Water Lore

Practice, Place and Poetics

Camille Roulière, Claudia Egerer, Camille Roulière, Claudia Egerer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032110653
• eBook ISBN: 9781000578294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pressing contemporary environmental challenges of our time: how can we shift our understanding and realign what water means to us? Water is increasingly at the centre of scientific and public debates about climate change. In these debates, rising sea levels compete against desertification; hurricanes and floods follow periods of prolonged drought. As we continue to pollute, canalise and desalinate waters, the ambiguous nature of our relationship with these entities becomes visible. From the paradisiac and pristine scenery of holiday postcards through to the devastated landscapes of post-tsunami news reports, images of waters surround us. And while we continue to damage what most sustains us, collective precarity grows.

Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.

This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history.

PART I Water stories (Re)presenting waters

1SAPPHIRE STORIES Disenchantment and sense of wonder in the underwater world

Karin Dirke

DOI: 10.4324/9781003218272-3

Introduction¹

The sea has flowed in human imagination since times immemorial. It streams in ancient myths and epics such as Homer’s tale about Ulysses’ travel across the sea and in Plato’s story about the sunken Atlantis. It is the source of many creation stories from the Bible and the Koran to the Hindu Rig-Veda (Messier and Batra 2–3). The sea has inspired travel accounts and adventure stories and has been central in science and discovery. The ocean is the point of departure for romantic poetry such as Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner and its precursor, the mythic tale of the Flying Dutchman. Bringing together the mysteriousness of the ocean and the rational, scientific spirit of the 1950s brought new desires to the western public, eventually opening for the later environmental movements. The popular and scientific stories about descent beneath the surface came to alter viewpoints and inspire new ways of thinking. This chapter is about how a sense of wonder concerning science and technology converged with aesthetic imaginations of underwater rhythm and colour, making it possible to realise humans as part of the ocean, but also to expose the problems of pollution and waste in the sea.

These visions of the underwater world entailed tensions to the modern “disenchanted” world famously theorised by sociologist Max Weber (321–7). In his essays on sociology, Weber discusses the meaning of science in the disenchanted world. He finds, with reference to Leo Tolstoy, that science cannot answer questions of value or meaning (326). Part of the rationalisation of the world is characterised by a lack of meaningfulness. Weber’s idea of rationalisation thus does not indicate an increased knowledge, but rather that knowledge has been specialised, redirected to experts. Further, the disenchantment theory is based on the idea that everything is possible to calculate or to articulate in logic terms. Art historian Donato Loia argues that the disenchantment of the world should be understood “as an historical process and not as an historical event which occurred at some point in time” (190). In this process, there is a “radicalization of rationality” which “progressively promoted the alienation of human beings from nature and a dehumanization of the ways in which we conceived of ourselves and related to others” (190). Humans thus, according to this theory, increasingly become alienated from nature and each other. The fundamental goal of science is not to reach values or meaning but to expand infinitely, increasing specialisation forever (185–6).

The 1950s as a decade can be described in terms of this Weberian rationalisation and disenchantment. Nevertheless, there is also a corrective built in the science, technology and popular culture of the 1950s. This chapter explores how this counter-force emerges through the stories of the western human’s relation to the ocean. In the submerged experiences discussed here, there is a strife for unsettling the rationalisation process, to attach meaning to the human’s existence in the world, yet doing this in a scientific way. Stories about the world under the surface merged science with the sense of wonder of fiction and travel literature, creating a tension in the modern, rationalised conception of the environment. This tension seemed to brew particularly in the fascination conveyed in the 1950s triangulation of science, technology and popular culture.

Science, technology and aesthetics of the Fifties

The 1950s has in retrospect been perceived as a naïve and over-optimistic decade when human expansion appeared to be limitless and everything seemed possible. Following World War II and its horrible discovery of just how much destruction advanced technology might entail, there seemed to be a necessity of re-building faith and hope in the possibilities of technological development (Leslie and Mercelis 11–3; Demeter 87–95). The decade also marks the beginning of the cold war race for dominance of both knowledge and power. New frontiers attracted scientists as well as the public imagination. The exploration of space, as well as the ocean floor, expanded in the post-war world. Putting objects, and subsequently humans, into outer space was part of a race for the possession of absolute knowledge of the planet. In the 1950s, the first satellite was launched with the aim to map the entire earth as a part of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58 (O’Leary 3). Mapping and knowing the entire world, as well as outer space, was a collective dream of rationalisation in the era.

The 1950s was, however, also an azure blue period, shimmering in sapphire. In the western world, the decade displayed the aesthetics of gilded seashells and summery beaches. The 1950s showed a monumental rise in teenage culture driven by a great increase in affluence of young people, ready to spend money on popular culture (Osgerby 7). The 1950s was the decade popular culture encompassed a whole generation. Young people in the west consumed and expressed themselves through popular culture, being beneficiaries of the post-war wealth (Jones et al. 5). The increased standard of living enabled free time and a consumer culture which desired both commodities and experiences. Many of these experiences took place underwater.

The western ocean stories of the 1950s thus carried a deeper ambition, compared to their predecessors: to descend into the sea. During the decade, the ocean received its colourfulness, and it was during this period the human dream of existing underwater was realized. A vision of an unexplored, secret world was spread, carrying dreams of new colonialisation and discovery. The underwater environment seemed vibrant, glistening, fantastic and mythical. It inspired associations of a sub-conscious world, infinitely larger than humans had ever understood (Messier and Batra 4; Lidström 15–27). The mystery of the ocean revealed an infinity which could engulf everything. Dispatching waste to the sea was a sacrifice without visual consequences. The ocean receives and hides what it devours (Patton 1–8). The ocean appeared to some as an eternal mother (Carson, The Sea Around Us 8–127).

The exploration of the deep sea accelerated after World War II. Oceanography was of older ancestry but had primarily studied the surface of the sea. It expanded rapidly after the second world war, particularly in the US, where institutions for studying the sea and its movements were productive, especially following the long-since-established Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanography Institution, both early exponents of scientific interest in the underwater world (Mills 259).

Exploring the sea

By the late 1940s, the Norwegian ethnographer and explorer Thor Heyerdahl became known for his ideas about how human ancestors had travelled the seas. With his vessel Kon-Tiki (1947), he aimed to prove how ancient people had crossed the ocean. Thor Heyerdahl made the sea surface modern and popular through his travels. The documentary Kon-Tiki, compounded from the films of his crew members, was launched 1950 and was the year after awarded an Oscar for best documentary film (Axelsson et al. 242). Stories about journeys in rudimentary vessels across sun-salty seascapes were popularised and consumed by an adventurous audience. The enchantment with adventure and exploration was paired with a mapping of the possibilities and limitations of technology. The interest in the promises of technology expanded in the western world after the world wars and was fertilised by the scientific fantasies of popular culture. A sense of wonder permeated the view of both unexplored places and the technology that made the explorations possible.

New methods for exploring the depths of the sea were developed in the light of technological optimism and lust for expansion, signifying the science and popular culture of the 1950s. Colonialisation and exploitation of uninhabited oceanic depths was considered unproblematic at a time when colonialisation of land became increasingly questioned. The sea appeared in the public imagination as a vacuum, uninhabited, like empty space (Messier and Batra 4; Patton 11). Vehicles with the ability to reach the abyss were developed, to resist an inhospitable pressure and retrieve information about an unknown environment and its resources. Diving gear, to immerse humans collecting materials, depicting and forming stories about a new world and its inhabitants, was constructed. Cameras and lighting equipment were built to endure underwater pressure as well as to compensate for the colour-absorbing qualities of water.

The visual culture of the 1950s emphasised the colourfulness of the underwater world. At the forefront was the National Geographic Society, an American scientific/popular science organisation with the journal National Geographic Magazine as its primary medium. The magazine published the world’s first colour photographs taken underwater in 1927 (Marden 162). The organisation sponsored the French adventurer, film maker and ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau (1910–1997) and his many oceanographic expeditions.

Underwater photography required advanced technology, to get cameras and lightning to work as well as to make it possible for humans to exist for longer periods of time underwater. Both areas underwent rapid technological development during the 1950s. The driving force was a combination of lust for exploitation, scientific ambition and the advancement of popular culture. There was a public thirst for stories about fantastic technology and previously unseen environments. Science fiction consequently became an established genre within literature after World War II (Telotte 65). The technique for underwater photography was in particular developed by the engineer Harold Edgerton (1903–1990), at the time legendary professor at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT). Edgerton built cameras and developed underwater photography together with Jacques Cousteau (“Underwater Exploration”). In collaboration with the engineer Émile Gagnan (1900–1979), Cousteau developed the so-called Aqua Lung, an air container to make it possible to breathe underwater. Underwater photography thrived with the construction of lighter breathing equipment (Crylen 74; Marden 177). Free diving was in this way made possible and popularised during the 1950s. In the west particularly, Jacques Cousteau and his film team on board the ship Calypso were famous for diving adventures, exploring the world beneath the surface. Cousteau was presented, and presented himself, as a patron of the sea, but has later been widely criticised for his methods. He is hardly perceived as an environmental activist today, at least not as he appears in the films from the 1950s (Crylen 68).

The exploitation and colonisation of the underwater world was legitimised by scientific and technological claims. The articles about, and by, Cousteau and his crew in National Geographic Magazine were permeated by a candid enthusiasm about technology. In the articles, the advancement of technology was accentuated, while the zoological and enviro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Foreword: “Salt Water Kin”
• Introduction: flux and change
• Part I Water stories: (Re)presenting waters
• Part II Water law and lore: waters and/in cultures
• Part III (Re)imagining waters: writing on and with waters
• Afterword: ‘if we stand …’
• Index