作为航海图的海洋叙事：论海洋空间的文学绘图

Original 罗伯特·塔利外国文学研究 2021-09-20

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内容摘要

海洋给文学制图者带来了独特的问题。它辽阔的水域没有稳定或精确的地名、可记录的地点或醒目的地标，滚滚波涛中的暗流是仅有的通道。地球如此之多的表面被海洋空间覆盖，但在这个空间能看见或者能被绘入地图的却是如此之少。然而，这里也是海洋叙事的场所。海洋叙事是最具奇幻色彩的文学形式之一，是一种结合了旅行叙事的新闻报道与狂野传奇的极度冒险的文类。至少从 18 世纪末开始，海洋叙事伴随着全球经济的根本性变革不断发展，因为纯贸易的海洋空间成了资本生产过程中不可或缺的一部分。海洋叙事是理解这一不断变化的世界体系的重要形式，因为船员的个体视角同时将海洋空间的主观经验与难以理解的世界体系的整体性联系在一起。尽管其抵制表征，但赫尔曼·麦尔维尔和约瑟夫·康拉德等作家都竭力表征这个空间。在海洋叙事中，自然、社会、个体性和文本性的相互作用建立了一组复杂的动态坐标，据此可尝试海洋空间的文学绘图。本文探讨海洋空间对文学绘图所构成的挑战，并认为作为一种文类的海洋叙事是绘制这些独特的敌托邦和异托邦的有效方式。

作者简介

罗伯特·塔利 , 德克萨斯州立大学杰出人文教授、英语系教授，主要从事文学空间研究、19 世纪美国文学研究、马克思主义文学批评和文化批评；发表专著多部，现任麦克米伦出版社“地理批评与文学空间研究”系列丛书主编。

Title

Sea Narratives as Nautical Charts: On the Literary Cartography of Oceanic Spaces

Abstract

The ocean presents unique problems for the literary cartographer. Its vast watery expanse has no stable or distinctive toponyms, no places to record or landmarks to highlight, and the only paths available are those carved through the waves by invisible currents. So much of the world’s surface is covered by this oceanic space, where so little can be seen or mapped. And yet this space is also the site of one of the most fantastic of literary forms, the sea narrative, a genre that seems to combine the journalistic reporting of the travel narrative with the high adventures of wild romance. From the late eighteenth century, at least, the development of the sea narrative accompanied radical transformations of the global economy, as the oceanic spaces of mere trade became integral to the production processes of capital. The sea narrative was a crucial form in making sense of this changing world system, as the perspective of the shipboard individual at once connected the subjective experience of ocean space with the incomprehensible totality of the world system. Writers such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad struggled to represent this space even as the spaces resisted representation. In the sea narrative, the interplay of nature, society, individuality, and textuality establishes a complex, dynamic set of coordinates upon which the literary cartography of oceanic spaces can be attempted. This article discusses the challenge to literary cartography presented by oceanic spaces, and argues that the sea narrative as a genre functions as an effective way of mapping these distinctively atopian and heterotopian zones.

Author

Robert T. Tally Jr. is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English at Texas State University. His scholarly interests include spatial literary studies, the 19th-century American literature, Marxist literary criticism, and cultural criticism. He is the author of numerous books and serves as the editor of Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, a Palgrave Macmillan book series.

Email: robert.tally@txstate.edu

There is a humorous scene early in Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, where Ishmael is asked by Captain Peleg, an owner of the ship (the Pequod), why he wants to go “a-whaling,” and he responds, “I want to see the world.” The captain tells him to go look over the weather-bow, which was pointed toward the open ocean. Thus, Ishmael found himself looking at an endless horizon of nothing but the sea. As he notes, “The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety could I see” (Melville 79, 81). He reports back to Captain Peleg that he saw “Not much…nothing but water,” and Peleg jokes, “Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see more of it, eh? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?” (81) The open sea, it would seem, does not offer much of a view.

Captain Peleg is teasing the naïve Ishmael, but it is also true that once the Pequod sets sail from Nantucket, in a chapter titled “Merry Christmas,” the sailors aboard—and the readers also—will never see land again. Ishmael (or Melville) may describe many wonders along the way, and the poetic and philosophical content of the text is undeniably powerful, but during the course of the voyage, no “landmarks” are seen at all, and in the final “scene” of the novel, “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (624), a reference to Noah’s flood in the Bible, when the ocean would have covered the entire planet. The irony, on display in Captain Peleg’s joke, is that there is not much to see in this world, at least not for the curious tourist in search of new experiences. This might explain the choices of the artist and cartographer Everett Henry, whose lovely painting, “The Voyage of the Pequod” (1953), traces the same trajectory of the ship, but also depicts a wide range of places and events located on land. The open ocean as Ishmael encounters it does not serve as a very entertaining tableau.

Oceanic spaces present unique problems for the literary cartographer. Lacking stable or distinctive toponyms, no places to record or landmarks to highlight, the vast, watery spaces of the world are constantly marked and remarked upon, but the only paths available are those carved through the waves by invisible currents, disclosing what the Beowulf poet called a “whale-road,” but leaving little behind that can afford one a consistent sense of place. In this essay I wish to discuss the relationship between literary cartography and oceanic spaces; as a distinctive type of space, which may or may not function as a mappable ensemble of places, the sea presents different and varied challenges to literary representation. The sea narrative is the genre or form of literature that most directly attempts to map such spaces, and its difficulties in faithfully registering the full experience of maritime space thus offers an exemplary case of the limits, and prospects, of literary cartography more generally.

Is the Sea a Place?

Traditionally, in both the geographic and the political imagination, the sea is not really a “place” in and of itself. Looking at a physical map or nautical chart, the vast blue (usually blue) watery space is largely a backdrop upon which the terrestrial features or places—islands, coastlines, reefs, or even shallows—are figured or marked. The sea, somewhat like the inky night sky for the stargazer, represents so much space between and among various places, but does not quite appear as a place, and yet, it is also absolutely crucial to human experience. The ocean represents what Siobhan Carroll has referred to as an “atopia,” a “non-place” far more hostile and resistant to cartographic representation and to homely experience than those that Marc Augé had examined in Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992). As Carroll observes,

Natural atopias, like the North Pole, the ocean, the atmosphere, the desert or the subterranean, are unusual forms of space that, because of their physical features or environmental conditions, resist being converted into the sites of affective habitation we call “place.” […] Of these spaces, the paradigmatic atopia, and the one that continues to influence our conceptualization of unfamiliar spaces, is the ocean. It plays this role in part because of its significant role in legal and political history. On one hand, the ocean has always been essential to travel, global trade and imperial conquest. On the other, its fluidity has posed substantial challenges to states seeking to extend land-based power across its surface. (Carroll 159-160)

In an obvious but also odd way, the ocean lacks territoriality, and yet it is also a space subjected to ever more complicated and nuanced forms of territorialization over human history. For example, where Stuart Elden’s The Birth of Territory (2013) reveals the long processes by which the earth’s terrestrial spaces were transformed into “territories” in the full sense of that term, Philip E. Steinberg, in The Social Construction of the Ocean (2001), has demonstrated the manner by which oceanic spaces have been produced over time and across social orders in accordance with different modes of production.

So much of the world’s surface is covered by this oceanic space, where so little can be seen or mapped, that it really ought to be central to any discussions of social and natural spaces, and yet it has frequently been relegated to the margins as land-based places, inhabitable and uninhabitable alike, take precedence in spatiality studies, for the most part. In her call for a more materialist approach to oceanic studies, Hester Blum has rightly noted that “The sea is not a metaphor. Figurative language has its place in analyses of the maritime world, certainly, but oceanic studies could be more invested in the uses, and problems, of what is literal in the face of the sea’s abyss of representation” (670). And yet, even with the historicist and materialist perspective, one that focuses on the actual lives and records of sailors, for instance, the sense of placelessness in oceanic spaces has its real topophrenic consequences, which are related to the challenges to literary or graphic representation in the form of mapping. Take the English expression to be “at sea”, which is fundamentally synonymous with being lost or bewildered; one’s sense of being dangerously “out of place” is intensified in the vast, abyssal zones associated with the ocean, which in turn may be transcoded onto a larger world system in need of cognitive mapping, to cite Fredric Jameson’s well known formulation.

It is perhaps noteworthy that Christian Thorne, in an essay on the ways in which the novel has remained tied to the conceptual space of the nation-state and cannot seem to adequately represent a supranational or global sphere, titles his exploration of this subject, “The Sea is Not a Place.” Thorne does not really mention maritime literature per se, and by using the phrase “the sea is not a place” for his title, he seems to suggest that literature “of the sea” may not be localized in space; in any event, such literature will not suffice to represent “world literature.” I would argue that Moby-Dick, for one, does achieve this sense of being a “world text,” as Franco Moretti has characterized it in his strange literary history of modernism, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (1995). Indeed, as I have argued in “World Literature and Its Discontents,” Moby-Dick might stand as the preeminent text for an investigation into world literature precisely because it makes the attempt to represent a global space, a vast historical range, a meticulous description of industrial labor, and a new form of philosophical speculation all at once its entire raison d’etre (Tally, “World Literature” 412-416). It is, as Edward Said once put it, “about […] the whole world” (369).

Maritime literature, broadly conceived so as to include Moby-Dick, for example, could be defined in part by this attempt to map this distinctive space. Oceanic space is the paradigmatic site of one of the most fantastic of literary forms, the sea narrative, which has thrilled readers and listeners for as long as tales of the sea can be found, going back to and even beyond the great floods of Gilgamesh and Gun-Yu. Modernity brings its own forms and effects, and while the sea has been absolutely crucial to the development of the modern and postmodern world system, it has also been an almost unrepresentable space, the precincts of monsters and mystery, as with Olaus Magnus’s Map of Scandinavia (1539), which features bizarre marine animals and mythic creatures in the waters of the North Sea. In that sense, the sea is also a principal locale for the literary imagination, which in turn makes it a crucial space for literary cartography.

Smooth and Striated Space

The sea narrative, as a genre that has appeared in various incarnations ranging from ancient myth to modern scientific accounts, may be imagined as a distinctive form of literary cartography. That is, these narratives enable the writer and the reader to give form to, and make sense of, the vast oceanic spaces of the world while also attempting to situate us, as individual or collective subjects, in meaningful relation to this almost impossibly large frame of reference. The sea, being oceanic, is almost its own infinite cosmos, and yet it is also the critical space in which cultures and civilizations emerge, come into contact, and transform themselves and one another. The sea is the ultimate “contact zone,” to cite Mary Louise Pratt’s famous term from her study of travel writing, Imperial Eyes, while also exhibiting an ominous sense of placelessness. As William Boelhower has pointed out, the ocean is “fundamentally a space of dispersion, conjunction, distribution, contingency, heterogeneity, and of intersecting and stratified lines and images—in short, a field of strategic possibilities in which the Oceanic order holds all together in a common but highly fluid space” (92-93). In the attempt to represent this zone and its meanings, sea narratives must figuratively generate real-and-imagined places in a speculative but also formal system, which is also to say, to map it.

The French theorists, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their unclassifiable work, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), distinguish between smooth and striated space: “in the first case ‘space is occupied without being counted,’ and in the second ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’” (362). As they add, “the sea is a smooth space par excellence, and yet it was the first to encounter the demands of an increasingly strict striation” (479). Perhaps, the most obvious example of this is the cartographic imposition of the Cartesian grid, what Bertrand Westphal has referred to as “the cage of meridians,” in which the open and oscillatory space of the ocean becomes rigidly fixed in a network of abstract lines, points, and coordinates. In this way, the vast space of the Pacific becomes measurable and ordered, as it is cordoned off into discrete segments, while various place names are highlighted along its beaches and islands. Striation renders the space knowable, which in turn enables it to become part of a broader system of knowledge and power.

We must note, however, that striation is not necessarily a bad thing, only that it attempts to fix, if only provisionally, spatial ensembles that may be subject to more complex and nuanced relations. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new spaces, switches adversaries. Never believe that smooth space will suffice to save us” (500). Indeed, I would add that the attempt to map such spaces is inevitably a sort of striating practice, but one that can make possible the disclosure of new, potentially smooth, spaces. Narratives do this very thing, by at once representing the spaces in them and transforming them through the power of the imagination. Literary cartography is thus also part of the system of power and knowledge, although it also frequently discloses aspects of the system that may encourage reversals of power-relations and engender new knowledges. In mapping these spaces, the writer registers them within a knowable framework, but in so doing the writer also modifies that framework, which now incorporates new figures and forms associated with the mapping project itself.

The sea narrative in modern literature, as a genre, seems to combine the journalistic reporting of the travel narrative with the high adventures of wild romance, two related forms that highlight this mixture of scientific ordering (striation) and speculative or transformative disordering (re-establishing smooth spaces). Whereas the travelogue seeks to understand and to make knowable the spaces and places it depicts, plodding along in the details of quotidian reality, the fantastic romance subordinates such spaces to a new vision of the world, one that may well contain dragons and allow for dizzyingly original flights of fancy.

From the late eighteenth-century, at least, the development of the sea narrative accompanied radical transformations of the global economy, as the oceanic spaces of mere trade became integral to the production processes of capital. The sea narrative was a crucial form in making sense of this changing world system, as the perspective of the shipboard individual at once connected the subjective experience of oceanic space with the incomprehensible totality of the world system. Writers such as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad struggled to represent this space even as the spaces resisted representation. In the sea narrative, the interplay of nature, society, individuality, and textuality establishes a complex, dynamic set of coordinates upon which the literary cartography of oceanic spaces can be attempted.

The sea narrative, broadly conceived, is a genre that functions as a way of mapping these distinctively heterotopian spaces, while at the same time acknowledging a certain “unmappability” of the domain. The sea may be experienced and studied, even intensely, but it seems to resist being known. Sirens, as in the Odyssey, are symbolic of both the danger and the allure; above all, Odysseus wishes to gain knowledge and experience, yet the oceanic spaces he traverses - and that we conceive as we follow such journeys - threaten to end the quest at every moment. (Since we are told in the opening lines of the Odyssey that Odysseus will arrive home late, broken, and alone, we may conclude that being a member of Odysseus’s crew has to be one of the worst jobs in the ancient Homeric world system.) If, as Heraclitus would have it, one cannot step into the same river twice, for the river is always changing, flowing downhill, then how much more complex and turbulent is the sea, whose tides and waves churn endlessly across almost unimaginably vast spaces of the earth, not to mention into unplumbable depths? And yet, the sea narrative endures, and literary cartographers attempt to map and remap this distinctive space.

Markings

As this example of the Odyssey suggests, the sea narrative when defined broadly is likely as old as storytelling itself, but the sea, like the land, is subject to its own historical developments. Without contesting the obvious truth that the ocean is a natural space, one can also follow Steinberg in viewing space as socially constructed: the ocean is a “space where social contradictions are worked through, social change transpires, and future social relations are imagined” (209). At various stages of human social development in different parts of the planet, the sea and its spaces have been socially constructed and figured forth in the service of all manner of projects, most notably involving trade and exploration. With the advent of modernity, one might say that these projects expanded and intensified at astonishing rates, and that the representation of the sea thus becomes all the more freighted with significance and value. By the mid-nineteenth-century, when Melville was writing his strange narratives of exotic travel, maritime adventure, and philosophical meditations and speculations, the oceanic space had become critical to the global economic system in its emergence (see, e.g., my Melville, Mapping, and Globalization).

Cesare Casarino, in his Modernity at Sea (2002), asserts that “[t]he nineteenth-century sea narrative constituted a crucial laboratory for the crisis that goes by the name of modernity” (1). Writers like Melville and Conrad operated in this laboratory, as did Karl Marx more metaphorically, whose voyages in critical thought charted the shifting and turbulent seas of an emerging world system. These writers, unbeknownst to themselves perhaps, figured forth a literary cartography of the world in which we are living today, but we who are “at sea,” situated within this terraqueous, global network, continue to do our part to make sense of a vast and shifting life-world. Each writer established connections between production, circulation, and a world system that would lay the foundations for globalization.

Conrad, like Melville, was himself a sailor and a sea voyager. He also experimented with linguistic forms and narrative techniques in order to find ways to represent experiences that seemed to evade description or even understanding, which is perhaps why these two writers stand out above all others operating in the English language with respect to the sea. In Lord Jim, Conrad offers a marvelous vision of striated space even as it highlights the ineffability of that oceanic experience:

She [i.e., the ship] held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle—viscous, stagnant, dead. The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer. (9)

Here, Conrad’s description of the ship’s relationship to the sky and to the water figures forth an image that is at once extraordinarily vivid and yet disconcertingly unfamiliar. The sky is oppressive, the sea is dead, and the ship itself becomes a sort of quill that marks these dual parchments with its evanescent writing. The line marks the progress across this aquatic “plain,” only to see its “story” disappear only moments later.

This is what might be considered a high modernist maneuver, in which the effort to delineate a path is thwarted by a fundamentally absurd or meaningless cosmos, here figured as the natural world—sky and sea—itself. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, another vision is presented, in which the scientific and romantic elements combine to unite, and at the same time sunder, man and nature.

In the chapter titled “The Chart,” Captain Ahab lays out his own sea charts and, consulting his logbooks as well, begins to “intently study the various lines and shadings which there met his eye,” and “with slow but steady pencil trace additional lines over spaces that before were blank.” Then, Melville writes, “[w]hile thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead” (215). In this evocative image, the navigator or cartographer is himself “marked” even as he is attempting to mark the spaces on the map. Melville’s reversal is profound, since he takes what seemed to be the subjective mapper (Ahab) and turns him into the object (the map), which might be said to be foreshadowing the reversals to come.

The opening scene of “The Chart” is not just a metaphorical case of the mapper being mapped. In this chapter Melville evokes what Jonathan Arac has called “a new mode of trans-subjective agency,” in which the narrator directly compromises the distinction between subject and object, leading ultimately to an interpretive perplexity over which character is the hunter and which the hunted (Arac 48). Arac highlights a similar “transfer” in a later scene, that memorable moment in which for the first time the reader encounters Moby Dick in the flesh: “At length, the breathless hunter [Ahab] came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing” (Melville 596). A few pages later, after the whale attacks Ahab’s boat, the phrase “his prey” is used again, although the meaning has been reversed, as Ahab is now the object of Moby Dick’s hunt (599). As becomes clear, Ahab’s much vaunted individualism and iron will are troubled by the forces that overwhelm him, which are ultimately figured in the persona of the white whale himself, which could be said to represent that unrepresentable totality itself. Another way to say it: the oceanic space marks and overwhelms the cartographer even as it is being mapped.

The blurring of subject and object here could be connected to a romantic comportment to Nature, and especially to the Sea, which is forever beyond the ken of the finite human mind even if man is obsessed with it, as Ishmael suggests throughout this novel. There is no mastery of the sea, only a recognition that one must try and fail, over and over. Here the itinerary of the subject and the map of the objective space reveal their fundamental incompatibility, but, at the same time, their necessary connections. Whereas Conrad’s Jim could imagine marking nature or the sea only to see one’s marks fade, like Ozymandias’s empire in the sands of time, Melville’s Ahab is forever marked by his attempts to “mark” or know this world.

Heterotopia and the Sea

As far as literary cartography goes, these features might well be found in representations of terrestrial domains also. But I do think that the sea narrative introduces special challenges to narrative mapping that might not affect adventures by land or travelogues of more grounded experiences. The utter inhospitability of the sea, which is quite literally uninhabitable by mankind, sets it apart, even if deserts, arctic regions, or the surface of the moon might offer approximate alternatives as well. Such “natural atopias,” to use Carroll’s term again, have a way of becoming heterotopic when they are featured as contact zones in which different modes of representation clash. This space enfolds and configures other spatial forms. As Carroll observes,

The challenges posed by the ocean also produced new meanings for other types of space, most notably the island and the ship. These spaces—one natural and one manmade—played essential roles in preserving human life at sea and thus permitting the extension of sovereign power over the waves. If the ocean functions as a paradigmatic atopia, the ship functions as the paradigmatic model for the human structure that enables survival in atopia. As such, it is often invoked in alongside similar human structures such as air balloons, spaceships, and even mines, to emphasize the dangers of the vessel’s surrounding environment and the social and physical labor needed to operate there. (Carroll 161)

The interaction between the individual or collective human subjects and a space that is supremely inhuman requires multiple mediations, including the invention and articulation of new ways of seeing and mapping.

In this way, the sea narrative develops a literary cartography, a verbal-nautical chart, that combines the subject’s own reflexive relationship with the ever-changing topography with an abstract, scientific or “objective” presentation. These two poles are mediated, as it were, but the utterly fantastic adventure that partakes of both while belonging to neither. What I mean is that this sort of narrative necessarily avails itself of something like fantasy—that is, an otherworldly discourse—even as it involves the intensely subjective experience or exploration of space and the map-like description or registration of spaces within a rigid framework or grid. As I have put it elsewhere, “The radical alterity of fantasy or of the fantastic mode broadly conceived enables and promotes a projection of a world that can, if only provisionally, be mapped” (Tally, Topophrenia 168). Between these variations on ways of knowing, there is also the sense that anything can happen.

In the closing lines of his famous essay on heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault asserted that “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence,” and it seems clear that he is imagining the open ocean and the narratives to be told, retold, and invented anew upon that space. He explains that, “if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea […][moving] from port to port, from tack to tack, […] you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century to the present, the great instrument of economic development, but simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination” (27). This last point is crucial, particularly for us today, living in a world in which the powers of the imagination appear to be attenuated in the face of a monstrous status quo, a landlocked sense that this space is and must forever be the same. The sea has always represented endless possibilities, and the ocean voyage, in turn, involves adventure and becoming. The literary cartography produced by maritime narratives both depicts and shapes the experiences and meanings that readers will discover in those maps.

In the case of Moby-Dick, the narrative mapmaking extends beyond the mere representation of spaces around the world and points to the ways that the maritime trajectory of the Pequod figures forth a broader depiction of a global economy. Partly, this has to do with the industry itself, as the whaling business in the early nineteenth century produced enormous wealth in the United States and elsewhere. But whaling was also, by necessity, a global enterprise. Despite its actual decline around the time Melville was writing, the whaling industry itself makes for a proleptic figure of the postmodern or multinational industry of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A predecessor of the oil industry, which may be the very model of postmodern corporate subjectivity, whaling is among the first truly multinational businesses. Take the multinational labor force for instance; it is not only that the crew is made up of individuals from all regions of the globe. Melville writes that “not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast in the American whale fishery, are American born,” and this rough estimate seems to be borne out in the historical record (131). The industry also operates in a way quite distinct from traditional national industries. Melville’s whale fishery is an industry that involves a sort of flexible production. In fact, it entails the full circuit of capitalist production—production, distribution, consumption—as well as the related processes of extracting raw materials, refining and packaging, storing and transporting the products, and so on. Much is made of the ship’s transformation into a factory in “The Try-Works,” but factory-production is but one aspect of the industry as Melville describes it. Whale oil is both the product of and the fuel for its own production. The actual work of producing it combines a primitive or primordial hunting with industrial production and even provides glimpses of a consumer society in which the consumers of the commodities are so distant, conceptually and geographical, from the production that they can have no real idea of the real circumstances under which their commodity is produced. In this sense, the nineteenth-century whaling prefigures the twentieth century’s vast, multinational oil and petroleum industries.

Along those lines, one can imagine the ways that Lord Jim, ostensibly the story of an individual sailor tormented by a guilty conscience, implicates an entire British colonial system. The evanescent lines drawn by the steamship on the sea and the sky, as quoted above, becomes scarcely detectable traces of the relations of power in a geopolitical complex by which the British Empire extends its reach from London to the Red Sea to the South Pacific, laying the foundations for globalization in the following century. The intensely psychological story of Jim, which plays itself out in the narrative in the forms of melodrama and existentialism, is part of what Jameson has referred to Conrad’s “strategies of containment,” whereby the social or political symbolism of the novel remains hidden, or “unconscious,” with respect to the “main” story (Jameson, Political Unconscious 266-267). Similarly, a geocritical or spatially-oriented reading of Lord Jim can disclose the geopolitical content that Conrad’s literary cartography traces in such figurative and aestheticized ways. In Melville’s and Conrad’s sea narratives, readers can discover the contours of the multinational, political and economic world system in its emergence.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I want to bring this discussion back to our own material world, but I must avoid the metaphor so associated with it: to wit, being grounded. We are human, which is to say, terrestrial beings, who it seems do not belong in the sea. And yet the sea is as much a part of human civilizations as any land or territory. Ultimately, this cartographic imperative impels us to adventures, which motivates us to roam over land and sea, belt and road. Our future, like our present and past, requires both, and the land and sea are ultimately intertwined as spatial ensembles that condition our lives. The changes to the representations of the sea affect the very way that such spaces can be imagined. Indeed, as Steinberg points out, “the social construction of the ocean-space to emerge will be embedded in—and contribute to—the construction of a new social order for the land as well as the sea” (209).

This is as true for our reading as for our writing, insofar as these literary maps must be skillfully read by critics attuned to the representational problems associated with the spaces involved. As I have said in a different context, “a critical practice such as geocriticism, operating as it does in a fantastic mode, may thereby achieve novel vistas, look back on the worldly world from our radically otherworldly perspective, project new constellations and maps, and maybe just perceive things a bit differently” (Tally, Topophrenia 168). And in the process of mapping, we explore these spaces, describe them, and make possible alternative visions. In this manner, we transform the world even as we attempt to map it. If the nineteenth-century sea narrative addressed the crises associated with the advent of modernity, which has since exploded into a myriad of hitherto unrecognizable patterns amid the postmodern processes of globalization in the late twentieth century, then literary narratives today, whether their events take place on sea or land, will no doubt be necessary to help us navigate the uncertain yet promising weather on the twenty-first-century’s expansive seas.

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此文原载于《外国文学研究》2020年第2期

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