Of Reef Tackles and Halyards: “Marine Language” and the Technologies of Immediacy in William Falconer's The Shipwreck
2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00982601-10394883
ISSN1086-3192
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoThe power of the shipwreck motif in William Falconer's The Shipwreck derives in part from an oscillation between, on the one hand, the tragic distance of the spectator or reader from the unfolding catastrophe, and, on the other, a sense of immediacy produced by the poem's representations of the desperate struggle for life aboard that distant ship. In Falconer's best-selling poem, the speaker frets over the challenge of making remote, unseen sailors present to readers on land. To meet this challenge, the goddess Memory must fly “o'er th'immensity of space” (A, 1:116).1 Yet it is not only temporal and spatial distance that separates the mariners from many readers. The sailors’ experience and knowledge, too, the very particularity of the things and actions on their ship, are unfamiliar to landlubbers. Memory, the speaker promises, will rescue the sailors, their lives and experiences, from “oblivion,” a term that appears frequently in the speaker's meta-commentary about the poem's purpose in its first canto. The term raises the danger of loss with its etymological origins in oublier, to forget (OED, “oblivion, n. 1”). Since the thousands of sailors laboring at sea at this time were out of sight, it could be easy to forget them. Conversely, as oblivion also meant “more generally, obscurity,” readers would have difficulty envisioning the exact goings on aboard those remote ships (OED, “oblivion, n. 2”).How to stave off oblivion, how to make the distant in space, in time, and in alien experience vigorously present? How to remember those laborers at sea risking, and often losing, life and limb in the vast machinery of maritime empire? And how to make known the obscure workings of ship life? In some ways, this problem of making the unseen seen, the distant present and known, is the work of sea voyages and the challenge of their representational forms. Falconer's poem poses two alternatives: accurate representation or artful poeticizing of an endangered ship and its sailors at sea. Facing the challenge that techne, the language of fact and detail, has posed to the georgic since Hesiod, Falconer prioritizes the former, positioning himself as a sailor first and poet second, writing in the advertisement that opens the second edition of the poem that “he is much more tenacious” of “his claim to the character assumed in the Title-Page than of his reputation as a poet,” that character being “A Sailor,” the first two editions’ only indication of authorship.2 The advertisement stakes that sailor's status on the poem's language, on the “technical terms,” what Falconer elsewhere calls “marine language,” and on the sailor-author's qualifications for explaining those terms clearly in the poem's “many notes.”3 Thus, faced with the choice between the muses and the goddess Memory, the speaker chooses Memory, proclaiming “The Muses’ aid he supplicates no more; / But trusts alone to Mem'ry's ample store” (A, 1:86–87). Although the poem achieves something like an artful accuracy, the speaker/poet claims that this diminishes the poem aesthetically, since it is representing empirical truth at the expense of art, including, at times, the loss of aural pleasure.The poem's speaker claims that it is especially at the aural level, particularly through the poem's language and the inclusion of odd-sounding “sea phrases,” that “Mem'ry” supplants aesthetics in this poem. The speaker defends the use of the forbidding technical language needed to name parts of the mechanical apparatus of a large merchant ship, arguing, “Tho’ terms uncouth shou'd strike th'offended ear, / For sake of truth, the uncouth measures bear!” (A, 1:82–83). Though the poem is mainly written in heroic couplets, this early moment in a long poem already anticipates future moments of “uncouth” sound. Falconer, a Scot, writes in standard English yet invites Scots pronunciation of “bear” to rhyme with “ear”—an uncouth pronunciation in an era obsessed with using correct, even polished, English. As well, the phrase “the ún|couth méa|sures béar” either disrupts the pleasing regularity of its iambic verse with the placement of the line's “uncouth” in the third foot, or, in forcing awkward emphasis on the first syllable of “uncouth,” it breaks with the pattern of the previous line, in which the stress falls on the second syllable of “uncouth”: “Tho’ térms|uncóuth.” Here, even repetition is irregular, the “uncouth” of line 82 sounding different when it appears again in line 83.In an interesting twist, it is through “terms uncouth” that the speaker aims to make the distant and unknown “couth,” so to speak. The poem's technical diction and graphic representation of disruptive sound more generally are among what we might call “technologies of immediacy,” devices that attempt to bring the experience of the distant ship near. To evoke a sense of immediacy, the poem deploys these technologies to enable readers to apprehend the spatially, temporally, and experientially remote maritime world. These technologies work in large part through producing “uncouth” sound, that is to say, sound that is “odd and strange,” as Johnson defines “uncouth.”4 In doing so, the poem works surprising parallels between the various meanings of the word “sound.” In its nautical sense, “to sound” (from old French, sonder) is to ascertain something remote and unseen—oblivion of a sort (OED, “sound, v. 2”). It is to discover what is invisible to the naked eye, such as the depth of water. This nautical meaning is one of the earliest senses of the term, already in use in the fifteenth century. From at least the seventeenth century, “nautical sounding” not only helped determine the position of an individual ship, but also contributed to the body of knowledge about the sensory world. Among its guidelines for sailors, the Royal Society directed them “to sound and marke the depths of coasts, promontories, Islands and Ports, marking the bearings and distances” and “to take notice of the nature of the ground at the bottom of the sea in all soundings” as part of its aim to expand the inventory of empirical information about the material world.5 More generally, “to sound” means “to measure,” “to survey,” and also to examine that which is not visible, and it is used in that more general sense by the seventeenth century (OED, “sound, v. 5”). “To sound,” in this sense, is also applicable to persons—to discover their thoughts and feelings. (OED, “sound, v. 6”). It is used in the sixteenth century to signify the indirect examination of someone to elicit his opinion, in the sense of “sounding out” someone. In all these senses, “to sound” is to discover that which is not visible, to make present that which is distant or obscure.In The Shipwreck, some of this sounding, this locating, this making the distant, proximal, is made possible through that other sense of sound, “anything audible, a noise, that which is perceived by the ear,” as Johnson defines it.6 On a ship, as Falconer knew, the two senses of the term can work in tandem. In the entry for “sounding” in his Universal Dictionary of the Marine, Falconer explains how a seaman heaves a lead plummet into the ocean and “the person sounding then proclaims the depth of the water in a kind of song resembling the cries of hawkers in a city. Thus, if the mark of five fathoms is close to the surface of the water, he calls ‘By the mark five!’ ”7 This evocative comparison of distant sailors to familiar people walking London's streets is a literal instance of making unseen sailors present through sound. It is doubly suggestive because it is in part through such soundings—the mediated apprehension of depth, the calling out of the measure, the entry of it into the logbooks—that sailors would sound their own location, as knowing the depth of the water was part of the process of navigating their own position on the sea, a position also invisible to the naked eye.On less literal levels, we could say that Falconer's poem sounds a ship and its sailors (making the remote and inapprehensible apprehensible for readers) through sounds, whether through technical “uncouth” language, the representation of aural experience of a storm at sea, or the graphic depiction of the human voice. We might extend our sense of “marine language” to include these other representations of sound at sea. But to begin, it will be helpful to think about the use and effects of technical marine language in the poem. Shipboard life and sailors at sea are remote not only because of their distance in time and space, but also because of the unfamiliar parts and actions of a ship, and the technical jargon that names them. But the technical jargon that bespeaks their distinct world also helps make those distant sailors present, retrieving them from oblivion in the very particularity of their language. That is to say, this odd and strange sounding language makes the sailors’ world linguistically distant, even exotic, but also present by enumerating material specifics. When the speaker describes how “Around the sail, the gasketts are convey'd, / and rolling-tackles to the cap belay'd” (A, 2:94–95), the technical terms like “gasketts,” “tackles,” and “cap” call up the details of the distant ship. The passive construction further foregrounds those items. These odd-sounding objects become subjects, and the sequential listing, and activating, of such technical objects places the reader in the midst of the flurry of things and their actions on the deck of an eventually foundering ship.Despite the seemingly autonomous movement of the objects aboard the ship, the technical specificity conjured through the poem's use of nautical jargon plays a role in building sympathy for the ship's sailors, for this is a poem that sounds out its human subjects, at least at the level of sentimental engagement. As the Critical Review had put it, the poem “will not fail to interest the reader of sentiment.”8 What to make of the technical passages and the specialist terms in what is also a sentimental poem? For critics of the period, crediting the truth of what appears on the page is crucial for the possibility of sentimental encounter. That the representation is or could be true, verified in part by the inclusion of details, helps readers credit a story as having really happened and thereby builds sentimental engagement. Even David Hume, while he did not believe fiction made this crediting possible, argued that when such crediting does take place in reading, the reader “enters deeper into the concerns of the persons: represents to himself their actions, and characters, and friendships, enmities.”9 Explicitly addressing fictional scenarios, Samuel Johnson argued that it is “accurate observation of the living world” that fiction writers should represent to facilitate such deep entry into the concerns of the persons represented.10 And, it should be noted, in the case of depictions of shipwrecks, such “accurate observation,” and the technical language that substantiates that accuracy, would be especially necessary, since, as Johnson had pointed out, shipwreck itself was a stock motif of romance.11 The emphasis on the technical workings of the ship would be one key way to shift representations of a shipwreck out of its associations with romance and toward truth and the related possibilities of sentimental connection.For Falconer, in The Shipwreck, the belief that events represented are true—the product not of artful fancy but of actual memory—is critical for fellow feeling. The ungainly sounding technical language wins out, at times, against the aesthetically pleasing, artfully inventive, harmonious language, a sacrifice for empirical truth, as the speaker had put it, and also a crucial element in fostering sentiment. Falconer includes the “jarring sounds” (A, 1:81) of such technical “marine” phrases as “reef tackles” and “halyards” or “Leeward gunnels” because of his need to represent the truth. The offending “uncouth measures” to which the speaker refers are the nautical-jargon-laden passages that distinguished the poem. The more unpoetic the sound of these technical objects, the closer they are to the real, to the objects and workings of the ship, the catalog of which makes the world of the ship present and compelling. In using “The harshest sounds mechanic Arts express” (A, 2:204), Falconer aims to capture the sheer material machinery of the ship without obfuscating verbal and aural beautification. It is that claim to truth and not poetic artifice that might draw the strongest feelings of sympathy, and the poem itself engages in “mechanic arts” as it negotiates technical detail within a carefully crafted poem. Tentatively weighing in on this negotiation in the first edition, the speaker amplifies it in the third, 1769, edition of the poem, pleading, If terms uncouth, and jarring phrases, woundThe softer sense with inharmonious sound,Yet here let listening sympathy prevail,While conscious Truth unfolds her piteous tale! (C, 1:85–88)It is truth, and not the melting mellifluous line, that makes for a piteous tale, but it is, after all, a piteous tale and not just a purely factual account.In Falconer's Shipwreck, then, the “inharmonious sounds” and “jarring phrases” are not unfortunate elements that must be put up with as the cost of representing truth. They are instead, and oddly, central to the production of piteous and terrified sentiment. The sound element of this counterintuitive dynamic, by which a distancing, uncouth language brings remote scenes closer by conjuring the very feelings of those settings, works in several ways. First, the technical objects themselves make sounds. As the tempest hits the ship and its rigging, it “Shrill thro’ the cordage howls” (C, 3:412), creating what amounts to an anti-Aeolian harp. If the Aeolian harp is an instrument through which an unseen force creates beautiful sound, this shrill howling cordage produces sound of opposite effect, calling up unpleasant, even painful feelings. The sounds that the technical outfitting of the ship makes are often of a disruptive, staccato nature, creating a cacophony that pauses the action unpleasantly even as it describes action of a different sort. The line “Rattle the creaking blocks, and ringing wheels” (C, 2:134) not only features terms for noisome sound, “rattle” and “creaking,” but also mimics that sound itself with the hard “ck” in the alliteration of “creaking” and “blocks.” As well, the idea of rattling things that are already simultaneously creaking and ringing creates aural confusion in the layered simultaneity of the sounds. The line also disrupts the regular forward movement of the meter with its opening trochee, “Ráttle.” The effect is to jar the reader in an aural experience that moves consciousness from thought and visual image to the bodily experience of distressing sound. Discordant rather than pleasantly evocative, such passages work against an aesthetically pleasing onomatopoeia.The sounds of the poem are not just those of the technical names for things and actions on the ship, but also these in conjunction with the violent ocean itself, including its terrorizing, howling winds and crashing waves. While the opening of the poem and much of the first canto are dulcet descriptions of the coast of Crete, the stage is set for compelling aural upheaval with a series of frightening visual elements of an approaching storm. The stanza that introduces the juddering aural soundscape begins with the imperative “But see!” (C, 2:125), the speaker imploring the reader to visualize a “confluence” of images of a rising squall. Crucially, to heighten feeling, the speaker describes these in present tense: “The blackening ocean curls; the winds arise” (C, 2:127). These produce an alarming scene and, in the case of wind, a feeling of danger, but as the storm rages, visibility becomes increasingly impossible. It is in such murky scenes of danger that the poem introduces “inharmonious sound,” both the tumultuous sounds of the storm, with descriptions of “sudden, bursting with tremendous roar, / A giant surge down rushes from on high” (A, 2:238–39), and the uncouth language naming the parts of the ship's technical apparatus. The strident discord of technical language is on par with the overwhelming power of the sounds of the storm, pausing narrative to invite feeling, and associating that feeling with violent natural forces. Suggestively, the “inharmonious sounds” of technical language feature most heavily when the poem presents the sailors at their most piteous, in the most danger, evoking sympathy, and, later, shock and grief, in a forced “sounding out” of others. The speaker describes how “Fierce, and more fierce, the gath'ring tempest grows” (A, 2:84), as ominous weather threatens, and at that point introduces the technical language by explaining how, in response to the mounting threat, “Around the sail, the gasketts are convey'd / And rolling-tackles to the cap belay'd” (A, 2:94–95).So far in this analysis, sound “sounds” the sailors and the ship using a jarring technical language that conveys a sense of actuality and represents the acoustics of dreadful natural forces—torrential rains, forceful winds—that produce feelings of extreme peril. But the sounds of the technical terms, that aural experience of the poem when odd jargon is incomprehensible to many readers, answer to Johnson's second definition of sound in the audible sense as “mere empty noise, opposed to meaning.”12 The sounds of the poem are not just those of the ship's parts and of terrorizing howling winds and crashing waves, but also the volley of technical terms unknown to many armchair readers. There is rapid fire action in the frenzied responses amongst the mariners as they defend against forceful winds and a quickly filling bilge, but often, because of the technical language, this is not action that nonspecialist readers can fully follow, producing an aural blur for those readers that reduces them to an impotent response. Such moments of incomprehension are also sometimes the very means of evoking sentiment. Those moments in which the reader is inundated with technical language, language which would be “empty noise,” incite sentiment in readers because their failure to grasp these words places them outside the realm of control, facing a storm of sounds they cannot master. These moments make the distant experience proximal by generating feelings: readers are as powerless and incomprehending as the struggling sailors, who begin to realize, in fits and starts, that they are unable to save their ship. The distance created by the uncomprehension of the technical terms generates feelings, for better (inviting a welcome safety from responsibility) or worse (producing helpless witnessing of the sufferings of others).The technical terms also raise feeling because they are often spoken words, sounded through desperate, even bellowing, human voices. Frequently appearing as the sounds of the shouting sailors themselves, the technical terms appear primarily as commands issued in response to the crisis. Exclamation points heighten the sense of desperation, as in frantic shouted orders, such as: “ ‘A-weather heave the helm!’ ” (A, 2:33). At one point, the chief commands the sailors “ ‘To trim the fore-sail, next prepare all hands!’ ” (A, 2:34); these imperative, voiced commands position the reader close to the desperate commotion of the imperiled ship. “Hands” might be a metonym for sailors, but Falconer had also noted in his Universal Dictionary of the Marine that “handing” sails meant furling them. Sound suggests some measure of nearness, and words enunciated by a human voice in particular are audible only in a relatively immediate vicinity. Yet here sound is both immediate and distant, the words audible, but their meaning, for many, sometimes familiar, sometimes unknown (and readers’ ability to respond to said commands, of course, impossible). At some points, voice combines with other sounds of alarm: Thrice with shrill note the boatswain's whistle rung.“All hands unmoor!” Proclaims a boisterous cry:“All hands unmoor,” the cavern'd rocks reply! (C, 1:786–88)The shrill whistle is a signal of alarm, but inexperienced readers would not know the exact meaning of the signal, nor would they know the meaning of the anaphoric “ ‘All hands unmoor,’ ” itself a disembodied cry, as isolated and empty a call for some readers as the sound of the command reverberating off the “cavern'd rocks.” The echo makes the command doubly inanimate and hollow, a voice detached from a body.In the poem's transcriptions of insistent, shouted speech that is as ambiguous as it is emphatic, or sometimes even disembodied, as in the echo, eighteenth-century notions of the power of orality are both invoked and overturned, specifically the idea that a voice promises unmediated access to emotion and can provoke action. For many of the period's theorists of language and its origins, while writing—and even more so print—distances readers in time and space from the scene and sentiment represented, the impassioned voice offers a primal instance of unmediated communication. Language, for writers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, for instance, originated in a first speaker exclaiming a powerful, unambiguous emotion.13 As language progressed, what it gained in complexity and rationality, it lost in compelling immediacy. When the boatswain “cries” “like a hoarse mastiff” (C, 2:250), his animal bark resonates with descriptions of that originary motivated, dire, and supposedly unmediated communication—but it also cannot rise above the limits of an animal's cry. When, in the midst of the storm, the ship master cries, “ ‘let go the sheet!’ ” (A, 2:136), the poem solicits the charged emotion associated with orality at a moment of crisis. While reproduced dialogue tends to make characters seem more immediate to readers, in this poem, the shouting master, responding to the exigencies of the storm, is still more pressingly present to the reader, conjuring a sense of immediacy. And yet what he shouts is an instruction for the operating of the complex machinery of a merchant ship in a technical language unfamiliar to most readers. For those readers, the command is more like the echo—a sound distant from them, futile as a command to them. All the cries ultimately fail to mobilize a successful response.Moreover, through a series of graphic devices, the poem makes this exclaiming voice present.14 This is a poem in print, after all. Punctuation marks, such as exclamation points, or the single inverted commas and italics indicating speech, along with syntactical conventions, such as “he cries,” provide a conventional, formal graphic that readers must navigate and sublimate to produce, conversely, a feeling of immediacy. We might also call print conventions “technologies of immediacy,” for in such graphic cues we find a distancing visual noisiness that is, strangely, necessary to convey the imminent emergency of the ship. This noisiness is matched by the technical jargon that makes up most of what the master shouts. After a harrowing scene in which the sailors, struggling to avoid shipwreck, hack off the mast, these lines appear: “ ‘Square, fore and aft, the yards!’ the Master cries, / While round before th'enlarging wind she flies” (A, 3:3–4). The line begins with the jolting spondee, “Squáre, fóre,” and those words themselves are somewhat noisy, in the sense of being sound without clear meaning, given their unfamiliarity, in their nautical sense, to most readers. Even terms that may seem familiar, such as “square” and “enlarging,” to which the reader is brought with some immediacy through the shouted command, are, in this context, defamiliarized, so much so that Falconer provides a footnote for the term “enlarging.” The footnote explains, “The wind is said to enlarge when it veers from the side towards the stern, which it consequently must as the Ship veers before it,” dramatizing the distance between readers’ language and meaning and that of the sailors.The speaker compares the work of writing passages filled with such technical terms to Daedelus's experience in the maze. For Daedelus, as for the poem's speaker, it is art that provides the escape—“Art her salutary aid bestow'd, / And snatch'd him from the intricate abode” (A, 2:208–09). Yet the speaker, a sailor, knows the meaning of these technical terms—he admits, “Experience taught the rugged way” (A, 2:212). The land-borne reader, alternatively, is in a labyrinth of unfamiliar terms whose negotiation requires not art but prosaic explanation, provided in The Shipwreck through footnotes and diagrams. The footnotes hold out the promise of a grounding of meaning, seeming to offer a sound footing from which to understand the objects and experiences that the poem represents. But from the first footnote of the poem's first edition, sure footing gives way to still further technical points in need of explanation. The explanation, “Bows are the round parts in the fore-end of a Ship that meet and close in the Stem or Prow,” prompts the uninitiated reader to the ship's diagram, or perhaps, later, to Falconer's Universal Dictionary of the Marine, to discover the meaning of “fore-end,” or “stem,” or “prow.”15 There is, then, a sort of dual movement in play in the poem and its technologies of immediacy for landlubber readers. The technical language within the poem itself helps make the remote immediate, seeming to offer a footing amidst the swirl of actions and even fostering sentimental attachment. But to make the remote fully immediate requires mediating technologies of footnotes, maps, and diagrams.Thus, as the poem makes the sailors and ship present through technical language, the re-creation of aural experience of the threatened ship, and the impassioned voice of the captain—sounding them, by presenting the noises of the ship and its sailors—necessarily does so through a variety of mediating technologies. This is a move we might track in the etymological changes in the term “sound.” For “to sound” once meant “to sink in, penetrate, pierce” (OED, “sound, v. 1,” “oblivion, n. 1”). To sound in this sense does not necessarily imply mediation, as one might do the sinking in or penetrating of oneself directly. This sense of the term, however, became obsolete by the middle of the sixteenth century, replaced by a sense of the term as an act predicated on mediation. The next known sense of “to sound” is the nautical sense, in which one must “employ the line and lead, or other appropriate means, to ascertain the depth of the sea” (OED, “sound, v. 2”). In his Universal Dictionary of the Marine, Falconer specifies that “sounding” means “the operation of trying the depth of the water, and the quality of the ground, by means of a plummet.”16 To apprehend the unseen depth, to sound an imperceptible bottom, one must sink in or penetrate using a mediating tool.In expanding knowledge of the material world employing mediating tools—in this case the line and lead—sounding reflects the epistemology of the new science, an epistemology characterized by “a paradoxical logic,” as Kevis Goodman puts it, “whereby the demand for sense-immediacy was met by a multiplication of the techniques of mediation.”17 Goodman has in mind scientific instruments, such as the lenses that seemed to increase access to the infinitesimal and microscopic while actually adding layers of mediation between viewer and viewed.18Suggestively, Goodman also has in mind linguistic instruments, such as John Wilkins's proposed universal language, aimed at developing a less mediated language system but instead adding obscuring layers between word and thing.19 Falconer's poem explores the paradoxical logic of both instruments, depicting the actual instruments of scientific knowledge aboard a ship, such as the sounding plummet, but also using linguistic instruments, technical terms, and the footnotes and diagrams explaining them, to try to make as immediate as possible the sensory experience of distant sailors at sea, to sound them, all while adding layers of textual mediation. The poem's passages featuring the exact technical names of the complex machinery of a merchant ship as it struggles might be said to offer what Goodman describes as the new science's “fiction of improved immediacy” that actually “depends on an exertion of hyper-mediacy,” a “noisiness” in the form of the footnotes and diagrams necessary to understand that language (26). With pages in which no less than twenty-six lines of footnotes crowd out eight lines of poetic text on the page, for example, Falconer's poem exerts such hyper-mediacy, emitting noisiness.In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke ponders the paradoxical logic of the new science, imagining the results that would occur “if our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it is”—that is, if a mediating tool could intensify the auditory sense. He regards the effects of that technology of immediacy that could enhance sensory experience as sound, a “perpetual noise.” In particular, he turns to the nautical to illustrate the effect improved auditory perception would have on us, stating, “We should in the quietest retirement be less able to sleep or meditate, than in the middle of a sea-fight.”20 While it is a naval battle that Locke imagines, the shipwreck is a parallel instance of a distant maritime aural fray made noisily present to the reader through mediating enhancements. In both nautical instances, the distant ship at sea made noisily present becomes a limit point, the undesirable consequence of the making sensorily immediate that which had not been perceptible. For Locke, the resulting explosive sound should warn us from such efforts, a sign that the divine has placed appropriate limits on what we can sense. For Falconer, however, disruptive sou
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