Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present ed. by Charlotte Mathieson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present ed. by Charlotte Mathieson Jimmy Packham Charlotte Mathieson, ed. Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. xiii + 270 pp. Sailing from New Bedford to Nantucket and invigorated by a sea breeze, Ishmael celebrates what he perceives to be an unblemished ocean. “[H]ow I spurned that turnpike earth!,” he remarks, “that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records” (ch. 13). Ishmael makes quite clear that it is the resistance to “marks,” to inscription, that signals the sea’s most profound difference from the land. And it is by reading the ocean in this way that Ishmael gains the sea room he needs to write his whaling epic. While his subsequent narrative gives the lie to any claim that this element “will permit no records,” for Moby-Dick’s sea is shown to have an extensive history and long literary heritage, Ishmael’s narrative method nonetheless demonstrates the extent to which he wrestles with the difficulty of fixing in writing that which is fluid, unstable, and, at times, unfathomably deep. Water conceals its history in inaccessible depths and erases the signs of the voyager’s presence, unsettling terrestrial conceptions of record-making. Or as Charlotte Mathieson quotes Robert Macfarlane, who writes in the wake of Ishmael: “‘The sea has its paths too, though water refuses to take and hold marks’” (1). Yet Mathieson’s edited volume, for which Macfarlane’s remarks are both preface and imaginative framework, strives to unseat the assumption that the sea is either place or trackless: the records it permits are many and varied. The challenges of writing the sea sit at the heart of much recent scholarship on Melville and other writers of sea narratives, as well as on maritime writing more generally. Recent work in the New Thalassology and, more recently, oceanic studies, has produced valuable insights into the relationship between the ocean and those individuals who have lived and labored upon it. Scholars such as Margaret Cohen, in The Novel and Sea (2010), and Hester Blum, in The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (2008), have emphasized the extent to which the physical labor of [End Page 113] seafaring is an important prerequisite to understanding the imaginative and literary labor that seafarers have so frequently engaged in. Simultaneously, these discourses draw much-needed attention to the ways in which oceanic experiences differ from terrestrial experiences and to the fact that studies of the narrative forms and literary modes adopted by the writers of the sea must be attentive and sympathetic to such differences. Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600-Present is a welcome addition to this field of study. Mathieson has produced an ambitious collection of essays that approaches its topic with a global mindset, including as it does essays on France, South Africa, the Russian Arctic, Ireland, Cornwall, India, and on the conceptually parallel coasts of the Levant and Silicon Valley. The subject under consideration justifies such an approach: it is, after all, the sea that unites these areas. But while the temporal reach of the collection stretches further back than its subtitle suggests—a number of essays address Homer’s Odyssey—modern narratives predominate. Of the nine essays, one focuses on the seventeenth century, another on the nineteenth, and the remaining seven on the twentieth and twenty-first. The project as a whole has its roots in questions Mathieson puts forward in the introduction. In what ways does it makes sense “to speak of the ‘sea narrative’ as a form,” and how do “narratives not only represent the sea, but also find their very forms shaped, challenged, reinvented, in the process?” (3). Some of the nine essays that follow confront these questions more directly than others, but, taken as a whole, all work well to trouble any easy definition of the term “sea narrative.” The particular attention the collection pays to the recovery of subaltern voices and narratives is, as Mathieson acknowledges, a central concern of oceanic...