Unexpected Bodies of Water: On the "Blue" Goethezeit

Abstract

Unexpected Bodies of Water:On the "Blue" Goethezeit Benjamin D. Schluter "Hat man sich nicht ringsum vom Meere umgeben gesehen," Goethe reflects after sailing from the Italian mainland to Sicily in 1787, "so hat man keinen Begriff von Welt und von seinem Verhältnis zur Welt" (WA I/31:90; Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea have no conception of the world or their relation to it).1 Today, some two and a half centuries later, Goethe's words ring true in an unexpected way. Rising sea levels, ocean acidification, offshore oil spills, plastic pollution, and overfishing—to name just a few of the Anthropocene's catastrophic effects on the blue planet—assert ever more urgently water's intimate embrace of past, present, and future life on earth. In our time, Goethe's maritime musings offer an untimely reminder of the sea's physical and political presence, as well as a watchword for those who, under the moniker of "blue humanities," have begun to emphasize the ocean's importance for ecocritical inquiry.2 Steve Mentz, coiner of the term "blue humanities," certainly echoes Goethe's oceanic insight when he insists that "as our planet gets bluer—as the sea rises and floods our coastal cities—we will benefit from a blue humanities perspective."3 At turns aesthetic, historical, feminist, queer, media-theoretical, posthuman, and postcolonial, the blue humanities perspective is as fluid as the sea itself.4 (Interdisciplinary osmosis is also common, being one of the blue humanities' siren songs.) Uniting adherents is a dedication to questioning traditional cultural narratives which, in John R. Gillis's words, "imagine human history as beginning and ending on terra firma."5 By reframing human (and nonhuman) origins and futurities among the elements, blue humanities scholarship opens brave new worlds of thought. Mentz describes the "shock of novelty that comes from jolting one's mental habits and practices into a new [oceanic] structure."6 For Melody Jue, undersea spaces shake up "normative habits of thinking and speaking about the world that belie our terrestrial acculturation."7 Bodies of water, from this perspective, also fall under Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's category of the unexpected body: their visceral difference—be it of an "alien," "monstrous," or "wondrous" aspect—challenges cultural and discursive norms. This applies not only to "aquatic humanoids" like mermaids, selkies, and proteuses whose slippery bodies "raise questions about what it is to be human and what lies beyond a human centered world."8 All variety of geophysical water bodies like oceans, seas, [End Page 147] lakes, rivers, and streams are possessed of an elemental logic that runs counter to terracentric standards of judgment and order. "Whether fresh, brackish, or salty," write Christina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, "water holds a mystery that fascinates humans, has aesthetic qualities that delight our senses, and—like water spirits—is both attractive and destructive."9 The blue humanities tap into water's mystery and delight, its attraction and destruction, to reinvigorate conceptions of the world and our relations to it. A major part of this task, especially in recent years, has involved critiquing conceptual and epistemic structures that privilege conditions of life on solid land. Karin Amimoto Ingersoll's Waves of Knowing (2016), for example, explores ocean-oriented ways of knowing, being, and identifying among indigenous Hawaiian communities that "[splash] alternatives onto the Western-dominant and linear mind-set."10 Astrida Neimanis' Bodies of Water (2017) rethinks embodiment according to a model of fluid permeability which transcends humanist accounts of the body's "bounded materiality."11 And in Wild Blue Media (2020), Melody Jue draws on her scuba experience to uproot a "terrestrial bias" in common theoretical vocabularies. Easily overlooked, for instance, are the historical and etymological associations of "inscription" with durable earth media: wood pulp, metal, stone, bone, and even in the digital age, silica.12 For Jue, taking into account material and embodied conditions on, at, and especially below the water's surface—environments where ephemerality and erasure, not fixity, is the name of the game—reveals a precarious relativity of terrestrial or "geo-graphic"13 models of writing. "The ocean," she writes, "changes how we understand...