Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 by Steve Mentz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 by Steve Mentz Gayle K. Brunelle Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2015) ix + 225 pp. In Shipwreck Modernity, Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 Steve Mentz sets out to disrupt the traditional linear narrative of modernity that posits the Renaissance as a rupture that began the modern era. Scholars of the Renaissance, from Jacob Burkhardt to Stephen Greenblatt, have argued that in attempting to revive the worldview and aesthetics of the Classical era, Greenblatt's "swerve," Renaissance humanists set the stage for modernity. Mentz contends that this paradigm of early modernity as a necessary break [End Page 234] initiating the development of modernity, most notably and recently celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012), misses the fundamental complexity not just of the early modern era, but of history, and of the human condition. Mentz is a literary scholar, and his analysis is based on examination of mostly English literature about the ocean and shipwrecks from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. His goal is to offer an alternate way of understanding not just pre-modern European culture and the whole concept of "modernity," but also our own culturally and ecologically disrupted era. Mentz argues in Shipwreck Modernity that the traditional interpretation of modernity is too "dry," too "land-based" to serve the needs of contemporary culture. By this Mentz means that our world is now too global, and too ecologically threatened, for a narrative that is Western in outlook, linear in trajectory and optimistic and positivistic in tone to help people make sense of the rapid ecological changes, globalization and fragmentation of the Western-dominated world order that characterizes our century. Mentz questions the usefulness of the periodization of history into medieval, early modern, and modern that still dominates scholarly chronology and the discourse, the actual language we use to describe history. Mentz offers an alternate discourse, a "wet" discourse in which the sea is at the center, not only because interaction with the sea was central to the development of the increasingly global economy and culture of the early modern and modern periods, but also because the formless sea, with no distinct lines or breaks, which reaches in all direction and disorients the human body plunged into it, seems a better way to understand historical change. Mentz argues that early modern European culture was "fundamentally ecological in nature" (2) because what historians have traditionally called the "expansion of Europe" obliged Europeans to interact with the ecologies, human and natural, of the entire globe. Like shipwrecked sailors, Europeans were plunged into a strange, formless ocean of new peoples, plants, animals, geographies, and topographies that they could neither categorize nor control. Survival meant figuring out how to float or swim until they reached the shore. And like the ocean, a single body of water that surrounds all land masses and mingles currents from all parts of the world, the intellectual "ocean" in which early modern Europeans found themselves adrift mingled past and present, hither and yon, indiscriminately. Humans sought ways to catalogue, periodize, and structure the waters around them, but ultimately the fundamental disorder of the oceanic nature of our world rendered any intellectual structures they created fragile and contingent. Surviving a shipwreck requires abandoning the vessel at some point and plunging into the salt water in an effort to reach the shore. The new land cannot be attained without first breaking up the structure of the ship and experiencing the disorientation of the formless ocean. And the shore itself is always contingent, since humans cannot create a global world without experiencing the ocean. This, for Mentz, seems to be his central metaphor for the crisis of modernity, and in particular the effects of climate change with which our own world is contending. Old structures, understandings and solutions are inadequate and in fact are fragmenting under the relentless [End Page 235] pressure of the ocean, rising ever higher to meet us as the global temperature warms. We cannot survive by clinging to a wreck. We must all plunge in and swim...