epic possibility to unanswered need. He watches, but he can’t tell.

Why a watchman? In historical metaphor he’s the one who missed seeing the iceberg, but in Shakespearean terms, or maybe I should say in my terms, it’s a demotion of Prospero from all-controlling magus to passive dreamer. In Dylan’s world, shipwreck must be all and only divine —

There is no understanding / Of the judgement of God’s hand

The wizard makes another brief appearance  in stanza 32 — “In the long and dreadful hours / The wizard’s curse played on” — which phrase has a darkly playful taste of a bad theater or performance review. But I’m struck by how much the song writes Prospero out. A song without a hero. (Which, come to think of it, is what Thomas Hardy does with the Titanic also.)

The eco-point, perhaps, might be about how the direct encounter between human bodies and the ocean generates a powerful intellectual craving for distance, perspective, a story that explains the cause of the disaster. Tell me the cause, Muse! We, like the people Dylan sings about “at the landing,” retreat from the disaster and “try to understand.” But the wetness of the encounter — the brute physicality of shipwreck — won’t let us. “There is no understanding,” which is to say, in my terms, no final dryness. This song, this disaster, the oceanic history that stories like the Titanic open up, won’t let the living reach a stable rest. Or, to put it another way, the only stability in shipwreck is on the sea-floor.

Our revels are now ended, but at sea there are no easy roundings.

Dylan must have been reading my mind or my blog, b/c his characters provide a who’s-who of my shipwreck project. Another character, Davey the brothel-keeper, sees the shipwreck as a historical hinge, “the changing of his world.” The bishop accuses the heavens, just like Anthony Thacher and Parson Avery in 1635. The “many, many others” see what I see in stories of shipwreck —

The ship was going under

The universe had opened wide…

Good music for thinking.