Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

“The permanent is ebbing”

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I wanted to like Jorie Graham’s Sea Change more than I really like it.  I firmly believe in addressing our climate crisis with poetry as an important tool, and I also like the visual experiment of her two-pronged lines.  The very long lines spilling on top of the very short lines — the left margin of the shorter lines begins in the middle of the page — creates a compelling asymmetry, a disorder or partial order that mimics the ecological processes she’s writing about.  But the gaze remains too earth bound to really wow me.

She’s got some nice lines here, driven by careful focus and particularity of vision, as when she writes about the boundary between self and world through recognizing

how the world is our law, this indrifting of us

into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the

intermingling of us lacks in-

telligence…

Perhaps it’s just that my blue water vision balks at too many leaves & branches, but the stronger poems here are really about midwestern winters and out of season blooms.  She has one pretty good invocation of the deep blue in the poem “Full Fathom” —

…hiss of incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its

nothing else: nothing in the above visible except

water

Of course I stumble over her “flat,” which is what the surface of the ocean never is, but she makes nice hash of Ariel’s anthem — “those were houses that were his eyes”; “there is a form of slavery in everything” — and struggles compellingly with the imposing meta narratives of climate change.

What I’m looking for is deeper and less familiar, I’m afraid.

 

 

The Hungry Tide

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This novelistic portrait of the Sundarbans, the massive swamp delta and mangrove forest at the mouth the Ganges on the border of India and Bangladesh, overflows with riches, including a smartly-handled love triangle that involves an American grad student doing field work on river dolphins, a fisherman with whom she shares no common language, and an urbane, egotistical translator who is also a descendent of the idealistic Indian couple who built the only hospital in the area.   Plus a wonderful political back-plot of exploitation and eco-politics, a through-line about translation of Rilke, some gorgeous descriptive writing, and perhaps the best storm scene I’ve come across in 21c English prose.

No reason not to start with the storm.  It arrives as a plot-mechanism and in due course clears the overcrowded decks of the love plot.  But part of the appeal of this novel is to employ traditional devices — poetic allegory?  symbolic animals? a brutal land-grab? — in ways that don’t have to be novel to be moving.  When our triad gets separated by the storm, with the wordly translator wading ashore in Lusibari and losing an important manuscript in the flood, while the dolphin-researcher and the fisherman cling to the top of a tree during the two phases of the cyclone — first before, then after, the stillness of the eye — it’s impossible not to be transfixed by sheer narrative force, a whirlwind in itself.  What happens simply must happen, or so the narrative makes us believe in the middle of the storm —

But something had changed and it took Piya a moment to register the difference.  The wind was now coming at them from the opposite direction.  Where she had had the tree trunk to shelter her before, now there was only Fokir’s body.  Was this why he had been looking for a branch on another tree?  Had he known right from the start that his own body would have to become her shield when the eye had passed?…She could feel the bones of his cheeks as if they had been superimposed on her own; it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one. (321)

There are other great touches here, including a wonderful description of a grad student finding a life’s project in obscure but meaningful research — “it would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do” (106) — plus a great poetic image of the tide country as a book whose pages dissolve everything they encounter, including themselves (186).

An interesting eco-twist on the political plot also: poor refugees are displaced and eventually massacre because the area on which they are squatting must be preserved as a wildlife refuge.  Which leads to some interesting speculation about political, if not biological, differences between humans and animals —

As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil.  No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived — by fishing, clearing land, and by planting to soil.  (217)

Plus I have always loved river dolphins, ever since I caught the barest glimpse of one on the Mahakahm River in Borneo, when I was sitting on top of a river ferry in early 1990.  Ghosh, oddly, does not mention that the Orcaella brevirostris also lives in Indonesia.

The mighty Atchafalaya

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Flooding has finally forced the hand of the Army Corps of Engineers, who appear to be ready to divert the swollen Mississippi to the Atchafalya, which is where the river has been wanting to go for decades.  The problem, of course, has been that if the river switches its course, New Orleans gets stranded.

Interesting to see how this plays out. 

Update: Here’s some video of the floodgates being opened.

Hungry Ocean: History, or Not?

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The sea is history, says the poet.  No, it’s slavery, says a novelist.  Maybe it’s Romanticism, says another poet.  Or eternity and change, sounds a familiar chorus.

On a very broad level I convened the Hungry Ocean to try to bring  competing oceanic models into contact with each other.  On the basic question, we’re in critical agreement: historicizing is a good thing.  But size and continuity matters, and the physical pressure of the ocean as ocean exerts a counter-historicist and counter-cultural unifying pressure.  “The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” writes Melville — but surely it’s our task as critics to peek under that shroud?

Bernhard Klein’s talk, “Fish Walking on Land” (love that title), with its great analysis of a satiric maritime how-to book from the 16c, was perhaps our sharpest reminder of historical alterity in the maritime world.  But several other papers also, including Hester Blum’s fascinating anatomy of printing under polar conditions, Mary K Bercaw-Edwards on “Sailor Talk in the South Pacific,” and Jennifer Schell on social whalemen and Rocky mountain isolate-trappers, brought forward the anti-ecstatic, historically unfriendly sea.  Not a space for Club Med, nor Crusoe, nor happy little grommets.

It’s easy for historicist critics to value these historical exfoliations for the alien pasts they open up to us, and possible also to find in our modern ambivalence about the ocean connections to these lost places and unforded passages.  But, sentimental swimmer that I am, I’m still attracted to the ocean as symbol and reality of global and historical connectedness.  When the weather gets nicer I’ll go swimming in the same ocean as a certain recently buried body, and I’ll think about that physical connection.  Does that make me anti-historicist?  (I know it’s an imagined unity in space, not time — but so what?)

Glissant, as usual,  guides my uneasy historicizing.  He insists on errant particularity — “Generalization is totalitarian” (20)– but also on the unities of oceanic forms and currents.  The master-metaphor is not Romantic or modernist transformation, but something messier, hidden, submarine:

We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes.  We approach it through the accumulation of sediments.  The poetics of duration… (33)

Underwater in the moving salt body, in Caribbean “defraction” rather than Mediterranean focus, on a beachy edge “between order and chaos” (121-2).  In an “aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.” (151).

We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone (194).

Glissant’s beach is a good place to be.

 

King Lear

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“If I get so carried away with a spider web covered with dew,” says one of the great writers of the 20th century, “what will I do in the evening when we are going to see King Lear?” It’s a good question: how do we make space on an ordinary Thursday night in May for the relentless freight-train of this play?  For a fast-paced performance,  just a hair over 3 hours with intermission, that opens up the mad, bad, dangerous King’s agony and pours everyone in the building inside it?

It’s properly billed as a tour de force for Derek Jacobi, which is certainly right.  I’ve never been more moved by this role or felt more completely inside one man’s emotional whirlwind.  Red-faced and needy, in a few cases breaking into a high-pitched whine — “Where’s my Fool?” — this King occupies the reckless, playful, disorderly heart of loss.  In a clever trick I’ve not seen staged before, he makes it clear that the love-test is something the King just thought of as he walked onstage with the already-divided map.  The contest of wills with Cordeila casts the old man as the child.  In fact, as I sat there, feeling the emotions roll over and through me, I spent a lot of time during the play being reminded of my children.  My daughter Olivia, who’s 8, shares in certain moods something like the King’s monomaniac urgency, his inability to seen past or beyond the contours of selfhood.  Thinking about her rage and her growing ability to master it, I wondered if Jacobi’s performance could stand to be so deeply immersed in the quicksand of child-egoism.  I think the question’s still a bit open — but watching the play, as with watching a child, it was impossible to doubt the truth of the pain.

The high point of the breakneck first half of the show was Lear’s speech to his cruel daughters: “Reason not the need…” (2.4).  The emphasis fell not so much on the satire of courtly clothes or adornments as on naked human emotional hunger: “But, for true need / You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need.”  The patience to endure might be found in Cordelia’s sacrifice, or Kent’s stoicism, or Edgar’s dirt-wallowing — though none of those roles were performed especially powerfully, except perhaps Kent.  At that still point in the center of the play, when the King prefers need to reason, it is clear that no daughters or followers or even Fools could touch him.

Something gets lost in the emotional maelstrom, and interestingly I think it was precisely what Ian McKellen got right his big-man Lear that I saw at BAM a few years back: majesty.  Jacobi was so tormented and so psychologically available — so able to broadcast his pain throughout the theater — that he didn’t seem quite as powerful as a pre-modern king might.  The curses on the daughters were potent, esp on Goneril, who, as performed by Gina McKee, gave the most majestic performance of the night.  But the sense that McKellen gave of really being larger than life, “the King himself,” leached out of Jacobi’s emotionally draining performance.  Is it possible to have both things at once?

The second act, which opens with a long string of scenes without the King, revealed how much Jacobi’s urgency carried the action forward; only Alec Newman’s swaggering, charismatic Edmund could really pull off a scene in Lear’s absence. Justine Mitchell’s Regan overplayed her joy during the blinding of Gloucster, and her hysteria sat badly after Jacobi’s richer emotionalism.  While watching all these scenes, including Goneril’s great laugh line about “the difference between man and man” and the Dover cliff pantomime, I kept thinking about Jacobi backstage, the King trapped in his body, waiting.  His madness when he at last re-emerged wasn’t wildly showy — the staging throughout was restrained, with a minimalist set and a great coup de theatre in which Lear whispers “Blow, winds” on a suddenly silent stage — but the emotional force of the night only started up again once he came back to the action.

The only thing you can want after such agony is rest.  At the play’s end, when all the family is dead, Jacobi’s red, exhausted face lies cradled in Kent’s paternal arms.  Like a sleeping child, for whom the only medicine is rest.

 

Hungry Ocean: Networks

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While listening to the last lecture at the Hungry Ocean a few weeks ago, I was flooded with anticipatory nostalgia: soon the weekend would be over, and would the rush of ideas and implications be salvageable?  Would the intensity last?  The short answer, almost always, is not quite — but as I said then, Patsy Yeager’s final keynote on Latourian networks as a counter-love — wonderfully personalized — to Marxist dialectic created a framework in which to think ocean-sized thoughts.

Latour’s ANT-filled landscape of human and nonhuman actants isn’t quite a vision of the world ocean — Latour in fact writes relatively little about oceanic things, even if he claims to be tempted to substitute “fluid” for “network” sometimes.  There are two revealing maritime turns of phrase in We Haven Never Been Modern.  First, Latour compares the end of modernist linear time to “a great ocean liner that slows down and then comes to a standstill in the Sargasso Sea” (77).  Next, he diagnoses conservative “antimoderns” as attempting “to save something from what looks to them like a shipwreck” (123).  In both cases, as Patsy’s talk reminded me, Latour gestures toward his no-long-post-or-not-post modern vision as metaphorically maritime.  Serres, of course, has more along this current.

For Patsy’s talk, however, and perhaps for us Hungry Ocean-ers, the payoff of the Marx-to-Latour move is a renewed sense of poetic possibility, a hope that poetry can represent (“capture” seems wrong) the fluidity and interconnectedness that the ocean constructs in physical and metaphorical ways.

This networked fluidity drew together (“assembled” might be Latour’s term, maybe in-gathered, to borrow a phrase from Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, is better) many of the conference’s talks: Jake Mattox’s literary vision of Maury’s Physical Geography, Dan Brayton’s world-spanning whales swimming alongside the Doty lyric, Bryan Since’s wonderful evocation of “The Man without a Country,” a story I don’t know.  I also think about the “peculiar” nature of sea literature, borrowing the phrase Siobhan invoked, and I wonder if the connection to Latour makes oceanic materials less “wet” and distinctive — Latour’s examples are as often as not desks and rocks and television sets, rather than waves and currents.

There was also a fine moment in the Q&A in which Patsy suggested that, after moving into Latourian freedom, to finish the analysis — talking here about Kona Blue?  I’m not sure — she needed to return to Marx, to the force of his critique of labor & value.  There might be a land-sea shifting & exchange model at work here, reminding us — as Sara Crosby’s paper also did, in a different way — that there’s really no “line” in any coastline.

Burial at Sea

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It might seem as if the body’s gone, but it’s not true.

Rather than sending the corpse away, sea burial speeds up the basic organic processes: decomposition, diffusion, reintegration into a circulating biosphere.  The Arabian Sea is far from Long Island Sound, and I’ve not been into that cold water since November, but it’s all the same salt body.  Into which we immerse our own salt bodies.  We swim together.

Via the wonder-ocean of Facebook and Siobhan Carroll’s link, I found Rusty Foster’s comments on what the US military might be using the sea burial for:  obliteration —

A corpse without a country, without ancestors or descendants. A corpse consigned to the sea, which belongs to everyone and no one. Burying bin Laden at sea was an effort to remove him, comprehensively, from the world. To obliterate him from the chain of succession of mankind.

The bottom of the sea, in a fantasy that the US military shares with Robert Pogue Harrison, is nowhere.

Surely we know better than that.  Coleridge knows better, as Rusty says.

It’s true that OBL’s body is gone to a place we can’t find or memorialize it.  But the terrestrial tunnel vision that always positions the sea as foreign, external, and alien only tells part of the story.

Even Genesis, with its creation of the world out of oceanic chaos, contains a wet center.  As Catherine Keller writes, the phrase “face of the deep” (Gen 1.2) already encodes the inseparability of surface (face) and depth.  Nothing goes away underwater.

Does putting OBL into the sea make him part of a planetary commons, a wonder-world of trash and life and global networks?  Does sea burial mean that those of us who swim in and think about the sea need to engage with the desert cave-dweller now , too?

Something to think about as swimming season approaches.

 

Toward a Cultural History of Immersion: Pleasure

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Who was the first person to feel joy when jumping into the sea?

That’s a harder question that it might seem, since our modern swimmer’s pleasures seem to have been pretty foreign to ancient and medieval culture.  Surely on a hot day fresh water would have been welcome, but the deep sea, home of monsters and tidal surges, might not have felt so enticing.

One possiblity came to me when I was finishing up Marcus Rediker’s brutal but essential book, The Slave Ship: A Human History.  Rediker notes the pattern of slaves escaping by jumping overboard, even when the ships were out of sight of land.  “One of the most illuminating aspects,” he notes, “was the joy expressed by people once they had gotten into the water.”  Isaac Wilson, a sailor testifying in 1790, wrote about a slave who hurled himself into the sea and swam away underwater.  The ship’s surgen described the escaped swimmer making “signs which it is impossible for me to describe in words, expressive of the happiness he had in escaping from us” before drowning.

Ecstasy, freedom, and death.  The cultural history of immersion does not end there, but it needs to go there.

Commons and Collectivities

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Maybe it was the pre-train martini at the terrace bar in Grand Central, or the tasty grouper at Community on Broadway , or bumping into a couple of my old college classmates in the Station, or even bouncing over the rock-scrabble terrain of coastal Connecticut.  But coming home late after a lively one-day event at Columbia last Friday, I felt just a little bit queasy. 

Further thinking suggests that bodily unease, in more or less intense forms, was the common subject of the half-dozen talks given that day.

Perhaps it’s something about the current version of posthuman ideas of embodiment, through Harraway, Hayles, Latour, Serres, Morton, Bennett, & the other usual suspects, but it seemed as if we all were thinking, in different ways, about the physical pressure of discomfort and bodily change.  Gil Harris, who spoke last, was of course the most explicit, treating us to the ripe taste of his current “becoming Indian” project about the physical experience of the Far East in the bodies and minds of early modern English travelers.  Crystal Bartolovich, whose paper was read for her b/c of travel snafus, explored log-labour in The Tempest, with an emphasis on the congealing of physical effort into value.  I spoke, as I usually do these days, about the disorienting impact of the deep ocean, and Bryan Lowrence, a Columbia grad student, spoke about “bare life” and its cultivation in More’s Utopia.  Henry Turner expanded on his current work on Bacon, but with new (to me) emphasis on the laborious process of thinking and the effort required to create generalizations and propositions.  (I thought of Funes el memorioso, who recalls everything in his world but is probably not very capable of thought — Bacon had his finger right on Borges’s paradox, & perhaps that’s where Borges got it in the first place.)  Drew Daniel, who I’d not met before, gave a great talk on melancholy and suicide in Donne’s Biathanatos that also, to me, highlighted bodily unease.  A great image of melancholy and suicidal thoughts as the storm outside an open window, against which one closes the shutter in order not to be tempted to leap.

So, what is it about bodily discomfort?  Are we getting old?  Not all of us, yet, in this group anyway.  Are we following the Hayles/Harraway line closer to the biological?

Makes me think I need to think harder about sea sickness.  I had a moderately intense day of mal de mer this past March in the Caribbean, which lingered, oddly, for days, as if my inner ear couldn’t really get clear of the sea.  The thought of it now, and the thought of thinking harder about it, makes me feel…

Suppose that’s a good enough reason to pursue it.

 

Hungry Oceans of Romance

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I remember quite distinctly thinking, during Gretchen Woertendyke’s paper on 19c American popular sea romances, that the generic connections between the sea and romance might run quite deep.  Might even, in fact, amount to a provisional definition of some of the basic features of maritime literature.

Definitions and lineages are always problematic for romance, that red-headed stepchild of epic and slow time.  I’ve wrestled through this somewhat in the book on Elizabethan prose fiction, in which I endorsed the somewhat idiosyncratic claim that The Odyssey is the exemplar of romance, rather than a somewhat oddly-shaped epic.

If romance is, structurally, a genre shaped through the loss-wandering-recovery triad, and if it, as in Homer’s poem, happily accepts a bewildering range of narrative invention and digression as part of its structure, then it makes some sense that the sea should be a major topos, as well as a common setting.

Looking back over waterfall of talks at the Hungry Ocean, I’m struck in retrospect that so many of these texts evince what I’d call the tactics of romance: indirection, sideways progression, obliquity.  To some extent, perhaps, those are also just qualities that modern readers like, & therefore emphasize — but the oceans of romance abounded at the conference, from Jean Feerick’s reading of Baconian science to Joshua Gonsalves’s Marxist reading of octupi-fictions, Sophie Gilmartin’s Villette, Matt Rafferty’s confessional narratives.  Even less likely suspects — Wordsworth, the coast of Louisiana — had a romance flavor, in the sense that the subjective experience of disorderly wandering wanted to imagine itself as productive or at least conceptually unified thinking.

(I should note, in case any novel studies people are grumbling right now, that I don’t much believe in the radical novelty of the “modern novel” & don’t draw a hard historical line before Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe or similar texts.  I’m with Margaret Doody on that question, certainly.)

If the ocean is the space of romance, so what?  Perhaps we can historicize oceanic narratives through the re-deployment of romance tropes — shipwreck, homecoming, storms, etc?  Or, maybe better, we can use Jameson’s great phrase about romances — “imaginary solutions to real problems” — to inform our readings of sea lit.

More to come about the Hungry Ocean — I’ve been thinking also about History, through Bernhard’s great talk especially, and Networks via Patsy’s.