Shipwreck in Art and Literature

Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day

Carl Thompson, Carl Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136161520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

1 Introduction

Carl Thompson

DOI: 10.4324/9780203079683-1

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.

Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1973)¹

Sea travel, with all its momentous implications for trade, conquest, and the diffusion of cultures, has a long history. Human beings were using vessels that could be labelled boats or ships by at least the fourth millennium BCE, whilst the very first open-sea voyages in more rudimentary craft probably occurred some 50,000 years ago, in the waters off what is now Southeast Asia.² Yet if the history of successful seafaring is a long one, the history of shipwreck and related forms of maritime disaster is presumably even longer—unless the first would-be mariners were extraordinarily lucky in their daring new experiment. Thereafter, shipwreck has constantly shadowed humanity’s efforts to master the sea. Providing a recurrent reminder of the limits of human power and ingenuity, the foundering ship has been an enduring source of fear, fascination, and anguished contemplation for many communities. This has, in turn, generated a rich tradition of shipwreck-themed art and literature, spanning many cultures and periods. The earliest known literary depiction of shipwreck is found in a papyrus dating from the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt (c. 2050–1650 BCE): it tells of a shipwrecked sailor, the sole survivor of a 150-strong crew, who is washed up on a magical island ruled by a benevolent giant serpent.³ The first visual depictions of shipwreck similarly date from antiquity, with Greek wine jars from the eighth century BCE showing scenes of overturned ships and drowning men which may represent Odysseus’s shipwreck; and in both literature and art, these are just the earliest surviving examples of what were almost certainly much older literary and artistic traditions.⁴

These ancient depictions of shipwreck herald the emergence of what would grow to be a major theme and topos in western art and literature. Indeed, to inspect the traditional western literary canon with an eye attuned to maritime disaster is to find shipwrecks everywhere: in the Bible and in Homer and Virgil; in Camões, Rabelais, and Shakespeare; in More’s Utopia (1516), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Byron’s Don Juan (1818), and Hopkins’s Wreck of the Deutschland (1875); and in Poe, Melville, Thoreau, Conrad, and many others. In the visual arts, similarly, figures such as Vernet, Géricault, Turner, Winslow Homer, and Sydney Nolan have produced powerful and iconic works on the theme of shipwreck and suffering at sea, whilst the topic’s continuing appeal in modern popular culture is demonstrated by James Cameron’s record-breaking Titanic (1997)—for a decade the highest-grossing film in movie history—and more recently by Ang Lee’s 2012 film adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2001). As these examples suggest, the literature and art of shipwreck has encompassed a great variety of styles, modes, and genres. The topic has been treated tragically, sensationally, philosophically, even comically. Some writers and artists have sought to commemorate, explicate, or in some way utilize for their own purposes real-life disasters at sea; others have fashioned wholly imaginary wrecks. And whilst shipwreck has frequently functioned simply as a narrative device or as an easy means to introduce drama and excitement to a work, these disasters have also often been invested with complex layers of existential, religious, and political symbolism, thereby becoming potent metaphors for some supposed larger truth such as the state of the nation, the workings of Providence, or the human condition.

Indisputably a pervasive and important topos in the western literary and artistic tradition, shipwreck remains a comparatively underresearched theme.⁵ The present volume seeks to redress this deficiency. Assembling an international group of contributors drawn from a range of disciplinary fields, it provides a variety of perspectives on the role of shipwreck in art and literature and addresses a rich diversity of what one can term ‘naufragic’ texts and images: fictional and factual accounts, highbrow masterpieces and lowbrow entertainments, poems, ballads and popular songs, films, comic books, and Conceptual art. Like the scuba-diving speaker of the Adrienne Rich poem cited above, the contributors in their different ways all seek ‘to explore the wreck’, as they investigate both a range of specific literary and artistic wrecks, and also the power, resonance, and endurance of the shipwreck motif more generally. At the same time, they differ from the speaker of Rich’s poem in one important regard. Rich’s scuba diver descends to the sea’s depths seeking ‘the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth’ (ll. 62–63). The essays gathered here, however, are concerned precisely with the stories and myths that have historically been told both about individual wrecks and shipwreck generally. That is to say, they are chiefly concerned with shipwrecks as they circulate in culture, as representations in a variety of media, rather than with the historical circumstances or archaeological legacy of real-life wrecks. As we shall see, however, it is never entirely possible to divorce these cultural constructions from the material realities of shipwreck, which in highly maritime cultures like those of early modern and modern Europe exert a constant informing pressure on both the production and reception of naufragic imagery.

These representations of shipwreck repay—and arguably require—critical scrutiny for several reasons. The contributors to this volume do not share any one theoretical or methodological approach, and they consider literary and artistic shipwrecks from a variety of disciplinary angles. Yet their chapters constitute collectively a longitudinal study of a very important motif in western culture. Shipwreck in Art and Literature demonstrates the rich imaginative potential of the shipwreck topos, tracing its development over almost two millennia and investigating its various inflections and valences in differing times and places. Recovering the diverse and complex meanings that have historically attached to the shipwreck motif, the essays assembled here take the first steps towards what in traditional art-historical practice might be labelled both an ‘iconography’ and an ‘iconology’ of shipwreck.⁶ These terms, now admittedly somewhat old-fashioned, point to a two-step process. The first, ‘iconography’, involves the gathering of knowledge about key narrative and visual conventions, common generic patterns, and so forth; the second, ‘iconology’, signifies the interpretation of works which deploy these conventions and patterns, leading ultimately to an assessment of the deeper cultural logic which generates this recurrent fascination with a given theme, trope or topos. It is to the latter project especially that the present volume addresses itself. Although individual contributors do not necessarily concern themselves with this larger agenda, the book as a whole seeks to shed light on the underlying cultural and historical currents which have fed an enduring fascination with shipwreck in the western world, and simultaneously to explore the ideological dimensions of many representations of maritime disaster, both in the past and in the present.

Tales and images of shipwreck are of course not unique to the so-called West. To offset any undue sense of western exceptionalism in this regard, Shipwreck in Art and Literature begins with an essay by Sarah Shaw which maps for the first time a rich Buddhist tradition of naufragic art and literature; and it closes with essays that remind us in various ways that shipwreck is today a fate generally reserved for migrants seeking to escape poverty, oppression, and war in the Global South. The volume’s main focus, however, is on western depictions of maritime disaster. This emphasis is intended to reflect and interrogate the importance of myths of seafaring, nautical exploration, and transoceanic trade in the formation of modern western identity and, indeed, of western modernity. For Hegel, it was the turn to the sea which made the peoples of Europe (and in due course North America) into the agents of world history. Insofar as Hegel means to imply that only western cultures have exhibited such restless, transformative seafaring, this view has quite rightly been dismissed as Eurocentric ideology. But it nevertheless says something important about how the West likes to imagine itself and the mythic status still possessed by figures like Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook. Hegel’s claim also reminds us that it has been very much through the exercise of maritime power and the establishment of maritime networks of trade, conquest, and communication that the West has sought to transform the rest of the world in its own image and to its own ends. As Philip Steinberg has noted, ‘It is difficult to over-state the role of the ocean in the modern world-system’, and this system was of course largely created during the colonial era by the now ‘developed’ nations of western Europe and North America and still works very much to their advantage (although the axis of economic power is beginning to tilt towards China, India, and Brazil).⁷

This larger geopolitical context, along with growing environmental concerns, has led in recent years to a burgeoning of academic interest in the maritime. As Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun commented in 2004, ‘the sea has begun to emerge as a truly interdisciplinary field of enquiry’.⁸ The present volume is accordingly intended as a contribution to the ‘New Thalassology’, as this emergent field has been dubbed.⁹ An understanding of how diverse societies negotiate, both artistically and ideologically, maritime disaster is obviously very relevant to this larger project of exploring both the cultural history of the sea and its ongoing presence in our lives. Indeed, in our current ‘postmodern’ epoch, shipwreck constitutes an especially useful lens for a broad range of cultural and historical enquiries. As we shall see in the final section of this introduction and then repeatedly over the course of the volume, it is a theme which frequently brings into focus little-known configurations and suppressed histories in the evolution of the western cultural imaginary, whilst simultaneously revealing some of the occlusions and illusions which sustain our modern world order. Before addressing these concerns, however, I offer first a brief overview of the evolution of naufragic imagery in western art, literature, and philosophy.

The Uses of Shipwreck

The term ‘shipwreck’ admits of several different definitions and encompasses a variety of forms of maritime mishap and disaster. In the present context, it is perhaps most important to note simply that a shipwreck can be both an object and an event. As object, a wreck is the physical remnant(s) of a boat or ship that has run aground, sunk, or in some other way become so significantly damaged that it is no longer properly operable as a sailing vessel. As event, a wreck is the process by which a boat or ship is destroyed or disabled. The set of circumstances which bring this about can take various forms and have various causes. Ships may be wrecked through natural, human, and even divine agency (at least according to some interpreters of the disaster); it is further worth noting that shipwreck as an event or process may be so devastating that it leaves behind no material trace, no shipwreck as object.

To cover the range of tragic possibilities just outlined, anthologies of real-life shipwreck stories—a hugely popular genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—usually adopt a catch-all title along the lines of ‘Shipwrecks and Other Disasters at Sea’.¹⁰ The present volume adopts the same expansive and somewhat elastic attitude to what constitutes a shipwreck, and it is necessarily also flexible in its understanding of what counts as a contribution to the literature or art of shipwreck. As genres or conceptual categories, the terms ‘shipwreck literature’ and ‘shipwreck art’ clearly need to encompass many depictions of ships which are never actually wrecked at all but merely face the threat of shipwreck as they labour in high seas or drift perilously close to rocks. Similarly, one cannot draw a sharp dividing line, in literature, between accounts which have a shipwreck as their tenor or primary point of focus and those which invoke shipwreck in a figurative sense, as a metaphoric vehicle to illustrate some other theme. Such figurative uses of the shipwreck motif have a long history, stretching back to antiquity, and have taken innumerable forms, in western culture at least—further evidence, perhaps, that shipwreck and the perilous voyage are significant master tropes and, as it were, key ‘metaphors to live by’ in the western cultural imaginary.¹¹ In this way, an imagery of voyaging and shipwreck has been frequently applied to themes as varied as the journey of life, the progress of the Christian soul, the act of literary composition, and even falling in love or getting drunk.¹² Such figurative or symbolic invocations of shipwreck, when developed at length and in detail, may become themselves a significant depiction of shipwreck, and of course they frame and inform many accounts and images which depict shipwreck more squarely and directly, including even supposedly factual accounts of real-life historical disasters.

Scenes of vessels in danger invoke implicitly the two later stages of the shipwreck scenario: first the disaster itself, the critical moment at which the ship becomes irretrievably damaged, and then the aftermath of the wreck and the search for survivors. The latter phase of the shipwreck paradigm has been the focus of a long and prolific tradition of castaway na...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Capsized Self: Sea Navigation, Shipwrecks and Escapes from Drowning in Southern Buddhist Narrative and Art
• 3 ‘Describe nunc tempestatem’: Sea Storm and Shipwreck Type Scenes in Ancient Literature
• 4 The Sunken Voice: Depth and Submersion in Two Early Modern Portuguese Accounts of Maritime Peril
• 5 God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of Ocean in Early Modern England and America
• 6 Shipwreck and the Forging of the Commercial Nation: The 1786 Wreck of the Halsewell
• 7 Shipwreck in French and British Visual Art, 1700–1842: Vernet, Northcote, Géricault, and Turner
• 8 Shipwrecks on the Streets: Maritime Disaster and the Broadside Ballad Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland
• 9 What Lies Beneath: The Submarine Shipwreck in Anglo-American Culture, 1880–1920
• 10 Molly Brown and the Titanic: The Shipwrecked Woman in U.S. Culture
• 11 Shipwrecking the World’s ‘Wretched Refuse’: Spectres of Neocolonial Exclusion in Carl de Souza’s Ceux qu’on jette à la mer and Charles Masson’s Droit du sol
• 12 Wrecked in the Shallows: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi
• 13 Salvaging a Romantic Trope: The Conceptual Resurrection of Shipwreck in Recent Art Practice
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index