American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations

Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations

S. Yamashiro

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137465665
• eBook ISBN: 9781137463302
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Implementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.

1

American Sea Literature—on the Sea

Abstract: This chapter gives an outline of the study of sea literature in the past, arguing that the traditional maritime literary studies and maritime cultural history haven’t looked at the oceanic environment as a whole, which resulted in too much an emphasis on fishing, trading, voyages, explorations on the ocean. Such a slant view to maritime activities might have to do with: first, humans’ existence as terrestrial beings, who have tended to look at the ocean as a plane figure; and second, the view that the land (terrestrial) and the sea (oceanic) are rigidly separated and opposed. As a new way to better look at sea literature, the author reinterprets some representative sea literature by finding how we can find oceanic experience embedded in some of the terrestrial experience. The authors to be mainly discussed are William Bradford, Olaudah Equiano, Washington Irving, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Joshua Slocum, and Peter Matthiessen.

Yamashiro, Shin. American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137463302.0005.

[T]he ocean which, although surrounding this earth, the home of the human race, with the ebb and flow of its tides, can be neither seized nor inclosed; nay, which rather possesse the earth than is by it possessed.¹

Hugo Grotius. The Freedom of the Seas

Sea literature on the sea

When people speak of sea literature, they often have in mind maritime literature that concerns fishing, shipwrecks, voyages of exploration or emigration, commercial transport, or naval wartime vessels. Today, within that narrow framework, sea literature is either anachronistic or scarcely exists for the reason that most of those maritime activities have dwindled away or have radically changed. For instance, except for commercial fishermen, or for islanders who routinely commute across the waters, or for funded researchers and explorers and accompanying journalists, the idea of travelling by boat or ship has come to mean a luxurious cruise or the recreational activities of the wealthy, such as sport fishing and yacht racing, or perhaps the smuggling of prohibited substances and illegal immigrants. In recent decades, maritime trade has become the global business of mass transport, human labor having been reduced by usage of enormous tankers and specialized container-transporting cargo ships. Military waterborne craft have undergone even greater changes, much of which is kept under wraps. The spread and dominance of time-saving and cost-effective commercial aviation for transport of both humans and commodities has altered people’s attitudes toward the ocean, especially the people of urban, industrialized nations. Except for people living in areas vulnerable to typhoons and tsunamis, or to engulfment by waves of tourists, even the oceans’ contribution to weather and rainfall appears to be of scarce interest. With all those issues cast aside, for many people the oceans of today appear to have value primarily for recreation and tourism, for providing food and mineral resources, and for disposal of unwanted substances.

But such a radical alteration of people’s attitude does not mean that there is no longer a place for the ocean in literature and culture. On the contrary, precisely because of these fundamental changes in the roles and interrelationships of the ocean and human society, there is an even greater need for literary studies to probe into what sea literature has meant in the past, what it means today, and what it can mean for our future.

School teachers and librarians, if asked about British and American literature of the sea, are likely to offer the names of Daniel Defoe, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Jack London, and perhaps Joseph Conrad or, more recently, Patrick O’Brian. It is a telling note that many of these names are now associated with “children’s literature.” Nonetheless, there are newer generations who have written about maritime activities either in the late nineteenth or throughout the twentieth century, writers such as William Warner (Beautiful Swimmers), Sena Jeter Naslund (Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-Gazer), Linda Greenlaw (The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain’s Journey), Antonio Benítez-Rojo (A View from the Mangrove), Thomas Farber (On Water), Peter Nichols (Sea Change: Alone across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat), to name but a few. Despite the brevity of this list, these newer books—collectively called “modern sea literature”—present a variety of maritime experiences. But I suspect that to do full justice to the authors, even this more recent sea literature is most beneficially read with a recognition and understanding of the extent to which our modern maritime experiences have changed from what was commonly understood before the advent of the twentieth century.

What is required is a new approach to sea literature. This chapter approaches the task by looking first at maritime activities undertaken on the surface of the ocean as well as by examining what constitutes important tropes of this genre of sea literature from the colonial period through the twentieth century.

In fact, the study of sea literature—or sometimes interchangeably called “maritime literature” throughout the book—has tended to focus on voyages, fishing, expeditions, migration, or related maritime issues such as storms, mutinies, piracy, and naval wars, all of which are based on activities conducted on or affecting the surface of the ocean, or else they are stories about ships and seamen. For example, there are relatively fewer analyses of beachcombing, diving, and submarine explorations, activities that are distinctively associated with the oceanic environment.

While our ways to interact with the oceanic environment today are different from the “traditional” maritime experiences of the past—some of which are either long gone or have given way to more modern versions—what we imagine when we think of the ocean and maritime issues seems to remain encapsulated in the older literature. A question to be pursued in this study presented here, therefore, is why our maritime experiences and imagination remain afloat in seas that are no longer so threateningly unfamiliar, that no longer have the kind of grandeur and allure of preflight imagination. In pondering such a question, I shall present below how maritime imagination has been conceptualized and represented in both maritime history and literature; while doing so, I will not only historically trace some of the representative works on the sea but attempt to find a new way to look at both old and new types of sea literature by using the concepts of the terrestrial and the oceanic.

Historical and cultural contexts

The outline of the study of sea literature

There are some persistent difficulties in a genealogical study of the ocean. According to Christopher L. Connery, some of the problems derive from “western modes of knowing.” It may be “presumptuous,” Connery argues, “to imagine that westerners can simply will themselves into another way of being and thinking, one where the ocean will be fully divested of its absolute exteriority, and where the conceptual limitations of both place and space have been superseded.”² Or, as Ulrich Kinzel similarly claims, “The situation of the maritime, modern subject is combined with the scientific problem of mapping something—the ocean—which does not—in the form of landmarks, coastline, etc.—yield to any visible shape or trace. It seems as if writing the ocean can only claim a virtual reality.”³ For Connery and Kinzel, the concept of the oceanic as opposed to the terrestrial presents some conceptual difficulties while it reveals how terrestriality is predominant in the western civilization. Connery also finds that “[t]he cyber-body, de-materialized, networked, and connected, is the latest version of earth knowing that supersedes the sea.”⁴ The earth and our experience on land are often considered imagined through terrestriality: such as space, place, nations, borders, geography, and so on.

While I agree with Kinzel and Connery, who regard the terrestrial tendency as an important ideological base of the western civilization, I will suggest that not just the terrestrial but the terrestrial and the oceanic “both” still have played important roles in our society in general. In this sense, I would slightly modify Connery’s view that the terrestrial tendency is no longer centralized in our society now; I will look into American literature and culture in detail to delineate how both the terrestrial and the oceanic constitute each other, though sometimes they look competing and contrasted.

Just like Connery looks at the oceanic presence in our society today, many will share the view that contemporary maritime culture is different from what it was, for example, in the nineteenth century. In his Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002), Cesare Casarino uses sea literature at the turn of nineteenth to twentieth centuries to theoretically study modernism’s production of crisis figured through a ship as Foucauldian “heterotopia,” a figurative utopia critically represented in culture. In sea novels, Casarino thinks that we can observe modernity as crisis because the ship, its labors are centered on body as well as developed through brotherhood, captures a transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism as something new and inconceivable. Casarino’s argument would be very helpful not merely to analyze how literary discourse responded to cultural and economic transitions at the turn of century but to see there is a plentiful possibility for literary theory in sea literature. By arguing that maritime fiction in the turn of century captures and polemicizes modernism’s notions of spaces and crisis; however, Casarino, like many others who study maritime literature, frames his arguments in a view that the terrestrial influenced the oceanic in the way that modernism was facilitated by the terrestrial industrial revolution. In his view, the terrestrial precedes the oceanic in terms of material production and progress because the focus lies in the late-nineteenth-century global economy where maritime mercantile economy was considered declined.

About the oceanic roles in the formation of modernity, there is a view that the oceanic economy was not always posterior to the terrestrial. Daniel Headrick, in The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (1988), examines the way the transfer of the Western technology to European colonies didn’t initiate the industrial revolution in those countries, but caused the traditional economies in the colonial regions to remain underdeveloped. In Headrick’s view, the oceanic mediates the terrestrial, complementing the terrestrial development, and it sheds light on the connection between the terrestrial and the oceanic emphasizing the oceanic contribution to the development of modern capitalistic global economy and accompanying European imperialism.

For a more comprehensive look at the oceanic space, Philip Steinberg, for example, argues that the history of the ocean in The Social Construction of the Ocean (2001) ought to be distinguished in three ocean space: “a non-territorial ‘Indian Ocean’ construction in which the sea is constructed as an asocial space betwee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: On the Sea, By the Sea, Beneath the Sea
• 1  American Sea Literatureon the Sea
• 2  American Sea Literatureby the Sea
• 3  American Sea Literaturebeneath the Sea
• Epilogue: Rooftop Water Tank
• Index