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A Poetic History of the Oceans. Literature and Maritime Modernity. SørenFrankAmsterdam: Brill, 2022, 447 pp.

2023; Wiley; Volume: 78; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/oli.12381

1600-0730

Svend Erik Larsen,

Coastal and Marine Management

This is a book that deserves to be read for its ambitions. Based on his comprehensive reading close to erudition within the field of maritime literary studies, Søren Frank sets out to reframe the somewhat marginalised genre of the maritime novel, yet also other forms of prose as well as visual material. With a detailed argument for the symptomatic significance of the maritime perspective in literary history the author zooms in on three dimensions: the history of what the author calls ‘the maritime world view’ in cultural history; the impact of the genre and related materials on literary aesthetics and poetics; finally, and for the author most importantly, its role for a reconsideration of today's eco-criticism and broader ecological awareness. His overall aim is to incorporate the so-called blue ecology as an integral part of the otherwise terrestrial focus that dominates today's preoccupation with ecological issues in art, culture and politics. Although global in its perspective, the book's historical, philosophical, theoretical and aesthetic references and materials pertain exclusively to Western—read Western European and American—literature and culture, combined with an emphasis on contributions from Scandinavian literatures. Here, Frank chooses mainly Norwegian and Danish material, yet, surprisingly, with an omission of the ocean-charged modern Icelandic and Faroese literature. In an article too recent to be included in Frank's references, Stefan Helgesson's ‘Geographies: Reading the oceans’ from 2020, Helgesson attempts to adopt a more global view by using a periodisation based on Alexander Beecroft's An Ecology of World Literature, which is less Eurocentric than the four periods Frank proposes in chapter 1 with a different level of detail: the theocentric, the anthropocentric, the technocentric and the geocentric world views. However, the book's ambition has the potential for producing new readings and perspectives in literary and cultural analysis. Thus, historians and philosophers are reminded that in as much as ecological concerns are directed towards the future, the formulation of alternative world views and life worlds requires the intervention of imaginative and creative writing. Moreover, the predominant focus on the present, which is given prominence by eco-criticism in literature and the arts, is counterpoised by an insistence on a broader historical perspective. Finally, social and environmental sciences are made aware of the necessity to take into account all sides of human life beyond quantifiable data in the engagement with environmental issues. To fulfil his ambition Frank's book consists of five chapters, of which the two longest are the first on the historical trajectory of cultural approaches to the sea in Euro-American culture, and the last one on the role of the Anthropocene during the last about 150 years, which for Frank must embrace both oceans and terra firma in what he aptly labels an ‘amphibian comparative’ perspective. This chapter is the best balanced and best composed of the five chapters and evidently closest to the author's heart. Although I don't like to recommend readers to begin with the end of a book, I'm inclined to do so in this case. The remaining three chapters cover more specific topics—one on the analysis of habitual embodied practices onboard ships; another on maritime technology with a particular focus on the transition from sail to steam and its consequences for the general relation between humans and oceans; and a last one on the overwhelming materiality of the sea beyond human powers. Across the chapters, brilliant and detailed textual analyses of a welcome mix of canonical and less canonical writers open up new questions and broader perspectives—in particular, from the globalised Western canon, Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne; from national canons the American James Fennimore Cooper, the Norwegian Jonas Lie and the Danish Martin Andersen Nexø; and from the non-canonical margins two Danes, the seventeenth-century discoverer Jens Munk and the early twentieth-century adventurer Aage Rask Nielsen. However, by stressing the highly relevant ambitions of the book, I also want to underline that the questions and perspectives at times are more convincing than the analyses and results. Some of my own questions and reflections inspired by the book follow below. The second chapter on bodily rhythms, is built on Henri Lefebvre's analysis of embodied rhythms and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's analysis of the culture of presence. Frank's point is that life in the limited space of a ship is particularly forced to build on embodied behavioural working habits and routines below the threshold of conscious volition. Although repeatable, they are only real in the moment they are actually performed. Only in passing, Frank mentions that memory—the term is not indexed—is essential for their involuntary repeatability without, however, referring to important phenomenological or sociological key texts for precisely this discussion: on an individual level texts by Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud or Maurice Merleau-Ponty; on a collective level, Paul Connerton or James Wertsch. Such references might have added important nuances to the descriptive reading practice Frank recommends in a pedagogical aside. In the chapter on Technology, Siegfried Giedion's Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History would, in line with the general argument of the book, have offered a broader historical perspective as a supplement to Martin Heidegger's abstract essay on technology. This text is paraphrased in such detail that the analysis of Joseph Conrad in this chapter becomes an application of the theory. Moreover, I would suggest the analysis of the role of the sublime, based on the traditional sources from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, be supplemented by the notion of the technological sublime suggested by David Nye or Christophe den Tandt. After all, a main concern in Frank's discussion of the Anthropocene is that technologies acquire a power beyond human control to a degree similar to what is characteristic of the natural sublime. Although the chapter the Materiality of the sea as a disquieting non-human environment, together with the substantial final chapter on the Anthropocene, stand out as the best composed chapters, I ask myself if a merger of the two chapters on Technology and Materiality might not have presented an improvement of the argument. They both discuss the confrontation with the sublime as indistinguishably both technological and natural as the limits of the power of human agency which, eventually, may produce a humbler attitude to the role of human power and control in our environmental actions, as Frank discusses at length in the last chapter on the Anthropocene. As I said above, this chapter is the centre of gravity of the book. One problem, though, may be worth addressing. In continuation of the anthropocentric world view, introduced in the first chapter on the Western history of seaborne world views, the Anthropocene is mainly regarded by Frank as a scientific notion in geology and anthropology with ethical and political consequences. Today, Frank warns that its anthropocentricity risks becoming the prison house of human ego-centrism and self-indulgence in our relation to the natural foundation of humankind. Here, Ulrich Beck's now classical Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in der andere Moderne might have offered an important contribution to Frank's discussion of the vicious circle of overcoming the technologically instigated environmental problems by ever new technologies. However, there is also an ontological or rather species-specific human dimension to it, also present in Beck's books. Like other organisms, humans too are bound to a life world defined by our perceptive and cognitive—or more broadly speaking: semiotic—capacities. We cannot not be anthropocentric. But we may use those capacities, still within an Anthropocene life world, to reflect on the dynamics of its boundaries determined by our combined semiotic capacities as they evolve through cultural history. The issue of human boundaries is brought up in the book in different chapters and could maybe act as the key word in future discussions of the poetics of the sea, that would embrace critical explorations of human boundaries in perception, cognition, language and imagination? Among the many new questions with which the book invites or inspires the reader to engage, this is not the least important.