What I Am Reading: "Ocean" by Steve Mentz

This little book is something a bit different: it is a brief entrepôt into what the author refers to as the "blue humanities," literature and other cultural output relating to the ocean. It is part of the Object Lessons series; I stumbled across the series at one point and wanted to try one to nurture my occasional interest in semiotics, and I had to pick Ocean because of my increasing attention to nautical matters. I might check out additional series entries, though I expect them to be fairly different in form.

The book's chapters are brief - each functionally ten pages or less. They provide a bit of musing on a theme, close reads of literary works on that theme, and perhaps suggest further reading on the subject (there are also suggested historical, fictional, lyrical, and scholarly reading lists in the back). The topics aren't covered exhaustively, and there isn't necessarily a cohesive theme or argument to the book as a whole; though there are recurring elements such as the ocean's encroachment and poisoning at the hands of humans in the Anthropocene epoch, or the replacement of sailing with swimming as the primary way that humans interact with the ocean. There are recurring authors from the western canon, including Joseph Conrad, Rachel Carson, Olaudah Equiano, and (of course) Herman Melville.

Charmingly, the introduction offers an oceanic twist to common academic concepts, though it doesn’t go on to use those in the book. It substitutes “current” for “field,” preferring flow and change, movements and connections to stable enclosures. It offers “water” for “ground,” as “nothing stays on the surface forever.” “Flow” replaces “progress,” as paths of thought can thus be messier. “Ship” replaces “state,” as the ocean sometimes works against nationalism and we should center instead “heterotopias and polyglot fantasy-spaces” of ships. “Seascape” replaces “landscape,” though perhaps “-scape” is wrong because most marine creatures don’t use their sight primarily; “distortion” similarly replaces “clarity” as water bends light and we should get used to heading for either the surface or the bottom. Finally, “horizon” “replaces” “horizon,” a place of transition or a place “where perspectives merge” that doesn’t change because it encompasses the future-peering of both land and sea.

Much of the book is organized around dualities. The first goes back to the very beginning: does is the ocean Alien, having originated from a comet, or does it come from the Core, having been intrinsic to the material that first formed the Earth? The book doesn't seek to answer the question in a scientific manner, but notes how the two positions have been reproduced in the culture, the ocean's hostile or uncaring presence juxtaposed with its nurturing and life-giving history. To wit, in the second chapter, history continues through the theory that human migration out of Africa followed coastlines, and the theory that the availability of seafood was important to the evolution of our brains (mentioning, but distancing itself from, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis). The cultural narrative led in a different direction, though, as the Bible rejected the ocean as a hostile force and, as the tome of an agricultural society, turned toward the garden as the origin of human life.

Next, of course, come the Greeks, and the duality of Achilles' relationship with the ocean (or at least with water) as he battles Scamander, a river god. Achilles is a destructive force polluting the river with bodies as he heads for his doom at Troy. On the other hand is Odysseus, a literal sailor, a literary trickster who achieves his homecoming through tactics, technology, and endurance rather than physical conquest. Mentz notes that there are, according to Northrup Frye, Iliad Critics (who value seriousness, tragedy, and realism) and Odyssey Critics, who embrace "delight" and perhaps more ambiguity. Odysseus is a very oceanic hero, building and sailing boats, reading the weather, and swimming; and his story perhaps has more useful lessons for our interactions with the oceans than does Achilles' destructive rage.

A term that Mentz uses for the next stage of human-ocean relations is the "wet globalization" of the Columbian Exchange, or the similarly-marked inauguration of the Anthropocene in 1610, when the globe began decisively warming. Ecologically, “wet globalization” was also the "recreation of Pangea," as the different biomes of different continents began to intermingle again after eons of separation. Mentz favors the term "wet globalization" because the integration of the continents relied more on the ocean than it did on the drive of any specific individuals, whether Colombus or the also-cited Vasco da Gama, who sailed to India with similar tragic results.

For the Portuguese to get to India and the Spanish to the Americas, they had to shift the paradigm of European interaction with the ocean, and the European concept of the ocean's limitations (in a context obviously excluding Scandinavians and any British fishing in Newfoundland, of course). They had to shift away from the ancient philosophers' concept of the Gates of Hercules, marking the end of the Mediterranean, as the edge of the known world, the ne plus ultra. Instead, they shifted their horizons to the Cape of Good Hope, personified in the epic Portuguese poem the Lusiads as Adamastor, a promontory titan. He is on an eternal quest for Calypso, the sea goddess, who tantalizes and threatens him and, by extension, the sailors that both of them endanger. Sailors in that era had to reject the comparative safety of the Mediterranean for the danger of the unknown Atlantic and Pacific.

They are able to do it because, as Mentz argues, sailors are cyborgs in the sense that Donna Haraway wrote about in "A Cyborg Manifesto" in 1984, as "couplings between organism and machine." Sailors needed to depend on their machine to survive the ocean, and came to intimately and romantically know every facet of the operations of their ship, as well as the conditions of the ocean. They knew it not just intellectually, but through the physical operations of their bodies as they engaged with the technology. Conrad knew it, and he wrote elegy after elegy for the then-dying world of sailing as it was eclipsed by modern technology. As noted, as sailing decreased, swimming became the main way that humans interacted with the ocean.

The book has an interlude about this, discussing the fall of the Port of New York in a generation as it was replaced by container ship technology in the '50s, specifically by container ports across the river in New Jersey (reference is provided to a book on this area's polluted geography, which looks interesting). The bustling and rough character of the southern tip of Manhattan was catalogued ambivalently by Federico García Lorca, who visited in 1929, only a few years before he was murdered by fascists. Lorca was a country boy, and felt overwhelmed and threatened by the city and the docks, but they did not have much longer to live. They live only in cultural memory now, as sailors have disappeared and their spaces such as that area has become increasingly gentrified.

The book then goes back in time a bit, to the 19th century, when technological improvement and political developments boosted wet globalization to the next level of connecting the world and transporting the fuel of capitalism and empire. Compared to the threatening-but-enticing sea catalogued by earlier generations of age-of-sail mariners and their cultural appurtenances, the 19th century Romantics and their love for nature in the face of order and industrialism gave the sea a more positive spin. Mentz selects Emily Dickinson to explore this. Though she was a landlocked homebody in Amherst, her works presented the sea (seemingly) often, representing vastness and natural forces. She wrote about an ocean that both made up the whole world and was, functionally, a negation of the whole (human) world through its alienness. Many of her works also eroticized the sea, subtly or openly, writing of the lure of immersion. “Might I but moor - tonight / In thee!” I like Emily Dickinson well enough, but this chapter was a little shaky: one poem, "My River runs to thee," cites the river as fetching the jarring "books" instead of the more obvious "brooks" that I found in online versions. Elsewhere, Mentz cites part of this poem that says "Bred as we, among the mountains, / can the sailor understand / The divine intoxication / Of the first league out from land?" However, he interprets this as how the narrator is "Swimming out now but accompanied by an oddly mountain-bred sailor..." (p. 88) whereas my interpretation was that the poem's "we" referred to the narrator, an "inland soul," and that the sailor was a hypothetical sailor. Perhaps he is right, but this drove home to me the subjectivity of a lot of the material being handled here.

While I was writing this post, it occurred to me that, despite the worthiness of Emily Dickinson, the section on the Romantics (and indeed, the entire book) passed without a single mention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an obvious missed opportunity. It does include Melville though, and yet again I am reminded that I really need to tackle Moby-Dick at some point. It partners him with Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid with Queequeg. Both go out farther than normal humans can, much as we would like to; both are closer to the sea. Both are different-than-human in their physical form (Queequeg through his tattoos), both are eroticized and romanticized by their main human figures (the Prince and Ishmael, respectively), and both eventually give their lives for their shore-bound lovers. Mentz keeps referring to Queequeg as "the cannibal," a useful and otherizing shorthand, I suppose. The Little Mermaid and Queequeg are the next step in human evolution vis a vis the ocean.

The book goes back to Conrad for another chapter, one about how philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's conceptualization of human society as seeking containers (from the womb through society to the coffin) manifests in the community on Conrad's sailing ships, manifests on Equiano and others' slave ships of the middle passage, and manifests in modern shipping containers, which Mentz went to an avant garde play in once. Other than the reminders of the fundamental relationship of the Middle Passage to wet globalization (and thus another ocean connection) this was sort of a weak chapter. To be tangential: it did return to Neil Roberts and his idea of “Freedom as Marrionage,” referenced earlier in the book. This is the idea that becoming a maroon, an escaped slave living in the interior of a (Caribbean) island, is not the attainment of a single point of freedom but a constant act of flight that many people go through regularly; akin (oceanically) to immersing one's self to swim forever.

Rachel Carson is the subject of the penultimate chapter; prior to Silent Spring, she wrote a trio of poetical/scientific books about the ocean, all of which are apparently very good to the point of being foundational. Mentz finds them to be better than Aldo Leopold's orienting of conservationism around the mountain, as the sea is less of a tough masculine presence, and will erode the mountain away eventually.

Finally, there is a chapter on swimming. Mentz starts out talking about his daily swims in the Atlantic, and mentions them a few times throughout. Swimming is a physical engagement between human and ocean, and allows one's mind to either wander or focus as one puts one's self through a wholly different environment. It's another way of engaging with geography and understanding place, and the swimmer is both powerful and also completely surrendering to nature's mercy.

Again, this book was a brief look into the "blue humanities," and some of its chapters were better than others. It was not a formal or systematized introduction, and there is definitely a lot of further ground to cover. However, it went quickly pointed me toward some offbeat reading suggestions, and I look forward to "immersing" myself further. Hah!