Being at Sea: Ontologising the Sea Narrative

Abstract

This article engages with the sea narrative in terms of the question of the ontological predication of the sea voyage as such. Focusing particularly on Stephen Crane's ‘The Open Boat’ and Herman Melville's White-Jacket – as examples of texts in which the presence of the sea is introduced as a radically destabilizing, factor vis-à-vis human temporality – the article seeks to explore some of the potential implications of the condition of being-at-sea for what Peter Brooks calls ‘the dynamics of narrative’ (xiv). Brooks's theory of plot specifically invokes a terranean metaphorics, which is in turn related to his sense of the psychological and ontological work that narratives perform. The question that this paper addresses is what this metaphorical bias might mean for the status and character of the sea narrative, and it seeks to elucidate this question by drawing on Martin Heidegger's views regarding Dasein's enframing of the world. Heidegger of course also deploys the metaphor of the ground in his ontological inquiry, but his critique of the territorializing imperatives of human discourse and practice (which I here put in conversation with Brooks's theory of plot) provides a useful point of departure in reconsidering the evergreen conception of the ocean as a dissolutive, abyssal and even a-historical space. By pursuing this line of inquiry, I hope to add further dimension to the current use of ‘the oceanic’ as a category of literary and historical inquiry.