LITMIR.BIZ

      Fig. 2 Map of Manchester slum. From Friedrich Engels. Der Lage der Arbeitenden Klasse in England, 1845.

      There was a deliberate and ironic anachronism in Engels’ choice of the sailing packet as a platform from which to launch an economic investigation of the city, underscoring capitalism’s descent from its “earlier heroic phase” to the depraved exploitation of the fully developed industrial system.¹⁰ This device contained an element of theater, a staging of a “backward” German traveller’s touristic awe at the sights, which echoes even today in insurrectionary literature.¹¹

      But ultimately Engels recognized that the port of London was in no respect anachronistically “outside” the contemporary system of production: “This great population has made London the commercial capital of the world and has created the gigantic docks in which are assembled the thousands of ships which always cover the River Thames.”¹² The order of causality here is significant: the port is the product of industrial capitalism. What is absent is a developed theory of primitive accumulation, which would comprehend the prior role of the merchant ship in producing that next stage of capital ist development. If the initial iconography of Engels’ journey to London and Manchester can be traced to Amsterdam, the Dutch precedent for his opening description of the bustling scene on the Thames can be found most clearly in paintings such as Ludolph Backhuysen’s Shipping before Amsterdam (1666), or earlier in Hendrick Vroom’s Return of the Second Dutch Expedition to the West Indies (1599). These are paintings with a deck or lowermast level viewpoint from which the profile of the city of Amsterdam is partly obscured by the density of triumphant vessels in the river IJ. The standard art-historical interpretation of pictures such as these assigns a larger symbolic and anthropomorphic significance to the image of the ship:

      … a ship is not an inanimate object but a complex manned entity that is rarely depicted in isolation; by its very nature it is related to a larger visible or implied whole. Not only are these ships some of the most complex products of seventeenth-century engineering, but their inherently human presence arouses our interest. Once we realize that they are pitted against the elements or against each other we become absorbed in their destiny. By implication the subject is dramatic because there must be an outcome: survival or destruction–victory or defeat.¹³

      It is precisely this insistence on hidden allegory that Svetlana Alpers opposes in her argument that what distinguishes Dutch paintings is the intellectually complex character of their non-narrative, “descriptive” engagement with the world and conditions of visual knowing. Alpers defends a mode of pictorial absorption that is not dependent on symbolization or narrativity. But the dramaturgy of eternal struggle and “destiny,” intended to elevate marine paintings above the level of mere documents of “seventeenth-century engineering” manages to arrive unwittingly at the threshold of an interesting and sometimes embarrassing historical truth: these ships are war machines, and their purpose is bloody plunder.

      It might do well for us to rethink these Dutch pictures in allegorical terms, to regard them as allegories of empire in which national identity and external threat and dominion are persistently figured by descriptive, topographic means. This requires a move from Alpers’ interest in the epistemological basis of Dutch paintings to a regard for their combative and even paranoid features. Expansive panoramic space is always haunted by the threat of collapse or counter-expansion. Thus the panorama is always implicitly or explicitly militarized: the net can close in from the other side of the horizon. For example, nowhere is the panoramic spatialization of an external threat more topographically evident than in Willem van de Velde the Elder’s The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder. This elongated drawing from 1653, with a vertical to horizontal ratio of 2:9, traces a densely massed line of British warships blockading the strategic gap between the island of Texel and the mainland of Holland. Here the imperium implicit in the Dutch panorama meets its mirror image. The blockade matches and implicitly “contains” the otherwise expansive view from the Dutch coast. The British antagonist is like-minded but stronger, and it is worth noting that this defeat of the Dutch “viewpoint” is reenacted in the van de Veldes’ subsequent decision to cross the horizon line and practice their craft in England.

      Many Dutch maritime paintings were commissioned by city magistrates, or by shareholders in the great trading companies. One obvious condition of their success lay in the ability of the painter to articulate the economic link between the ship and the city in appropriately illusionistic and nonsymbolic spatial terms. Consider an earlier Dutch maritime painting, Hendrick Vroom’s View of Hoorn of 1622. Hoorn does not sink modestly into the sea as Dutch cities tend to do when viewed from deck level. The elevated masthead view, and the slight curvature of the coastline combine to place the city of Hoorn at the center of a global circle, with favorable offshore winds propelling ships immediately outward in their quest for wealth. In effect, this picture gives us two panoramas: one visible and contained, showing the clear profile of the city and the parallel expanse of the Usselmeer, and the other “providential,” implied and open. This second, implied panorama extends outward at an oblique angle from the frame, along the speedy radius offered by the wind, leading to the larger expanse of the North Sea and on to the Baltic or the Indies. The viewer, a vicarious (or actual) seafarer, is invited to look back toward the city with the peculiar longings characteristic of approaches and departures.

      Fig. 3 Willem van de Velde the Elder, The English Fleet at Anchor off Den Helder, drawing, 1653.

      Once the ship loses sight of land, this panoramic and umbilical linkage back to the port of origin is broken. At the end of the age of sail, Joseph Conrad would come to understand well the phenomenology of this separation of the ship from the land:

      The passage had begun, and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing.¹⁴

      Fig. 4 Hendrik Cornelisz. Vroom, View of Hoorn, oil on canvas, c. 1622.

      The painter of this latter space was of course Turner. And with Conrad and Turner, the economic function of the ship loses the positive value it held for the Dutch. The mood shifts from the supposedly sanguine temperament of the lowlands to the melancholy of the late romantics, and the frontier, even bloodier and more colonized now than before, is imagined to be “unattainable.” As it moves at the center of its own panorama, the ship becomes the lost and wandering daughter of the land. One measure of Engels’ radicality was his ability to break with the fatalism of this emerging romance of the sea’s isolation, and to step from the deck of the ship onto the streets of the city at the center of the global circle of power.

       FORGETTING THE SEA

      It may well appear at this juncture that I am performing a grotesque juggling act at a triple funeral: a memorial service for painting, socialism, and the sea. Leaving aside for the moment the second and presumably most recently deceased of the three, what possible claims can be made for the totalizing ambition of the classical maritime view a century and a half after Engels turned his back on the waterfront? Why would anyone be foolish enough to argue today that the world economy might be intelligently viewed from the deck of a ship? Furthermore, isn’t an interest in marine painting liable to charges of antiquarianism and anti-modernism? And finally, by posing these three questions together, don’t I risk the

Скачать книгу