LITMIR.BIZ

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elites parallels its renewed intransigence for desperate third world populations: for Sri Lankans, Chinese, Haitians, Cubans, for the Filipinos and Indonesians who work the sealanes. Air travel assures that bourgeois cosmopolitanism no longer requires any contact with the sea. Social classes no longer rub shoulders in the departure terminals of the great steamship lines. And cruise ships, the floating apartheid machines of postmodern leisure, have a way of obscuring from passengers the miserable conditions endured by the third world crews who cater to their mobility and their desires.

      Culturally, the sea becomes a vast reservoir of anachronisms, its representation redundant and overcoded. The last aesthetic movement to claim the sea with any seriousness was surrealism. It is both perverse and fitting that the founder of structural anthropology should later in life sustain this surviving surrealist spirit, asserting his preference for the eighteenth-century maritime painting of Joseph Vernet while dismissing cubism and lamenting the modernist “shipwreck of painting.” Of Vernet he says:

      By means peculiar to the art, one is transported into a vanished world. And even more marvelous, perhaps this world never existed, for the painter didn’t slavishly reproduce what he saw; he rearranged the elements and combined them into a lyrical synthesis. One of Vernet’s great harbors is not far from the evening at the Opera that Proust described!²¹

      In keeping with the surrealist love of obsolete didacticisms, Claude Lévi-Strauss is producing here a radical recoding of the classical edification demanded from the port scene. This earlier project of waterfront enlightenment, toward which we can orient the ironical figure of Engels as well, has been described in a recent book by Alain Corbin:

      The practice of walking along wharfs and stone piers … expressed the fascination exerted by a stage on which spectators could observe particularly manifest displays of energy, activity, heroism, and misfortune. It fitted logically into the classical journey. Here nature had retreated before the labors of man, who had cut stones and reshaped the boundaries that God had set to the ocean.²²

      Corbin remarks further that “Vernet made the harbor view into a privileged panorama. In his work, the port is first and foremost a picture that walkers in the hills examined with their spyglasses.”²³ We can better understand Lévi-Strauss’s point when we realize that Vernet’s viewpoint, described thus, corresponds to Proust’s initial “naive” attitude toward the theater: “… real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me.…”²⁴ But Lévi-Strauss’s discovery of Marcel Proust in Vernet is all the more perverse and comical when we turn to some of what Proust had to say about seascapes:

      A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one I used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, when I was coming home from a walk and looking forward to going down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky over the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then a little later, over a sea already cold and blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we would presently be ordering at Rivebelle reawakened the pleasure which I was to derive from the act of dressing to go out to dinner.²⁵

      This paragraph, in which the mundane synesthesia of culinary anticipation slides into a reverie of shipborne escape from “the necessity of sleep and … confinement in a bedroom,” ends with the line, “I was on all sides surrounded by pictures of the sea. “But it is precisely the unity of the “picture” that Proust is dissolving, by stripping the perceptual qualities of iconic signs away from the larger visual field. As Walter Benjamin observed:

      It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of correspondances; the Romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one to reveal them in our lived life.²⁶

      Throughout this chapter, “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls,” Proust repeatedly forces the tropes of romantic longing up against a de-psychologized post-impressionist treatment of seashore space. On the one hand, his narrator speaks of “the shipwreck of my nervous storms.” At the other extreme, the optical superimposition of a garden in the foreground and a steamship in the far distance is described in this way: “… the tiniest slice of blue still separates the questing prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steaming.”²⁷

      Proust’s deconstruction avant la lettre of seascape is all the more striking for being staged within the realistic idiom of the novel. For Proust, it is photography that initiates the collapse of seascape into an increasingly undifferentiated spatiality. His character Elstir, a painter of seascapes and port scenes, produces confusions of terrestrial and maritime space for which a precedent was already found in certain photographs. Elstir “reproduce[s] things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed.….” Having “prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town, only marine terms, and urbanterms for the sea.” Elstir gives the “impression of harbours in which the sea entered into the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian.…”²⁸

      Over the course of this chapter, Proust engages in a double and contradictory movement: participating both in a romantic revival of the deluge and in the counter-tendency to domesticate the maritime sublime by converting its perceptual properties into the raw material of still life. This ambivalent strategy is entirely consistent with surrealism.

      But this ambivalence, which allows the features of classical and romantic seascape to atrophy and hypertrophy at the same time, has also become a routine and unconscious staple of journalistic prose. A reporter for the New York Times produced a series of accounts of the oil tanker Braer breaking apart on the rocky coast of the Shetland Islands:

      The Braer’s final hours came in the overnight darkness, in a setting of almost primeval fury, as 30-foot surf and winds gusting up to 95 miles an hour smashed the writhing superstructure. Every so often, flashes of lightning illuminated the dark cliff and the wild seascape ²⁹

      But two days before this, the scene is described with an almost Proustian taste for the banality of culinary metaphors: “At its worst, patches of cappuccino-colored foam swirl along the shore, barely staining the beaches and rocks.”³⁰

      If this account seems to veer between Lord Byron and Proust with a shift in the weather, the reporter’s confusion may have more to do with an epistemological difficulty than with any migration of modernist indifference or postmodern semiotic play into journalistic discourse. Confronted with an oil spill and a tempest, the reporter is hard-pressed to differentiate between the destructive workings of first nature (the storm) and manufactured second nature (the leaking oil). The result is the forced simile by which leaking crude oil is repeatedly and reassuringly likened to upscale coffee. Wittingly or not, this metaphoric loop takes us back to the very origins of maritime risk insurance at Lloyd’s coffeehouse in eighteenth-century London.

      But it is unlikely that most readers of the New York Times would make this connection. If Proust can be said to have rigorously enacted the exhaustion and death of seascape within the modernist literary canon, then the elite newspaper of a coastal cosmopolis, the New York Times, can be said to have taken the lead in turning its back to the sea. When maritime news appears it is restricted to stories of disaster, war, and exodus: thus the subject is compressed into a weirdly blasé and episodic faux-sublimity. The sea is the site of intermittent horrors and extraordinary but brief expenditures of energy, quite distinct from the dramas of everyday life.

      The disappearance of the sea took place slowly, over two decades. In the 1960s, the New York Times typically ran a page of shipping and transport industry news, alongside the weather, which was charted far into the Atlantic. Cargo and passenger ship departures and arrivals were reported daily. By 1970, the “Shipping/Mails” section was restricted to passenger and mail ships only, excluding cargo vessels. By 1980, the “Shipping/Mails” listing had migrated to a small corner of the “Stock Options” pages of the newspaper’s business section. The weather maps, placed elsewhere, were more likely to hug the Eastern seaboard. By the end of 1985, in the middle of the Reagan-era decade of speculative accumulation, the

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