1 The Shipwreck of the São João in 1552
On February 3, 1552, the galleon São João left Cochin on the western coast of South India to return to Lisbon. Being a cargo ship, a so-called carraca (carrack), the São João was employed in the Portuguese merchant fleet. Leaving Cochin, it carried mostly pepper, and also porcelain, beads, tapestries, and other goods. The load could have weighed as much as twelve thousand quintals, but due to ongoing war in the Malabar area, which restricted the Portuguese delegation in its merchant scouring of the southwestern territory of India, the load is supposed to have weighed only seven and a half thousand quintals (three hundred and sixty-seven tons). Nevertheless, the São João was still “overladen,” the goods reportedly “were worth a conto in gold.” It was alleged that since Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to India in 1497–98, a ship had never left the Indian coast loaded with so much richness in merchandise.1
On board the ship was Capitão Manoel de Sousa Sepúlveda together with his wife dona Leonor and two children. Close to six hundred crew members, enslaved people, and passengers accompanied them. After four and a half troublesome months attempting to reach Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, the São João shipwrecked off the coast of Natal, at 31°S, near what is now Port Edward on the eastern coast of South Africa. This happened on June 24, 1552. The breakdown of the sailing ship’s technological system, which had been in process for quite some time, had fatal consequences. Nature proved to be more powerful than human ingenuity, and over one hundred people lost their lives during the actual wrecking (Figure 9).2
The account of the misfortune of the São João, “Relação da muy notavel perda do Galeão Grande S. João” (Account of the very great loss of Galeão Grande S. João), was recorded by an unknown author, perhaps based on information from Àlvaro Fernandes, a survivor and guardian of the galleon. It was probably printed for the first time as early as 1554. Most of the account relates the events after the wrecking, when Manoel de Sousa leads the survivors up the coast of Africa. This turns out to be a most difficult march during which they suffer horrendously from thirst and hunger, some are attacked by wild animals such as leopards and snakes, and even eaten. As the journey up the coast continues more and more people die en route.
We are also invited on board the ship during the crucial days and hours of distress, when the crew works hard to rescue the precious cargo and the ship. In the first pages, it becomes clear how dependent the sailors are on the ship’s
Twenty-first-century readers are able to see through the sixteenth-century religious veil and discover technology and its failings as the most probable cause of wreckage. Already in 1552, in the time before steamships, the sea journey was a highly technological affair as the first pages of “Naufrage du grand Galion São João” show. The sails were a major component of this technology. They not only facilitated motion and speed but also played a vital role in maneuvering the ship: “they spent much time mending them in order to be able to navigate.” In the case of the São João, the sails having been in a bad condition for quite some time “was one of the causes, the most important one, for their perdition.”6
The foundering of the São João. Image from the 1735 edition of Brito’s História trágico-marítima
© john carter brown library
During the weeks, days, and hours before the foundering, we register an intense maritime coupling of 1) natural elements such as winds, waves, depth, currents, lightning, rain, and darkness, 2) human factors such as skill, force, cunning, and panic, and 3) technological components such as sails, lead line, pintles, helm, rigging, yards, rope, hawsers, masts, and axe. Due to the high degree of unpredictability—“And the winds blew in such a way that one day they came from the Levant, the next they came from the Ponant”—it is crucial that the humans work together smoothly and appropriately with the technological components and that the components function properly. If not, the risk of wreckage and death increases dramatically: “But the sea remained so high, and the ship fatigued when losing three pintles of the helm, the entire perdition or salvation of the ships depending on this.”7
Minor destructions multiply and are soon followed by major ones. A wave smashes into the helm, which turns out to be rotten; it breaks in two, making it
2 Technology, Literature, and the Ocean
The domains of culture and technology have a long history of being looked upon as two separate and distinct worlds, according to Bruno Latour.8 On
If there is one world in which this dichotomy between culture and technology makes little sense, it is the maritime world. Technology is embedded in every aspect of maritime culture. This is true of the age of sail and the post-sailing era as well. More accurately, we can speak of different intensities of technological embeddedness during the ages of paddle, oar, sail, steam, and engine power. If the prevailing idea of a fundamental technological, existential, and experiential disruption caused by the replacement of sail by steam during the nineteenth century is somewhat reasonable,10 it is worth remembering that the sailing ship was arguably the world’s most complex technological machine during the four centuries spanning from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.11
In this chapter, one ambition is to challenge the idea of maritime history as either a dichotomous before-and-after (an enchanted, technology-free past versus a disenchanted, technologically determined present) or a smooth linear progression of ever higher technological complexity. This is not to say that
Another objective is to avoid the binary extremes of utopianism and dystopianism that often adhere to technology. This is not to say that technology is neutral. Technological artifacts are withdrawn for most of the time, acting as a sort of second nature for humans, but they are never neutral. They transform our perception, our being-in-the-world, says Don Ihde: “new instrumentation gives new perceptions.”13 But if technology and technological evolution have always been part of human and maritime history, then it would be more productive to analyze the distinctive experiences of different technological environments at sea instead of ignoring them or splitting them into two forms, namely an enchanted pretechnological era and a disenchanted technological era. Such an analysis makes it possible to acknowledge that the favored scapegoats in maritime fiction, the steamship and the more exclusive submarine, are just as capable as the sailing ship of producing positive experiences of a technologically mediated life at sea.
If maritime history is technological history, then each technological transfer potentially brings with it a double movement of revelation and concealment, amplification and reduction, invitation and inhibition: “We learn something new of the physical world through such differences, and there is ‘truth’ in each variation.”14 This line of thinking will guide us in a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon in which Captain MacWhirr and his steamship the Nan-Shan encounter a tropical cyclone in the western part of the Pacific Ocean. We will also analyze Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne, arguably the first novel to embrace and celebrate the potentials of maritime science and modern technology, and compare Verne’s take on technological
In Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996), which deals with the rise and fall of an ambitious train system project in Paris, a source called M. Cohen remarks: “A train may well be more complicated than a satellite, technologically speaking.”15 Although the book is about a different transport system, Cohen’s statement reminds us that the history of technology is not a linear one-way street that leads toward an ever-higher degree of complexity, at least not if we look at shorter time spans. Objects from the past may well be more technologically complicated than the inventions of now and tomorrow. Their newness and transformational power may certainly have been existentially more remarkable to their contemporaries than some recent inventions are to us at present. Cohen’s remark also implies that not only are the present and future technological (satellites), the same is true of the past (trains). If we take Cohen’s (and Latour’s) argument a bit further, the idea of a technology-free past seems to be a romantic illusion. Human history is technological history.
The replacement of sailing ships by steamships during the nineteenth century was made possible by Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine in 1712 and James Watt’s improvement of the engine from 1763 and onwards. It triggered a series of fundamental changes within the entire maritime culture, for example a strict division of work between on-deck sailors and below-deck engineers and stokers, a greater degree of predictability in terms of arrival times, and less danger and hazard for the crew. Within the domain of water-borne propulsion, the switch from paddles in the first dugout canoes (Figure 10) to oars in the first rowing boats (Figure 11) represents a parallel evolutionary step. Whereas paddles are held by the paddler and not connected with the vessel, oars are traditionally connected to the vessel by means of rowlocks, which transmit the applied force to the boat. In this system, water is the fulcrum. Paddlers face the front of the canoe. Rowers face the stern of the boat, and as they pull the oar, their entire body contributes to the transmittance of power from oar and water via the rowlock to propel the boat. The two
The Codex Mendoza. ms. Arch. Selden. A. 1, excerpt of fol. 063r
© the bodleian library, oxford
Gustave Caillebotte, Les plaisanciers aviron sur l’Yerres (c. 1877–c. 1879)
© bridgeman images
The social bond between objects and humans is “mysterious,”17 Latour claims. However, in the maritime world this bond is often characterized by intimacy, familiarity, and confidence, at least for experienced sailors accustomed to seafaring. If not, the ship would wreck, and the crew would drown. The primary reason for this fusion of culture and technology is that the sea is fundamentally a hostile environment for human habitation. Evolutionary speaking, the human species may derive from early life forms that emerged from the sea millions of years ago, but in recorded human history humankind’s natural habitat has always been the terra firma. The assemblage of the human world (culture) and the marine world (nature) requires a third component: the
In that sense, the maritime world is a privileged place from which to examine the relationship between humans and technologies. This interface is more intense on the ocean-going ship, and it can produce insights applicable to landbased existence and existence in general. In The Whale and the Reactor (1986), Langdon Winner remarks: “The map of the world shows no country called Technopolis, yet in many ways we are already its citizens.” Informing Winner’s view of human history is a narrative of a progression from low technology to “high technology,” also comprising ideas of “a new order” and “a distinctively modern form of power.” Winner’s diagnosis is true of landbased existence. There, “artificial things now shape our sense of being human.”18 But
Maritime history challenges Winner’s idea of a break between then and now in terms of technological complexity and its impact. Technological developments at sea have never only been about the transformation of what sailors do, but also what people think about the sea, human existence, and seafaring.20 If Winner advocates a difference in kind (old order/new order), I argue for a difference in degree. In my view, the metahistorical level stands for invariance, while variance can be found on the historical level. “Individual habits, perceptions, concepts of self, ideas of space and time, social relationships, and moral and political boundaries have all been powerfully restructured in the course of modern technological development,” claims Winner.21 Yes, they have, but this is equally true of the course of “premodern” technological development, especially at sea. Every tweak to an already-existing instrument and technology and every invention of new instruments and technologies made new geographical worlds accessible and opened new experiential-perceptual and existential-practical worlds to the sailor (and the reader of his exploits). Using new instruments becomes second nature and thus shapes the sailor’s life. At the same time, sailors are always aware of the extreme fragility of these second-nature instruments and that everyone’s survival depends on their functioning. These instruments had to be as fully integrated as extensions of bodily movement and behavior as possible, with the underlying realization that the instruments could fail or break.
Again it helps to observe the force, virtue and consequences of what has been discovered, and that is nowhere more apparent than in those three things which were unknown to the ancients and whose origins, though recent, are dark and inglorious: namely the Art of Printing, Gunpowder, and the Mariner’s Compass. For these three have altered the whole face of things right across the globe: the first in things literary, the second in things military, and the third in navigations. From these countless other alterations have followed so that no empire, no sect and no star seems to have exerted a greater effect and influence on human affairs than these mechanical innovations.22
Bacon may have intended to characterize the techno-progressive blessings of his time and its immediate past (“recent origins”) by referring to these three inventions, but while Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440 in Europe, only 180 years prior to when Bacon wrote about it, the Chinese invention of gunpowder dates back to the ninth century,23 and the compass, another Chinese invention, was invented as early as the middle of the third century bc, although it was probably not used as a navigational instrument before the eleventh century.24 Two of the three examples referred to by Bacon belong to much earlier epochs than the age of scientific revolution. So, if we buy into Bacon’s technological eulogy, his examples and their genealogy emphasize the metahistorical importance of technological inventions and the difficulty of excluding technology from the premodern phase of human history.
If humanists in general have been hesitant to venture into the domain of technology, the situation does not improve if we consider the literary scholarship concerned with maritime fiction. Blindness may be too strong a word, but it seems as if the dimension of a technologically embedded existence on board the ship gets less attention than it deserves considering its importance.25 The majority of literary scholars occupied with the sea and ships interpret the
Technology fundamentally influences the everyday lives of humans in at least three domains—action, perception, and knowledge—but it does not “stand for something else.” Technology does not possess a meaning or symbolic truth hidden beneath its surface that must be retrieved to explain its existential significance for humans. Although genealogies of technologies may reveal crucial decisions comprising ethical and political implications—democratic or totalitarian, centralization or decentralization—such findings have little to do with a symbolism of technology. Instead, they pertain to what Latour labels “network.” Technology either works or does not work. Either way, it impacts the human lifeworld in practical and perceptual ways. Technology is never neutral.
The significant role of technologies at sea has generic implications for nautical literature. Maritime fiction is neither Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) nor is it Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Goethe’s novel focuses on the individual’s matters of heart and personal feelings, not least ideal love; it is written in the form of intimacy, subjectivity, and subjective feelings par excellence, the personal letter, but it is also completely ignorant of, uninterested in, and cleansed of the technical sphere of life (e.g., how guns work). Wilde’s novel implodes into its own mirror of creation and is articulated in a philosophical discourse, and like Werther it is unconcerned with the outer world of messy, unruly stuff and its practical-technical constitution. Maritime fiction is neither Sturm und Drang nor l’art pour l’art. It may contain elements of both: Sturm und Drang and l’art pour l’art are broader
Perhaps it is Fenimore Cooper’s early sea novels with their young romantic sailor heroes that come closest to Goethe’s Werther and its idealistic protagonist, while Conrad may be the maritime author whose aesthetic experiments are most comparable to Wilde’s aestheticism. It must be stressed, though, that both Cooper and Conrad are intent on depicting the dirty and brutal life on board the ship and the cold and mechanic world of technology, to which neither Goethe nor Wilde came close. Maritime fiction is first and foremost an examination of man’s technologically mediated encounter with nature and (perhaps less recognized) his “naturally” mediated encounter with technology—it may even be a depiction of nature’s challenge of technology and vice versa in which man’s role is minimal. Consequently, maritime fiction is saturated with nature, technology, and the practical human activities that arise in the coupling between the two. As such, the technological dimension constitutes a metahistorical component of maritime fiction (a historical component is then the intensity and concrete design of the technological dimension), independent of historically specific aesthetic and thematic orientations. How technology and technological development are perceived varies from period to period and from author to author, but in nautical literature technology is ever-present.
As with many vital rhythms of life, such as the beating of the heart, technology is such an integrated part of human life that we only notice its existence when it breaks down or is unavailable. This is the case on board the ship. Daily life is often governed by monotony and strictly defined routines involving (or dictated by) technology—the reading of the compass, the measuring of latitude and longitude, the feeding of the stove with coal, the looking out for allies or enemies, etc. In what follows, I use the insights of Martin Heidegger, Don Ihde, and Peter-Paul Verbeek on technology to create a platform from which to elaborate on topics of interest and concepts useful for an analysis of maritime fiction, here Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Conrad’s Typhoon.
In the passage from Novum Organon, Bacon considered technology to be more than simply newly invented objects. To Bacon, technology transforms the world. It does so by changing man’s perception of and behavior in the world in that it determines different ways of experiencing the world and of opening it to new practices. In that sense, Bacon is a key figure in the transition from theocentrism to anthropocentrism and technocentrism where the relationship between man and technology becomes crucial for humankind’s evolution, progress, and way of uncovering the world. Bacon belongs to the utopian
I will try to steer clear of the binary utopia/dystopia thinking and instead use Bacon’s printing-gunpowder-compass quote as an invitation to examine the different kinds of technological experience that are crucial ways of being in the world. Technological experience is not limited to the post-sailing epoch, and technological experience in the post-sailing epoch—for example the experience of being and working on board a steamship—can have its own positive elements. Which changes in “human affairs” and “the whole face of things right across the globe”—they may be good or bad, positive or negative, but they are certainly different—are triggered by technological changes?
Heidegger and Ihde are relevant, because their phenomenological approaches facilitate an understanding of technology as a certain way to uncover the world and as a special form that transforms man’s experience of the world. In addition, it comprises both an epistemological and a practical dimension of human existence by prioritizing “a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity.”28 In a maritime context, the practical dimension is very important, because ship life historically has been physically demanding and required hands-on skills and a practical rationality. But the perceptive dimension is equally important as a way to comprehend the specific maritime epistemology of “oceanic thinking.”
The invention of the compass was evidently of the greatest importance to the maritime-driven transformation of the cartographic appearance and state of the world. Although the compass was a Chinese invention, and although the Chinese had explored the Pacific long before the European transoceanic
As previously mentioned, Margaret Cohen takes up the mantle from Bacon and mentions three further discoveries or inventions with decisive importance for life at sea: John Harrison’s invention of the chronometer in 1759; the British Admiralty’s decision in 1795 to introduce fixed rations of lemon juice to all crew members to prevent scurvy; and Robert Fulton’s steamboat journey in 1807 up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, New York.31 In La Mer, Michelet devotes an entire chapter to the lighthouse, which from around 1830 began to populate the coasts on the world’s continents, “saving, and guiding” seamen lost in utter darkness and therefore in danger of shipwrecking due to sandbanks and rocks.32 Like the compass, these technological inventions and scientific discoveries transformed maritime existence and the sailor’s experience of the world, primarily in terms of making life at sea safer, more calculable, and regularized. It is only reasonable to assume that both later and earlier discoveries have also had existentially, experientially, and epistemologically transformative effects.
3
Heidegger elevated technology to a philosophical question. By turning technology into a vital component of man’s interpretation of and being in the world, he emphasized its hermeneutical and existential importance to human life. In Heidegger’s work there are several books, texts, and passages—from Sein und Zeit (1927) and Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935) to “Die Frage Nach der Technik” (1954) and Gelassenheit (1959)—dealing with the question of technology and its perceptual and practical human consequences. In Heidegger’s work, there is a move from an ontic and ahistorical analysis of the capacity of concrete technologies and tools to open up the world in a particular manner to an ontological and historical analysis of technology as “world-disclosure” in which any specific technology is simply a manifestation of the world picture that already governs our way of thinking in a specific moment in history.33 Simply put, Heidegger moves from “beings →Being” (Sein und Zeit) to “Being →beings” (“Die Frage”).
The most obvious example of a philosophy of technology in Heidegger’s work is the famous lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” given in Munich in 1953. The lecture is widely considered to be the first serious contemplation on technology in Western philosophy. Heidegger transcendentally defines technology as a dominating and controlling manner of thinking and engaging with the world. Technology becomes a particular way of world-disclosure (Being) in which reality appears to humans as no more than calculable raw material to be manipulated by humans. However, as early as in Being and Time, more specifically in § 15–18, Heidegger discusses through his analysis of tools or equipment (Zeug) as “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden) man’s “being-in-the-world” as an already practically (and nonthematically) oriented existence shaped by the operativity of tools and in which it is possible to see a particular world-disclosure. However, this type of world-disclosure is a posteriori (determined by concrete tools, by technologies) whereas the world-disclosure in the lecture is a priori (determining the way in which technology appears).
Both texts attempt transcendental determinations of man’s technological/technical relationship with the world. In other words, Heidegger uncovers basic pre-structures that are valid at all times (Being and Time) or at certain moments in history (“The Question”). Transcendentally means here two different things, though, depending on which temporality governs the analysis. In the lecture, where technology is seen in a specific historical context (that
In Being and Time, it is not technology as such that is submitted to a transcendental analysis in which the ambition is to trace technology back to its conditions of possibility. Instead, Heidegger’s focus is the way in which technologies or tools (e.g., a hammer) appear to humans either as ready-to-hand (zuhanden) or present-at-hand (vorhanden). Ready-to-hand, or handiness, and present-at-hand, or simply present, are the two pre-structured ways in which tools enter into a relationship with humans. They either work unnoticed, or they noticeably don’t work. In contrast to the idea of technology in the lecture, tools are not analyzed transcendentally and backwards in terms of their conditions of possibility, but forward in terms of their concrete functions and their manner of opening up new worlds to humans. The hammer implicitly makes us see the world in new and potentially multiple ways; there is not one single and dominating world picture determining the functions and potentials of the hammer.
If both texts draw up transcendental approaches (technology as an inescapable mode of human perception), although in a different manner (tools as positive world openers, or technologies as expressions of a negatively valorized technical Being), there is a difference of temporality between the ahistoricism of Being and Time and the historicism of “The Question.” This difference is important for the understanding of Heidegger’s position vis à vis traditional and modern technology and his conception of the evolution of the history of technology. The tool analysis in Being and Time is to be considered within Heidegger’s agenda of creating a fundamental ontology concretized in the analysis of Dasein. The tool analysis is linked to the analysis of “the worldhood of the world” (“die Weltlichkeit der Welt”) and thus points forward to one of the constitutive elements in Dasein’s “being-in-the-world” (“in-der-Welt-sein”). In Being and Time, man is in his thrownness (Geworfenheit) already given a world, and this world is either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. The world is either given in a practical-useful interaction (Zeug) or in a distanced, contemplative, and theoretical approach (Ding).
As Verbeek has convincingly shown, the difference in approach is the main reason why Heidegger end up formulating two axiologically very different evaluations of the hammer (positive) and the power station (negative): “Heidegger measures tradition and modernity with different scales. […] When he compares specific technologies of the past and present with each other, he applies two different standards, reserving a historical perspective for an analysis of modern technologies and an ahistorical perspective for traditional technologies.”35 This internal inconsistency makes it possible to nuance the traditional understanding of Heidegger as someone who nostalgically looks back upon a bygone era of innocent craftsmanship (hammers and mills) and critically and contemptuously observes his own contemporaneity of industrial technology (power stations).
For what would happen if we were to use Heidegger’s own ahistorical approach, in which technologies are world openers and things that make Being as an event visible, to an analysis of modern technology? What is the equipmentality of modern technology, its characteristics of such immanent features as its ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, “in-order-to,” and “in terms of [aus] its belonging to other equipment”?36 What would happen if modern technology was less an expression of how coming into being is understood in different
One of the most fruitful insights of Heidegger’s analysis of Zeug is that the special human intercourse (Umgang) with the world, which Heidegger calls handling (handtierende) and using (gebrauchende), that is, the ready-to-hand intercourse that is characterized by a “thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies,” comprises its own epistemology, “its own kind of ‘knowledge’” (seine eigene “Erkenntnis”). Humans do not access or gain new knowledge only through theoretical or interpretative elaborations of consciousness, but also through the preconscious workings with their hands and the artifacts in those hands. Furthermore, this zuhanden interaction with the world makes the world closer, more habitable, and more familiar to humans. Heidegger thus pinpoints and legitimizes a practical knowledge about the world that is caused by the use—the “something in-order-to …”38—of technological artifacts. Through the technical-handling dealings with the world, humans recognize and perceive the world. Technology is a mode of uncovering the world. Using technology, a specific practical opening of the world takes place, a knowledge that is technologically mediated.
It is important that Heidegger identifies and legitimizes a practical knowledge about the world constituted through the use of equipment, which here applies to a broad conception of technology and technique. Heidegger mentions for example “equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement.”39 Although Heidegger famously exemplifies with a hammer (a technique that belongs to the domain of craftsmanship), it is not wrong to conclude that his analysis—the transcendental dimension associated with the pre-structure of ready-to-hand or present-at-hand—applies to technology as such. Inherent in the technical making-use-of the world or in the practical dealings with the world is an epistemological dimension of worldly knowledge through the event of disclosure. Technology is a manner in which the world is revealed to humans. Through the use of technology, a certain practical opening of the world takes place. This opening is at the same time knowledge mediated through technology.
The primary orientation or dwelling of our everyday dealings is not (in) the tools themselves: “On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work—that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too. The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered.” For this work to be produced, Heidegger also determines the equipment as having a structure of towards-which, and the product itself has the same “in-order-to” structure of the tools endowing it with an essential usability: “The shoe which is to be produced is for wearing (footgear) [Schuhzeug]; the clock is manufactured for telling the time.” Apart from the work to be produced, the production itself is a using of something for something. In other words, there is also a reference to materials in that the work is dependent on leather, thread, needles, and the like. Finally, Dasein, here the producer or the bearer of the equipment, should also be accounted for in this relational totality: “The work produced refers not only to the ‘towards-which’ of its usability and the ‘whereof’ of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges.”41 The produced work, its context, its material, and man are four dimensions already inscribed into the tool in terms of its character of
The hidden connection between world and technology—hidden because the world is opened through the transparency of the tool—can only become manifest through a negative experience: “When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-to-hand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material unsuitable.” The nonthematized zuhandene intercourse with the world can break down if the tool suddenly turns out to be useless as is the case with the compass on Conrad’s the Sofala, the bolt holes insufficiently filled with pitch on Munk’s Enhiørningen, and the helm on Captain Manoel de Sousa’s the São João. Transparency morphs into opacity as when a clean windshield in a car suddenly is hit by a stone and cracks. The tool now points to itself as something present and material that demands attention, as if it was a prompter emerging from her box and entering onto the scene. It becomes conspicuous, obtrusive, or obstinate, says Heidegger. Consequently, the tool’s totality of different contexts of assignments—of “in-order-to,” “whereof,” and “towards-which”—is made explicit through a rupture in the circumspective sounding through the thematization of the circumspection itself, and the environment reveals itself all over again: “With this totality, however, the world announces itself.”42
With Heidegger’s analysis of equipment in Being and Time, it becomes clear that technology is a fundamental human activity that functions as a center of gravity around which the world, nature, and man circles in a pre-theoretical and nonthematized totality of understanding that constitutes man’s immediate world. This practical approach is more primordial than the theoretical “present-at-hand” approach. It is crucial that this technologically mediated interaction is given not merely a legitimized but a privileged epistemological role in relation to world-disclosure and knowledge of the world.
In “The Question Concerning Technology,” the “unconcealment” that governs modern technology “is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” Modern technology’s challenge happens in a way so as to
Bestand points back to Heidegger’s earlier analysis of Zeug. On the one hand, nature is revealed as a material “in-order-to,” on the other hand the world no longer appears as an object. In Being and Time, the equipment also entailed a discovery of nature as “natural products” and ready-to-hand through its use and structure of “in-order-to”: “The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’”44 This is not a distanced intercourse that transforms reality into a present-at-hand object; instead, it has already included reality and nature into a context of use and assignments. The world, which humans encounter through modern technology, is saturated with the quality of standing-reserve, with nature already implicated in different situations of energy demands. In the famous example of the Rhine and the power station, the river no longer runs freely according to Heidegger: “even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command. […] the river is dammed up into the power plant.” For the modern tourist who wishes to enjoy the Rhine as an aesthetic object, a river in a landscape, the experience is compromised by the fact that it has become “an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.”45 Even though similarities exist between the analysis of equipment and that of standing-reserve, it becomes evident that Heidegger has moved the emphasis
Throughout “The Question,” Heidegger’s descriptions of and vocabulary related to modern technology (e.g., “the monstrousness that reigns here”) could tempt the reader into believing that the more neutral, even positive Heidegger who wrote Being and Time has morphed into a dystopian technophobe or neo-luddite. That is a simplification of the complexity of his thoughts. Heidegger’s ambition is to distill the essence of modern technology in order to discover its limits and, ultimately, its dangers. Not the danger of specific technologies, but the danger of technology’s essence. Since the essence of technology “is by no means anything technological,” it is not possible for humans to choose if they want to be part of it or not. Specific technologies are not neutral, but neither is the essence of technology a neutral dimension of Being. It is to be treated as what Heidegger terms “destining [Geschick],” that is, “a way of revealing” (ein Weg des Entbergens),46 which man has been sent upon and that determines all history. In this idea of being sent on a path, we hear echoes from the earlier fundamental and existential idea of man’s thrownness into the world. Here, it implies that humans are given a concrete historical existence, and within the modern world (which Heidegger seems to think begins in the seventeenth century) they have been sent upon a technological path of unconcealment.
Heidegger’s emphasis of the historicity of modern technology—and remember that he describes it as monstrous—enables humans to regard it as something historically given. The historicity means that the technological Ge-stell may eventually be replaced by another paradigm; that it is given, means that humans may relate to it more freely. Destining is not an expression of fatalism; instead, it includes two options: either a potential for the freedom to choose alternative paths or a danger of only going down one path.
In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself.48
Fourthly, and this is perhaps the most dangerous consequence, modern technology and its destining in the form of Enframing and ordering “drives out every other possibility of revealing”: “Thus the challenging Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself and with it That wherein unconcealment, i.e., truth, comes to pass.” The essence of modern technology not only blocks off alternative ways of revealing, but also, by doing so, the possibility for a more primordial revealing. Heidegger writes off a superficial critique of technology that remains on the ontic level: “What is dangerous is not technology. There is no demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger.”49 The true danger is not the fact that humans can get hurt, even fatally, because of some machine. Rather, the hegemony of Ge-stell threatens to determine human existence in the image of technology’s essence and to block any alternative roads thereby denying humans the opportunity to access a more primordial unconcealment and truth.
4 Don Ihde and Technological Forms of Experience
Heidegger exerts a deep influence on the works of Don Ihde, whose overall ambition is to further advance the thinking on the role of technology in human life beyond Heidegger’s work. Ihde’s starting point is Heidegger’s transcendental approach to technology in that he shows how human relations with technology fundamentally color the human experience of and existence in the
But if Ihde’s starting point is Heidegger’s transcendental understanding of technology, his correction of and ambition to think further than Heidegger consist of leading his own philosophy of technology in a more empirical direction. This move was partly inspired by what Hans Achterhuis labeled “the empirical turn” and has subsequently inspired Verbeek to further elaborate on both Heidegger’s and Ihde’s thinking.51 The empirical challenge to the philosophy of technology implies that thinkers replace their focus on Technology (as essence) with a focus on technologies (in use). In that sense, the transcendental agenda in Heidegger’s later writings on technology, especially the search for the essence of technology in “The Question,” needs to be supplemented by investigations of concrete technologies and tools. In Ihde’s words, a move takes place from “generalizations about technology uberhaupt” to an “examination of technologies in their particularities.”52 It is still necessary to distinguish between the transcendental approach in Being and Time and in Heidegger’s later writings. In the latter, transcendentalism means searching for technology’s conditions of possibility, which Heidegger found in the historical manifestation of Being as a negatively valorized technological world-disclosure. In the former, the transcendental approach had to do with uncovering the pre-structures of our concrete technologically mediated perceptions and actions—pre-structures such as “ready-to-hand,” “present-at-hand,” and “in-order-to.”
Ihde attempts to position himself between the transcendentalism of the late Heidegger, the transcendentalism of the early Heidegger, and the empirical position by concentrating on what he calls “human-technology-relations.” These are meant to capture “the ways we are bodily engaged with technologies.”53 Ihde asks how the human relationship with technology transforms and has always transformed human experience and existence. But technology’s transformation of human perception and action is seen within concrete
Neither Ihde nor Verbeek rejects the insights of the linguistic turn but consider them to be necessary corrections to a too naïve positivistic and naturalistic thinking. But since the linguistic turn has led to a death of the thing, the time is ripe to reverse the Platonist propensity for immaterialism and counter the linguistic turn by acknowledging the crucial roles of materiality, technology, and things in our everyday lives. According to Ihde, the way to do so is by adopting an empirical method. As Verbeek remarks about the empirical studies: “By researching specific technologies in concrete applications, they have brought to light the fact that technologies have different impacts in different contexts. The supposed determinism of technology appears to be weaker than is presented in the classical picture; while technologies do indeed strongly shape the form and the context in which they function, this happens in a more differentiated and local manner than in the traditional view.”55 A relevant point is that this was in fact what Heidegger initiated (but never completed) in Being and Time.
In Technologies and the Lifeworld, Ihde lists four different forms of human-technology-relations corresponding to four types of technological experience. The first two are characterized by being technologically mediated perceptions in which humans are related to the world through technology. Ihde labels the first of these perceptions embodiment relations and the second hermeneutical relations. The third form is labeled alterity relations and the fourth is called background relations. The first three forms are to be seen within a human-technology continuum in which the first (embodiment relations) is characterized by a pure ready-to-hand relationship between man and technology (man and technology merge and technology becomes a quasi-I), whereas the third (alterity relations) is characterized by a pure present-at-hand relationship
Embodiment relations are Ihde’s elaboration of Heidegger’s Zeug analysis, and they have the same structural characteristics: withdrawal and transparency. Humans are granted a mediated access to the world through technologies in such a way that man and technology fuse into a symbiosis. Humans incorporate technologies in their perception of the world so that they no longer are experienced as separate and different. Ihde mentions glasses and binoculars as examples of such embodied ready-to-hand technologies. The diving suits, including the helmets of copper and glass, in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers are another example. An important correction of or supplement to Ihde’s theory is Verbeek’s emphasis of technology’s role in co-shaping or constituting both humans and the world. It is wrong to believe that subject and object are just two preexisting poles whose relationship is mediated by technology; more accurately, both humans and the world are products of technological mediation.56
(I-technology) → world
Hermeneutic relations imply “a special interpretive action within the technological context.” Here, technologies that represent the world require reading and interpretation. Technology mediates a specific access to the world, but in this case the link is representational and demands a hermeneutical effort. Technology is no longer completely transparent but must be somehow experienced. Humans move towards a more thematized and present-at-hand relationship with the tool, which is now functional through its visibility, although this visibility can be said to represent a different kind of referential transparency. The analysis of hermeneutical relations is Ihde’s attempt to adjust Heidegger: “What is emerging here is the first suggestion of an emergence of the technology as ‘object’ but without its negative Heideggerian connotation.”59 To Ihde, the hermeneutical relation to technology is a no less primordial derivation than the embodied technological relation. Admittedly, a thematized and thus (self-) conscious interpretation of technology is required, but this is merely a new type of transparency in which humans are not overly fixated on the specific interpretation but on the world to which the technology refers.
I → (technology-world)
I → technology (-world)
I (-technology/world)
This typology of Ihde’s and the insights of Heidegger’s philosophies of technology will now act as a conceptual platform from which to read Conrad’s Typhoon and Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers.
5 Technology in Typhoon
In the Conrad analysis, I examine different types of technological-maritime experiences on board a steamship. Conrad is widely regarded as a conservative, disenchanted, and dystopian writer of modernity, a lost romantic who has little good to say about steamships and the moral, mental, and structural changes they bring with them. Nevertheless, in Typhoon certain positive qualities of steamship life emerge (possibly contrary to Conrad’s intention). Conrad is a key figure in the complex discussion of maritime technology and its evolution, especially concerning the replacement of sail technology with steam technology. In the essay “The Character of the Foe,” Conrad confirms Ihde’s later idea of human-technology relations, in this case the relationship between humans and ships, and their importance for the human experience of the surrounding world: “And so much depends upon the craft which, made by man, is one with man, that the sea shall wear for him another aspect.”63
5.1 Sail and Steam
A recurrent axiological and ideological structure in Conrad’s work develops out of the fierce antagonism that he creates between two technological machines, the sailing ship and the steamship, the former often eulogized, the latter repeatedly denigrated. We have already examined the two descriptions in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” of the eponymous sailing ship and the steamer tugging the Narcissus. An initial contrast between “The short black tug” that “gave a pluck to windward,” “then hovered for a moment on the quarter with her engines stopped,” and “the slim, long hull of the ship” that “moved ahead slowly under lower topsails,”64 sets the tone for many of Conrad’s dichotomous images of the innocent world of yesteryear and the degraded worlds of now and tomorrow.
One thing is the description of each ship’s design, one short, the other long and slim, but Conrad also points to nuances between the movements of the two ships. To give a pluck and to hover give an impression of unsteadiness, whereas the slow movement of the Narcissus is harmonious and even graceful. This is emphasized as the sailing ship “became a high and lonely pyramid, gliding, all shining and white, through the sunlit mist,” whereas the tugboat
resembled an enormous and aquatic black beetle, surprised by the light, overwhelmed by the sunshine, trying to escape with ineffectual effort into the distant gloom of the land. She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water. On the place where she had stopped a round black patch of soot remained, undulating on the swell—an unclean mark of the creature’s rest.65
He could not hope to see anything new upon this lane of the sea. He had been on these coasts for the last three years. From Low Cape to Malantan the distance was fifty miles, six hours’ steaming for the old ship with the tide, or seven against. Then you steered straight for the land, and by-and-by three palms would appear on the sky, tall and slim […]. The Sofala would be headed towards the somber strip of the coast […]. Then on through a brown liquid, three parts water and one part black earth, on and on between the low shores, three parts black earth and one part brackish water, the Sofala would plow her way up-stream, as she had done once every month for these seven years or more, […] long before he had ever thought of having anything to do with her and her invariable voyages.68
Not a very enterprising life for a man […] who had sailed famous ships […]; who had made famous passages, had been the pioneer of new routes and new trades; who had steered across the unsurveyed tracts of the South Seas, and had seen the sun rise on uncharted islands. […] Was there not somewhere between Australia and China a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef? On that dangerous coral formation the celebrated clipper had hung stranded for three days, her captain and crew throwing her cargo overboard with one hand and with the other, as it were, keeping off her a flotilla of savage war-canoes. At that time neither the island nor the reef had any official existence. Later the officers of her Majesty’s steam vessel Fusilier, dispatched to make a survey of the route, recognized in the adoption of these two names the enterprise of the man and the solidity of the ship.71
In both The End of the Tether and The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” the difference between sail and steam is a conflict of modernity between the old world of craftsmanship and the modern world of industrialization—that is, between a world of simple experiences in which bodily toil and stable communities are the central components, on one hand, and a complex and obscure world of money controlled by distant companies on the other. Robert Foulke has described the transformation from the former to the latter: “When the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854 formally established the British Merchant Service, many shipowners complained that ‘the confidence between the sailor, his officers, his captain, and his owner’ had been destroyed. The force of custom was gradually replaced by the rule of law.” Already in the 1840s, an increasing bureaucratization of the maritime world intended for making profit and creating competition took place. This happened in the same decade during which the steamship began to pose a threat to the sailing ship, although this development did not really take off until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The positive image painted by Conrad of the unity of shipowner, ship, and crew became challenged when “owners without consciences sent crews to sea in ill-found steam-coffin ships.”72
The antagonism between the era of sail and the era of steam and Conrad’s anxiety towards the future death of the sailing ship involve a diagnosis of broader social and political tendencies, and also point to Conrad’s deep-seated existential concerns. The shift from sail to steam has to do with different experiential and perceptual worlds and the existence and practices they make
Central to Conrad’s “hermeneutical phenomenology” and existentialist thinking is the man-ship-sea constellation he uses as an elementary model for critical reflection on the transformations of human life at sea. The model clearly resonates with Ihde’s idea of “human-technology relations” and of his model “I-technology-world.” Conrad’s ship becomes the medium through which his characters experience their environment (Umwelt), in this case the sea, and experience themselves as perceiving and practically oriented individuals. To Conrad, the steamship results in an isolation of man, because he loses contact with the sea and the ship; instead, he becomes absorbed by the machine and its omnipresent rhythm, noise, and smoke. Implied in Conrad’s descriptions and reflections of steamship-mediated existence is an idea of the sailing ship as a completely different mediator. We are to understand life on board a sailing ship as one in which the ship disappears and makes way for an unmediated I-world, which Ihde calls “naked perception.” However, as the example of the São João showed, Conrad’s idea of the sailing ship as a withdrawn and transparent mediator may be questioned.
To Conrad, the steam engine and the by-products of its machinery are the new elements that determine steamship experience. We have already discussed his essay “Ocean Travel” (1923), in which he talks about “the invariable resistance of water to the screwing motion of the propeller.”74 Conrad regards the machine-driven propeller as unnatural, because it does not enter an equal relationship with nature as do the sails in relation to the wind. In contrast, the propeller’s conditions of functioning relate to the water’s resistance (not its cooperation) and the engine’s monotonous and autonomous power (not its variable and contingent power). Based on Conrad’s reflections, Foulke draws
Foulke continues his argument by referring to some lines from Conrad’s “Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic” (1912), featuring in Notes on Life and Letters (1921). According to Foulke, Conrad not only predicts that these new “seamen-mechanics of the future” will be “the legitimate successors of these seamen-sailors of the past,” but also, and despite being legitimate successors, that “they are a different breed of men.”76 However, this last sentence does not figure in Conrad’s text. How it has entered Foulke’s article can only be speculated. This misquotation is worthy of note. Foulke quotes Conrad to support his claim about Conrad’s dichotomous thinking on sail/steam, but a detail Foulke misses is that Conrad does not speak about the toilers of marine steam boilers. Instead, he refers to the “comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelligent workers,” “resourceful and skilled,” of the new internal combustion engine. In other words, Conrad introduces a reflection on the motor-driven ship to supplement his usual categories of sailing ships and steamships. “Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic” confirms the traditional Conradian valorization of sail and steam as positive and negative respectively, but he then adds a positive image of “being-on-the-motor ship.”
Foulke’s argument that Conrad re-affirms a critical stance on steam in “Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic” is not wrong, he just misses the significant point that Conrad with “seamen-mechanics” refers to combustion-engine engineers and does so positively. Conrad sees them as the “legitimate successors” to the true and idealized seamen-sailors of the past era of sail. He contrasts them
men whose heavy labour has not a single redeeming feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring, arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard, brutalising toil, belonging to neither earth nor sea, I greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the internal combustion engine. The disappearance of the marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody in sympathy with his kind must welcome.78
It is not the men of steamships who are criticized (at least not here). Conrad is sympathetic to them and their predicament. Rather, it is the technological system that is responsible for their specifically degraded being-in-the-world. Conrad proves to be a sophisticated thinker of the experiential and existential impact of concrete technologies, although his view on sailing ships may be too innocent and neutral in terms of their mediating role.
Returning to the more prominent antagonism between sail and steam, we can identify more clearly what transforms maritime life. Instead of being ruled by the laws of nature, maritime life is now ruled by the laws of mechanics; instead of being determined by nature’s unpredictability and its calls for readiness, it is now determined by the machine’s monotony and the precalculated arrival times systematized in trustworthy timetables. Steamship life is infused with what Heidegger calls “calculative thinking,” a future-oriented thinking that constantly, on “conditions that are given” and “serving specific purposes,” plans ahead (even without numbers, adding machines, or computers) and “races from one prospect to the next” with the anticipation of being able to “count on definite results.”79
The sailing ship is characterized by what Gumbrecht would call a presence-oriented relationship between man-ship-nature, especially by nature’s basic unpredictability. If nature is the pole with the greatest magnetic force in the constellation man-sailship-nature, on the steamship this external orientation shifts towards an internal orientation. The steamship and especially the engine room is now the pole with the greatest magnetic force. The antagonism parallels Heidegger’s opposition between the era of technical craftsmanship and the era of industrial technology, between an exclusively practically oriented
To Conrad, the shift from sail to steam was a decisive technologically mediated experiential disruption, here expressed in the essay “Ocean Travel”: “The one statement that can be safely advanced about traveling at sea is that it is not what it used to be. It is different now elementally.” This feeling made it possible for him to describe with great precision the existential consequences the new steamship had, not least for man’s worldly experience: “It is not so much a matter of changed propelling power; it is something more.” In both “Ocean Travel” and “The Character of the Foe,” Conrad investigates the different experiential forms that can be linked with the steamship. In his own words, he examines the “psychology of sea travel.” We have already discussed “Ocean Travel” as an example of a disenchanted thinking about the technocentric epoch, so let me recapitulate: The experiential transformation triggered by steam can be summarized by such words as “tame,” “less exciting,” “conditions of shore life,” “hotel,” “sham comforts,” “fixed,” “definite date,” “hold of the land,” and “disharmony.”80
your modern ship, which is a steamship, makes her passages on other principles than yielding to the weather and humouring the sea. She receives smashing blows, but she advances; it is a slogging fight, and not a scientific campaign. The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway. The modern ship is not the sport of the waves. Let us say that each of her voyages is a triumphant progress; and yet it is a question whether it is not a more subtle and more human triumph to be the sport of the waves and yet survive, achieving your end.82
The close and collaborative/colliding relationship with nature is gone and has been replaced by an autonomous (“she advances”), indifferent, and disenchanting (“slogging fight”) machine. It is as if steam technology suddenly and disturbingly steps in between man and nature and occupies a spot that was previously empty. Conrad considers the sailing ship a large ready-to-hand and well-functioning tool, a pure embodiment relation like wearing eyeglasses to improve vision. The sea is no longer pure nature with its undulating, rhythmic, and capricious waves; instead, the steamship transforms the sea into a flat, smooth, and frictionless highway. To Conrad, such “triumphant progress” is not a victory to be celebrated, because it is mechanistic and dehumanizing.
The vista is now opened towards the future in that Conrad wonders how future humans will look back on the era of sail. Their ability to feel sympathy is questioned by Conrad in that an “incorrigible mankind hardens its heart in the progress of its own perfectability” and thus becomes less receptive to nature’s wonders and to the “soft” machinery of sail that allowed nature to be nature by respecting it. This is different from “the seaman of the last generation” who was “brought into sympathy with the caravels of ancient time by his sailing-ship, their lineal descendant,” and who “cannot look upon those lumbering forms navigating the naïve seas of ancient woodcuts without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate derision, envy, and admiration. For those things, whose unmanageableness, even when represented on paper, makes one gasp with a sort of
If Conrad confirms an antagonistic thinking between sail and steam (the lineage is broken), his vocabulary takes us back to the vocabulary of “Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic” in which he introduced the “seamen-mechanics” of motor-driven ships as legitimate successors to the men of sail. If Conrad defines steamship sailors as being “only our successor” and not “our descendant,” then the adding of “legitimate” to “successor” in “Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic” indicates that Conrad considers the new “disciplined, intelligent,” “resourceful and skilled” seamen-mechanics of the future as the true descendants of the seafarers of mast and sail. If so, the image of a lineage broken transforms into a lineage that, although disrupted, will continue in a different form in parallel with the advent of new technologies and new humans. The era of steam becomes a mere parenthesis in-between the era of sail and the era of combustion engines, a parenthesis characterized by man’s physical, arduous, brutal, alienating, monotonous, and unredeeming toil, whereas the work of the man of masts and sail and the seaman-mechanic of the future is characterized by uniting a physical and cerebral dimension and comprising a redeeming potential.
Conrad considers human experience in the age of sail as richer and purer, more harmonious and naked, more primitive and intimate than the experiences humans achieve in the age of steam. Ihde’s idea that every mediating technology always implies a double movement of magnification and reduction is given a twist by Conrad: the duality is maintained, but the magnification is linked to sail only, whereas the reduction belongs to steam exclusively. Time and again, the conclusion of Conrad’s analysis is that with the advent of steam humanity is denied the richer experience of the world of sail. The steamship is not an “engine” capable of generating possibilities for new maritime experiences. The early Heidegger as well as Ihde and Verbeek would perhaps disagree. Instead, steam-power is regarded as a technology that facilitates the transfer of the comforts of land to the space of the ship. With the emergence of the steamship, humanity becomes poorer, because it loses
The reduction of experience can be viewed in the context of Heidegger’s metering out the Gefahr in which modern technology places mankind, especially the danger of reducing human experience exclusively to technological experience (in the form of Ge-stell). The question is whether or not this is the right path to take? Should we uncritically accept Conrad’s romanticized conclusions? Or is a more constructive approach to be found in Ihde and the early Heidegger? Conrad never frees himself from an interpretation of modern technology, which feeds off the illusion that humanity has had a more natural and nontechnological relationship to the world, the I-world. In his strong bias towards the age of sail, Conrad forgets that the sailing ship facilitates a technologically mediated experience with its own transformative powers.
Foulke draws attention to nostalgia and romance as being “almost ubiquitous in the literature of sail,” but it is also one of his key points that “life on board nineteenth-century sailing ships was not the romantic existence which readers of sea literature sometimes imagine.” It is Foulke’s intention to reconstruct and flesh out “the image of experience in the lost world of sailing ships,” which he sees as an embodied world of experience.85 In that sense, Foulke’s ambition, like mine, is to examine the different forms of ship-life experience more closely and without prejudice. To Foulke, we should not blindly trust the literature that deals with sailing ship life, because it is romanticizing and nostalgic. And if the literature about steamship life is often critical and disenchanted, as is Conrad’s, the philosophies of technology put forward by Heidegger, Ihde, and Verbeek assist us in bypassing the authorial bias and creating an alternative version of maritime existence. We may suppose that
5.2 Steamship Experiences in Typhoon
Foulke is correct in saying that Conrad only personalizes a steamship in Typhoon, but when he says, “only in one other story, ‘The End of the Tether,’ does he seriously explore steamship life for its own sake,”86 that is not entirely accurate. The End of the Tether is a portrait of “the Dying World of Sail” seen from the perspective of the era of steam and “historical time.” Typhoon is the only fictional text in which Conrad deals exclusively with steamship existence, which means that he steers clear of the antagonism between sail and steam. Typhoon is therefore an obvious choice for examining steamship experiences on their own terms, also because Conrad treats steamship life as being nearly free of all the usual negative valorizations.
In my analysis of Typhoon, I employ a dual focus. One line of argument will concentrate on the Nan-Shan as a collective and relational environment. The ambition is to describe the different experiences of and mediated through the steamship, not least when the typhoon hits the ship. Another line of argument centers on Captain MacWhirr’s experiences of technology, his relationship to the barometer, an instrument that plays a central role in the novel, and his distinct attitude of “composure” that ultimately leads to the rescue of the crew and the ship. My approach falls within the Heideggerian model of everydayness/disruption (Alltäglichkeit/Störung). The typhoon is a negative experience and disruption of the average everydayness with its ready-to-hand relationship to tools and their assignment structure. As such, it helps to make visible man’s technologically mediated relationship with the world, not least because the disruption destroys the structure of assignments of the in-order-to.
While acknowledging that Leavis and Watt have valid points concerning the general tone and the specific characterizations in Typhoon, my reading moves in a different direction. Instead of Leavis’ emphasis on sublimity with its Kantian connotations of the primacy of human rationality and calculation, and instead of Watt’s Bachtinian accentuation of the comic and the humorous, I argue that MacWhirr’s composure represents a different type of heroism that is best described as a unique combination of Heideggerian Gelassenheit (releasement, letting-be) and calculative thinking; that is, of meditation and calculation. My reading will also dispute those readings, for example Bruss’, that place Jukes at the center of the novel. It will demonstrate that Typhoon is a novel about the relationship between man, technology, and nature; more
…
(man-steamship) → nature
man (-steamship/nature)
However, this needs to be differentiated. While it is true that everybody on board the Nan-Shan is implicated in the abovementioned embodiment and background relations, they experience them in different ways. This has to do primarily with the architecture of the ship (the deck above and the engine-room below) and its division of labor (sailors above and engineers below). The deck and the engine-room determine to a large extent each crew member’s concrete experience of the ship’s environment and functioning. Each space signals a world completely different from the other space. Conrad draws contrasting images of the two. One is open, clear, and airy, the other closed, dark, and claustrophobic. One belongs to the sailors, the other to the stokers and the engineers, one of whom had “arms like a blacksmith.” Each world is determined by a particular intentionality, its in-order-to, and its specific task. One is oriented towards navigation and reading the weather (e.g., through the barometer), the other is one-dimensionally focused on the steam. Rather than complement each other, they seem to be incommensurable: “Who cared for his crimson barometer? It was the steam—the steam—that was going down.”92
(man-machine) (-nature)
The arrow of technology’s mediating capacity is dissolved because focus is no longer directed at anything but the machine. At the same time, it is not a case of an alterity relation, because the machine does not present itself as an “other” to the stokers and engineers. Instead, their bodies are completely absorbed by the ship’s steam engines because of the closed-off room with its noises, heat, and emissions that attack the human senses. The embodiment relation of “below” emphasizes the fusion between man and machine and simultaneously tones down any experience of mediation between ship and sea.
(man-steamship) → nature
The two worlds are separated, but as Conrad mentioned, on the steamship it is the machine that is decisive, and it is obvious how it both encircles and influences sea life above and below deck. Experience through technology, here the steamship, becomes either more atomized and specialized (the Nan-Shan reduced to pure machine, the steam engine) or more self-sufficient and disengaged (the Nan-Shan reduced to being on vacation). The technologically mediating event or movement, symbolized by the arrow in the schematization of human-technology relations, loses much of its power, becomes softer, so that man and technology constitute an increasingly closed circle. The sea seems to be an unobtrusive reality more distant.
man → steamship (-nature)
The basic human-technology relation on the Nan-Shan is still the embodied relation: (man-steamship) →nature. Sometimes, this morphs into a background relation: man (-steamship/nature), but this has to be supplemented with an alterity relation: man →steamship (-nature). This shows that the technological experience in the engine-room in condensed form constitutes the essence of steamship experience. Its scheme is precisely the fusion of embodiment relations and alterity relations: (man-steamship) (-nature). The engineers and the stokers in the engine-room, the “black-squad,”94 realize this experience in its full extent through their work, while the sailors on deck are reduced to idlers and spectators.
All the above-mentioned human-technology relations and experiences are thrown into confusion and broken down during the hurricane. The advent of the typhoon, a tropical cyclone, results in a negative confrontation between the technological relations and human experiences. They are torn out of their transparent context of use and suffer a Störung, a disruption. This is where the man-technology-nature theme is revealed as being problematic. Jukes senses this new experience of the steamship. In addition to feeling “unsafe,” he feels that the ship’s motion is “unfamiliar, unforeseen, and difficult to counteract.” What used to be familiar is now strange; tranquility has been replaced with anxiety. Nature, here in the form of the sublime, has begun to challenge man and not the other way around. To the sailors on deck, the challenge with its extreme noise drowns out both man and machine: “It was tumultuous and very loud—made up of the rush of the wind, the crashes of the sea, with the prolonged deep vibration of the air, like the roll of an immense and remote drum beating the charge of the gale.” The sailors are no longer isolated from or in a disengaged relationship with nature but separated from each other: “This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind.”95 Their eyes, ears, and mouths are somehow rendered useless, and what is left of their sensitivity is their ability to smell and, more importantly, feel with their entire bodies the ship and nature.
(man) steamship-nature
The battle instigated by the hurricane is now a battle between steamship and nature in which man has become an unnecessary and superfluous component. The disruption emphasizes that the sailors on deck are passive spectators to what is anthropomorphically described as a fight: “The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.”96
(man-technology) -nature
man → (technology-world)
It is of course questionable if such exposed nontechnological experiences are possible on the steamship since every experience here is embedded in technology. Nevertheless, the typhoon suddenly makes it possible to enter a direct relationship with nature.
He was trying to see, with that watchful manner of a seaman who stares into the wind’s eye as if into the eye of an adversary, to penetrate the hidden intention and guess the aim and force of the thrust. The strong wind swept at him out of a vast obscurity; he felt under his feet the uneasiness of his ship, and he could not even discern the shadow of her shape. He wished it were not so; and very still he waited, feeling stricken by a blind man’s helplessness.100
The typhoon does not change much for MacWhirr since he is used to having an indirect or distanced relationship to nature. At first, this is a genuine problem for him: an actual blindness and inadequacy whose concrete expression is the condition of false comfort and lethargy. Later, the blindness transforms into a qualified way of seeing which turns out to be the salvation of him and the crew.
MacWhirr → (barometer-nature)
stood confronted by the fall of a barometer he had no reason to distrust. The fall—taking into account the excellence of the instrument, the time of the year, and the ship’s position on the terrestrial globe—was of a nature ominously prophetic; but the red face of the man betrayed no sort of inward disturbance. Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of a prophecy till the fulfilment had brought it home to his very door.101
Inherent in this type of technological experience is a formalization of specific aspects of nature. Something is reduced, something is magnified, but what is magnified requires deciphering. It serves as an example of Heidegger’s calculative thinking: Nature is quantified, and man can count on nature by being able to predict it. Nature can be counted and counted upon. As a result, the typhoon announces its arrival at this early point in the novel. Because MacWhirr has never seen such a dramatic barometer fall before, he rejects it or simply cannot read it correctly. The barometer loses its hermeneutical transparency, and the instrument points toward itself as something useless. The typhoon’s disruption is revealed by the barometer, yet in MacWhirr’s case, its indication cannot be read accurately.
It stood very low—incredibly low, so low that Captain MacWhirr grunted. […]
His eyes looked at it, narrowed with attention, as if expecting an imperceptible sign. […] There was no mistake. It was the lowest reading he had ever seen in his life.
Captain MacWhirr emitted a low whistle. […] Perhaps something had gone wrong with the thing!
There was an aneroid glass screwed above the couch. He turned that way, struck another match, and discovered the white face of the other instrument looking at him from the bulkhead, meaningly, not to be
gainsaid, as though the wisdom of men were made unerring by the indifference of matter. There was no room for doubt now. […] The worst was to come, then—and if the books were right this worst would be very bad. The experience of the last six hours had enlarged his conception of what heavy weather could be like. “It’ll be terrific,” he pronounced, mentally. He had not consciously looked at anything by the light of the matches except at the barometer; and yet somehow he had seen that his waterbottle and the two tumblers had been flung out of their stand. It seemed to give him a more intimate knowledge of the tossing the ship had gone through. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he thought. And his table had been cleared, too; […] all the things that had their safe appointed places—they were gone […]. The hurricane had broken in upon the orderly arrangements of his privacy. This had never happened before, and the feeling of dismay reached the very seat of his composure. And the worst was to come yet!102
Between the first and second look on the barometer, MacWhirr has undergone a learning process. He is now better able to equate the barometer’s position with the empirical conditions of nature, the typhoon. As a result of his immediate experience of a tropical cyclone, MacWhirr has expanded his hermeneutical competences and technological vocabulary. The typhoon has clarified the hermeneutical skills that are presupposed for the barometer to make sense, not through a theoretical process, but a practical and concrete process.
Ultimately, the barometer has not served its purpose; instead, it has been a kind of measuring device able to chronicle the development of MacWhirr, from inexperienced to experienced, from blind to seeing, from an inaccurate interpreter to an accurate one. However, the technological experience only reaches its completion when Captain MacWhirr returns to the barometer to re-read it. Only then is its hermeneutical transparency restored, and only then does he understand the meaning of its expression. But Captain MacWhirr’s enhanced hermeneutical proficiency is not enough to lead the Nan-Shan safely through the hurricane. It only helps MacWhirr to get a better understanding of the enemy’s magnitude. The still missing ingredient for the ship to get through the storm without wrecking is to be found in MacWhirr himself as a personal trait.
During the typhoon, nature arouses the sense of the sublime in the main characters. This is emphasized by the narrator’s use of words that all point to liminal experiences in which perceptions of the outer world and mental
When Jukes reappears on deck after his mission to create order amongst “the Chinamen,” he “discovered he could detect obscure shapes as if his sight had become preternaturally acute. He saw faint outlines.” Calm and order are reemerging. The shapes may be obscure, but still, they are shapes. The wind having disappeared, Jukes’ senses reactivate one by one. He breathed the smoke from the funnel, he felt “the deliberate throb of the engines” throughout his body, he heard distinct sounds, and he saw “dimly the squat shape of his captain.” However, what has been endured was only the first round of the fight. After having re-gained a little strength in the hurricane’s core, the second round announces itself through “a colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship,” and “Jukes could no longer see his captain distinctly.” Between parts v and vi, Conrad introduces an ellipsis in the story’s chronological progress by choosing not to depict the second half of the fight. Instead, he laconically states at the end of part v that Captain MacWhirr was spared the “annoyance” of losing his ship, and in the beginning of part vi we hear about the Nan-Shan’s arrival in Fu-chau on “a bright sunshiny day.”105
To Kant, objects may be called beautiful, but they cannot be called sublime, because sublimity “is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind.” The source of the beautiful is in nature, whereas the source of the sublime is exclusively in us: “the object serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind; for what is properly sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form.” Natural phenomena such as earthquakes or typhoons pass through our sensory perception. As a result of their might and violence, they surpass our imaginative faculty and lead to a cognitive collapse. They “make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power,” and as a result “we found our own limitation in the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our capacity to adopt a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain.” However, the collapse also leads to a new and purely reason-determined cognition. The experiences of the limits of our senses and our inadequacy make us realize that we possess a supersensible capacity and strength (the mind, ideas): “we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature.”107
in our own faculty of reason [we found] another, nonsensible standard, which has that very infinity under itself as a unit against which everything in nature is small, and thus found in our own mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: likewise the irresistibility of its power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.109
we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us (insofar as it influences us). Everything that arouses this feeling in us, which includes the power of nature that calls forth our own powers, is thus (although improperly) called sublime; and only under the presupposition of this idea in us and in relation to it are we capable of arriving at the idea of the sublimity of that being who produces inner respect in us not merely through his power, which he displays in nature, but even more by the capacity that is placed within us for judging nature without fear and thinking of our vocation as sublime in comparison with it.110
White water, of course, figures prominently in the Romantic conception of the sublime, and the related notion of the oceanic, where pleasure is derived from the prospect of terror, boundlessness, and obscurity. But within the narrative chronotope of white water, characters do not enjoy the contemplative distance necessary for the sublime. A character’s removed and aesthetic stance toward the struggle to survive would be a road to certain death.111
Cohen introduces a different kind of sublimity that we could call the maritime sublime. To Kant, the epistemological conflict associated with the sublime—the capacity to grasp genuine terror, boundlessness, or obscurity—is ultimately solved by reason and thereby confirms reason’s sovereignty and capacity to totalize nature conceptually, for example through concepts such as the infinite. An aesthetic distance to the natural object is upheld in order not to be destroyed. In contrast, Cohen argues that to the sailor facing the hurricane on board the ship everything is a matter of life and death. The sailor encounters the sublime nature physically, head-on, without the comfort of contemplative distance and the sanctuary of reason’s abstractions. The maritime sublime overwhelms the sailor’s senses with matter. It causes a mental state of conceptual and ideational vacuum without any possibility of escape (epistemological problem) and a physical state of numbness in which speech dissolves, the ears are blocked, and the eyes are blinded (phenomenological problem). The liminal experience is both cerebral and corporal. If the sailor occupies a distanced position as a detached observer with a transcendent perspective, he will lose sense of the lethal potential of the sea and jeopardize his survival.
This is not exactly the case in Typhoon, though. Through Captain MacWhirr, Conrad shows that having a certain distance to nature perceived as sublime is a necessary supplement for survival. But the distance is more Heideggerian than Kantian. In Typhoon, the experience of the sublime emphasizes the limit of concepts, but Conrad also mobilizes it to expand this limit. MacWhirr
without taking the time to sit down he had waded with a conscious effort into the terminology of the subject. He lost himself amongst advancing semi-circles, left- and right-hand quadrants, the curves of the tracks, the probable bearing of the centre, the shifts of wind and the readings of barometer. He tried to bring all these things into a definite relation to himself, and ended by becoming contemptuously angry with such a lot of words, and with so much advice, all head-work and supposition, without a glimmer of certitude.113
MacWhirr cannot understand what he reads. He is unable to integrate the meaning of the words into his horizon of understanding, because they do not relate to himself. It is only when MacWhirr has experienced the typhoon that he manages to fuse this experience with the theory and signs mediated by the reference work and the barometer and thereby achieve a new understanding of what a storm is. MacWhirr is a rather one-dimensional man, who values practicality above all else, and who only understands a phenomenon when it strikes him physically.
The disruption is not the novel’s final statement. The transition between the parts v and vi reveals that the Nan-Shan managed to survive the tropical cyclone. But perhaps the survival is not the novel’s final statement either? Perhaps we could examine the manner in which the Nan-Shan manages to stay afloat? This is where Captain MacWhirr takes center stage. The disruption is not completely isolated from the rest of the tale’s more everyday episodes. The typhoon as Störung functions as a correction causing MacWhirr to integrate two separate experiential dimensions. He is only able to do so because the relationship between man, technology, and nature is set in a particular way. The human relationship with nature must be distant, in a way more Heideggerian
At first, MacWhirr’s steamship existence is characterized by a mediated and distanced relationship to nature, first through the totality of the Nan-Shan itself, then through the barometer, his downcast eyes, and the reference book. This detached relationship becomes impossible to uphold during the typhoon when these media are inaccessible, either because his senses have been blocked or because his hermeneutical competency is inadequate, or they are insufficient because the typhoon makes it impossible to walk around (or sit) with downcast eyes. The typhoon demands a supplement to the technologically mediated revealing of the world; it demands a revealing that is distanced but distanced in a different way. Conrad uses the word “composure” to characterize MacWhirr’s specific attitude, and this can be further elaborated through Heidegger as a particularly productive combination of his concept of Gelassenheit, which is a nontechnological manner of revealing (usually translated as “releasement” or “composure”), and his idea of “calculative thinking.”
The calm collected attitude is associated with MacWhirr from the beginning, but it is valorized in two opposite ways throughout the novel. At first, the narrator and Jukes contribute to the ridiculing of MacWhirr. His calm is here an expression of a “bashfulness” bordering on the ludicrous and associated with the comfortable life. It is implied in his wearing “a brown bowler hat, a complete suit of brownish hue, and clumsy black boots” as if “unable to grasp what is due to the difference of latitudes,” and it is condensed in the image of his “elegant umbrella of the very best quality, but unrolled.” When Jukes acts as MacWhirr’s maid by helping him unfold the umbrella, Rout, the chief engineer, “would turn away his head in order to hide a smile.” The negative and positive evaluations of MacWhirr’s attitude are contained in one sentence: “Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he was tranquilly sure of himself.” No imagination and no ability whatsoever to understand figural speech, yet also self-reliant, dutiful, and reliable. This combination of characteristics is the reason that every ship under MacWhirr’s command is a “floating abode of harmony and peace.”114
In the negative evaluation of MacWhirr, his calmness is a consequence of steamship life and, ultimately, of his inexperience in relation to technology and nature. But during the typhoon, MacWhirr’s calmness transforms into a footing for stability and decisiveness and, ultimately, for survival. The experience
MacWhirr’s “composure” comprises both. It signals an attitude of calculative-calm thinking, a mixture of mental activity and passivity, of future-orientedness and being-in-the-here-and-now. The attitude is a unique maritime coded position in which the future-oriented calculative thinking is supplemented with presence-oriented and calm thinking. In the “Memorial Address,” in which Heidegger develops his ideas of Gelassenheit and meditative thinking as an alternative to calculative thinking, he describes Gelassenheit or releasement in the following way: “We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no,’ by an old word, releasement toward things.”115 This attitude does not open nature through challenging but instead cautiously lets nature encounter man. Releasement (also called abandonment or letting-be) becomes the attitude capable of resisting the danger (Gefahr) of a humanity that adopts an exclusively technological-revealing approach to the world. Michelet observes something similar in “Conquest of the Sea,” the chapter in La Mer that discusses (the limits of) the scientification of the ocean, in relation to a typhoon: “Enmeshed, it is no longer possible to go back; it holds you.”116 Ultimately, science (understood as calculative thinking) and daring (understood as future-orientedness) alone or paired would allow the typhoon to dominate; when combined with Gelassenheit and know-how, survival is possible.
Through this analysis based on Ihde’s human-technology relations, it seemed as if the possibility for a distanced and contemplative gaze had disappeared within the Ge-stell, but perhaps this was too hasty a conclusion. Through the composed (gelassene) attitude, it is possible to establish a necessary distance to nature’s overwhelming forces. This distance is the basis for decision-making and survival. The calculative attitude is always reaching out in(to) the things,
During the typhoon, MacWhirr remains calm. To Jukes, he is transformed into a solid rock to which the roaming and panicking first mate can hold on for dear life. The calmness manifests on several levels, for example through the captain’s voice, which comprises “that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo.” MacWhirr’s calmness and passivity is no longer charged with comfort; instead, it is endowed with a sacred light and offers a potential for survival. MacWhirr has been formed and educated by the hurricane, so that his “composure” is now ready to be expressed in its true oxymoronic constitution: “Face it. […] Keep a cool head.”117 MacWhirr unites the challenging attitude (“Face it” indicates reaching out for things) and the collected attitude (“Keep a cool head” signifies withdrawal and meditation) into the attitude of composure, which is what prevents the Nan-Shan from shipwrecking. In the encounter with the devastating force of the tropical cyclone, man needs to have a mediated relationship with nature, not merely through concrete technologies, but also through himself. Man as seaman must withdraw from nature’s violent tumult and look inward to remain in the world. Through the typhoon, Conrad points to a freedom in man in relation to technology and to the Ge-stell, which is necessary for his survival. Technology cannot rescue humanity; only humanity can rescue humanity.
J. M. W. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, exhibited 1842
© tate
J. M. W. Turner’s painting Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth from 1842 (Figure 12) foregrounds the relation between technology (steamship) and nature (the ocean) and can therefore serve as a useful framework for understanding Conrad’s Typhoon. Both works have the same objectives: to emphasize the limits of technology in relation to nature and to show that nature constitutes a particular correction to technology. Turner’s painting conveys his lifelong fascination with the forces of nature; at the same time, it is an example of his fervent engagement with the development of nineteenth-century steam technologies. More specifically, Snow Storm thematizes the limits of technology through the destructive potential and centrifugal forces of
The painting was not well received by Turner’s contemporaries. An exception was John Ruskin who praised it for being “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas.”119 It eventually became iconic because of its unique rendering of the chaotic forces of the wind and the waves, as they round upon a manmade machine. Its fame is also a result of Turner’s rejection of the physical and rational distance so
The typhoon educates MacWhirr, and he realizes the need to complement the technological approach to the world with a contemplative approach. Turner produced his paintings some fifty years before Conrad wrote his sea stories, yet they are both romantics in the sense that they see the conflict between nature and technology from the perspective of nature. Technology will always constitute a fall from a more natural and primordial state. To find what is genuinely human, it becomes important for Turner and Conrad to examine the limits of technology. To Conrad, the genuinely human is always to be found on the sailing ship (MacWhirr is a special case), because this “machinery” functions in concurrence with man and nature.
It is possible to locate Heidegger within this horizon in that he, too, operates with a kind of naturalness—the ready-to-hand attitude—that can be disrupted by the theoretical-thematized approach. This relationship becomes more complicated with modern technology, through which the challenging idea of nature as standing-reserve becomes dominant. Within this historical moment of being, Heidegger is also searching for more primordial forms of relating and revealing. He proposes the attitude of releasement, of letting-be, that results in a more detached and composed relationship with the technological world. In Conrad and Heidegger, there is a constant search for the primordial and for what is uniquely human. Technology in its modern variant seems to be enemy number one. The experience of the typhoon is to Conrad what the experience of anxiety is to Heidegger. Both experiences tear man away from his technologically mediated and everyday approach to the world, isolate him, and let him be confronted with his abandonment to the world (Geworfenheit) and his freedom of opportunities (Entwurf). This condition is un-homely (unheimlich) in the same way as the Nan-Shan suddenly becomes a stranger, because the sailors can no longer feel at one with or take refuge in what was their familiar environment. The intrusion of the negative emphasizes man’s freedom regarding the technological world-disclosure—in Conrad, this is precisely the addendum that makes possible the rescue of the ship—but it also points to the finitude and inadequacy of humans when faced with the forces of nature and the surroundings. Realizing that the technological and calculative opening of the world is given within a limited and historical context that is man’s signals the impossibility of maintaining a hegemonic relationship to nature. Since man is final, he can never calculate everything. Conrad and Heidegger are not only critics of technology, but they are also explorers of the limits of
Like Heidegger, Conrad shows that it is when man is in grave danger that he is able to find the saving (Rettende): “But human reflection can ponder the fact that all saving power must be of a higher essence than what is endangered, though at the same time kindred to it.”120 Through a new attitude, man is able to see that the saving (the possibility for another world-disclosure) stands in a special relationship to danger and its possible reduction to only one world-disclosure. By realizing the essence of technology and technology’s reduction (in Heidegger man becomes standing-reserve, in Conrad passenger), it becomes possible to relate to it freely. So, when the technologically implicated and nature-challenging man seems to be most absorbed and occupied, a turn is possible that opens man in a new way. Heidegger calls this new and freer opening toward things and nature Gelassenheit. During the typhoon, such a turn happens, but in the distinct maritime way in which technology is united with the calm attitude. Maritime life is always already technologically coded and mediated, and there is in this life a constant focus on survival in the struggle between life and death. In that sense, the two “settings”—calculation and meditation—are united in one state of being, MacWhirr’s composure.
In the “Author’s Note” to Typhoon and Other Stories, Conrad discusses how he transformed the hurricane story from “mere anecdote” into genuine art: “I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place. What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr.”121 Three things are important here: “deeper significance,” “leading motive,” and “point of view,” all of which converge in the attitude of composure. The deeper significance has to do with Conrad’s probing into the question of the roles of humans and technology, and the limits of technology in relation to nature. The leading motive is MacWhirr, who, like a conductor, manages to centralize the divergent rhythms (as conceived by Lefebvre) and, not least, unite the complementary viewpoints of calculative and meditative thinking into a single point of view, the composed attitude. Composure becomes Conrad’s salvaging of a unique maritime-technological form of experience that is an acceptable and nonreductive world-disclosure with a capacity for safeguarding (but not guaranteeing) the sailor’s survival in his encounters with extreme
6 Science and Technology in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
The works of Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad share the same fundamental interest and structure: the relationship between humans and the natural world as mediated by technology. However, their attentiveness toward humans took separate directions, their visions of the natural world contrasted, and their attitudes toward modern technology differed. Conrad’s primary interest is the physical, psychological, and existential predicaments of shipborne men and life at sea. He sees steam technology as muddying, even destroying, the purer and more primordial experiential relationship between humans, sailing ships, and the ocean. In Conrad’s oeuvre, Typhoon is a rare example of a more positive attitude toward modern technology. Verne’s focus is on the capacity of manmade technological machines to assist humans in transgressing the geographical and spatial boundaries of the known worlds. In Verne, the psychological dimensions of his characters are of lesser importance than their actions and observations of the exterior world.
If Conrad uses the outer world of technoships at sea as a setting from which to explore the inner worlds and interpersonal relationships of his characters, Verne uses state-of-the-art and not-yet-accomplished technological developments as vehicles for human explorations of the white spaces of the physical world. The natural sciences then assist Verne in describing and inventorying its riches and resources. In Conrad, focus is on the human predicament. But it is the mysterious laws of a withdrawn, noncommunicating, and hostile universe that governs his worlds, reducing humans to impotent, insignificant, and yet fascinating creatures who grapple to comprehend the obscure mechanisms that determine their individual fates. In Verne, focus is on technology’s capacity to open up new outer worlds. Manmade technological inventions make humans into industrial masters of and consubstantial with a pliant world made transparent and communicative through science. In Verne, there are no uninhabitable spaces, only uninhabited ones.122 Assisted by technology and language, Nemo and other Verne characters become demiurges, something we almost never see in Conrad. As world-makers, they “make space into a language” and
6.1 The Making of a New Literary Profile and a Novel
Jules Verne combined the seriousness of scientific documentation and the didactics of educational instruction with the qualities of fiction, which gave him a profile as “popularizing writer.” This was encouraged, perhaps even constructed and dictated, by his editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel after he received Verne’s manuscript to Cing semaines en ballon, his first novel, which was published in 1863.124 The duo’s idea was to create a symbiosis between the novelistic form and the natural sciences by meticulously incorporating the totality of knowledge accumulated during the previous and ongoing geographical explorations. The concept for the series Voyages extraordinaires, in stark contrast to l’art pour l’art, was natural history mediated as science adventure fiction, a picturesque encyclopedia. It was an ambitious, optimistic, and somewhat utopian project. Fundamentally, it was also a commercial agreement, a literary production in the economic sense with two to three works to be written per year. The agreement seems to have suited Verne’s bourgeois temperament.125
Thirty-seven years before the publication of Conrad’s Typhoon, on July 25, 1865, George Sand (1804–1876) sent Jules Verne (1828–1905) a letter of thanks for sending her his two most recent novels, Voyage au centre de la terre (1864/1867) and De la terre à la lune (1865). Sand appreciated his writing and urged Verne to pursue his imaginative explorations of the world by turning to the depths of the sea in his next novel, making submarine adventures possible by the creation of diving devices perfected by the young writer’s scientific imagination.126 The elder Sand, whom Verne admired, is often credited with playing a decisive role in the genesis of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, first serialized from March 20, 1869 to June 20, 1870 in Le Magasin d’éducation et de recreation, and published as an illustrated novel on November 16, 1871. As Jacques Noiray remarks in his “Préface” to Gallimard’s 2005 edition of the novel, it is possible that Verne obeyed “a deeper logic of his own imagination.”127 After the aerial
The inner, personal, and artistic logic was supported by outside, social, and market forces. Among the public there was an enormous interest in scientific landmarks, technological innovations, and barrier-transgressing voyages. Curiosity regarding the underwater world was particularly fervent during the 1860s. An important source for Verne (as it was for Michelet), and an example of a scientific landmark publication that resonated with the public, was Matthew Fontaine Maury’s The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855). Additionally, several submersible ships had already been on display in Paris. The increased attentiveness towards submarines and the speed of experimentation was due in part to their rising significance in the American Civil War. The submersible vessels employed during that war were all still dependent on human power to move. The world’s first submarine to be propelled by mechanical power, the French Plongeur by Admiral Siméon Bourgois and naval engineer Charles Brun, was launched on April 16, 1863, and inspired Verne’s design of the Nautilus in terms of form, size, and functions. There was also a real Nautilus created by the American Samuel Hallett, displayed in 1858 and later during the 1867 World Exhibition. Hallett named his submarine in homage to Robert Fulton who invented the world’s first submarine in 1800 and named it Nautilus.128
Sand may have urged Verne to explore the oceanic depths, but she alone did not catalyze Vingt mille lieues. As Noiray put it, “the surprising thing would have been if this novel had not been written.”129 The fact that Verne had published a short story in 1861, “San Carlos,” which features a bizarre submersible vessel, relativizes Sand’s role even more. If Conrad drew on personal experiences from sea voyages and anecdotes circulating among the sailing community, Verne plunged into scientific textbooks and visited exhibitions to examine the latest hardware on display. Verne also had the maritime world close by. He was born on an island surrounded by two branches of the Loire River in Nantes, an important shipbuilding town in Verne’s lifetime. His brother was a naval officer
6.2 Science Adventure Fiction
Almost all of Verne’s novels are adventure novels, and several have been labeled as science fiction. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas qualifies as both, although the science-fiction tag has been challenged by Verne scholar and translator William Butcher: “Verne is not a science-fiction writer: most of his books contain no innovative science.”130 Verne was inspired by several contemporary submarines, perhaps the Plongeur most of all. He visited the 1867 World Exhibition that featured section models and complete models of the Plongeur, which he is supposed to have observed carefully.131 Verne’s novel cannot qualify as science fiction if one understands science fiction to be a work of fiction that comprises not-yet invented technological machines. But the truth is that the all the submersible ships built prior to the publication of Vingt mille lieues were extremely primitive compared to Verne’s Nautilus.
After two years of further experimentation, especially trying to solve the problem of a lack of stability, Bourgois and Brun abandoned the Plongeur project in 1865, largely unhappy with the result, and the French navy disarmed it on June 20, 1867. Jacques Payen remarks, “The true beginnings of the submarine dates to the end of the nineteenth century, first with the Gymnote by Gustave Zédé from 1888, then especially the Gustave Zédé from 1893, and finally the Narval by Laubeuf in 1899.”132 Submersible vessels existed around 1870 when Verne published Vingt mille lieues, but his Nautilus was much more advanced than the Plongeur, Hallett’s Nautilus, and Fulton’s Nautilus as well as all other existing submarines. Verne’s Nautilus was a machine of the future that helped inspire the technological breakthroughs of the 1880s and 1890s. This is precisely what George Sand meant when she urged Verne to create diving devices and perfect them by using his scientific imagination. The science was already underway, but for it to advance it required not only further technological experiments, but also the vivid imagination of a writer with Verne’s unique talents.
Two interventions are possible. First, it is generally acknowledged that Verne’s primary interest was never science and technology as such, but rather the prospects made possible by science and technology to make new spaces in the form of geographies, hydrographies, and aerographies accessible to humankind as well as their implications for political society in its entirety.134 Second, Suvin’s argument that cognitive estrangement primarily emerges from “a narrative novum (the dramatis personae and/or their context) significantly different from what is the norm in ‘naturalistic’ or empiricist fiction,” and also bearing in mind his comment on science fiction’s “concern with a domestication of the amazing,” makes it difficult not to associate Vingt mille lieues sous les mers with science fiction. The novum is obviously the context of the submarine world, which represented one of the last frontiers not yet crossed by humans, and the project of Verne and Hetzel was to familiarize the amazing undersea world. In addition, Verne mobilizes estranging perspectives that challenge the norms governing society at large. The oceanic perspective, the view from the aquatic depths, represents an alternative to the terrestrial “Ptolemaic-type closed world picture,”135 by challenging the idea of human exceptionalism. The submarine perspective, the view from the Nautilus and through the eyes of Captain Nemo, also conjures up an alternative social model comprising echoes of the quarante-huitarde tradition, utopian socialism, nationalist liberation movements, and libertarian individualism.
Let us not delve into technological and generical details here. Some sources already quoted can be consulted for more on the evolution of submarines and the accompanying micro-technologies. With regard to genre, a flexible solution
6.3 Progress and Mastering
My main objectives are to discuss the role maritime technologies play in transforming the relationship between humans and the natural world and how a technologically mediated experience of the sea is configured aesthetically. Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires in general (the series comprises more than sixty novels), and Vingt mille lieues sous les mers in particular, inscribe themselves in two interdependent ideological currents that dominated the societies of Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century: the quasi-religion of scientific and technological progress and the aspiration to master the planet, which included mapping the parts of the planet as yet unknown to these societies.
Later in his career, from around 1870–71, the optimism that characterizes Verne’s early work is replaced with a more pessimistic view of progress and the potential for science and technology to support progress, growth, and exploitation. The novel that marks the turn is Le Chancellor, which Verne began to write in 1870 and published in 1874–75.137 In Vingt mille lieues, arguably the last work of Verne’s first period, he glorifies both currents, progress and mastering, although not without the occasional reservation. As Jean Chesneaux has shown, Verne’s thinking is inspired by the optimistic ideology of Saint-Simonianism characterized by its commitment to the exploitation of the world’s natural resources and of capitalist and colonial conquest.138
Nemo’s praise of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the developer of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, the same year that Hetzel initiated the serialized publication of Vingt mille lieues in Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, is a testimony of the novel’s Saint-Simonianism: “He does more honour to his nation than the greatest of sea-captains! Like so many others, he began with obstacles and disappointments, but has triumphed because he has the necessary will-power.”139 Navigators such as James Cook, Comte de La Pérouse, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and Dumont d’Urville are often referred to by Nemo or Aronnax, all of them considered heroes in their efforts to explore the globe and expand our knowledge about it. Verne’s admiration for past discoveries
Nemo’s voyage is an attempt to resume and transgress the explorations of the English Cook and the French d’Urville in Oceania and the Antarctic. It is precisely by virtue of the Nautilus, Nemo’s awe-inspiring submarine and technological wonder, that, in the words of Aronnax “a still greater marvel” than “the most fabulous and mythological of creatures” because “a man-made phenomenon,”140 Verne is able to push further than his predecessors. Cook and d’Urville were restricted spatially as well as temporally, which left their explorations fragmentary, limited, and unfulfilled. Their expeditions had a natural expiry date, manned as they were by land-committed scientists, sailors, and family men, and subject to the demands that only terra firma can supply in the long run (fresh water, fruits, and vegetables, materials for clothing, tools, etc.). The expeditions also had natural geographical and hydrographical limits as the ships were reliant on the surface of the sea for movement and unable to cross masses of ice.
(crew-Nautilus) → underwater world
(crew-Nautilus-underwater world)
Not only is the submarine able to access spaces no human has ever accessed, but it is also able to inhabit them. The Nautilus is not only a prosthesis of the crew, but it also forms an organic unity with the ocean.
As a self-supporting ecosystem that requires oceanic substances and nothing more for its continued existence, there is no time limit on the voyage of the Nautilus. This enables Verne to totalize what had up to then been fragmentary
The point of view in Vingt mille lieues is radically different from anything seen before in literary history. In the mid-twentieth century, Günter Grass was celebrated for creating a perspective from below through the character of Oskar Matzerath in Die Blechtrommel (1949). Grass’s point of view was from below in a generational-altitudinal and social sense, primarily the child’s perspective from an altitude of approximately one meter, but also the perspective of a member of the German merchant middle-class. Verne’s point of view is from below in a veritable elemental(-altitudinal), spatial, and species sense. With the Nautilus, and through the narrator Aronnax and Captain Nemo, Verne invents an all-embracing vision that unites worlds above and below. It is a dual point of view that is simultaneously inverted-inverting, decentered-decentering, and displaced-displacing—in short, radically different-differentiating and strange-estranging. It is a perspective that borders on the nonhuman and approaches a superhuman techno-geographical-hydrographical epistemology, at once geographical-hydrographical and detached from the challenges of nature thanks to the invention of a technological marvel.
6.4 Vraisemblance
So far, we have dealt mainly with the marvelous and the extraordinary. It is important to stress that Vingt mille lieues taps into the register of vraisemblance. The rootedness in a world that is radically different yet not impossible (Suvin’s formula for science fiction)142 was part of the pedagogical and didactic
Aronnax’s scientific background endows him with reliability, and the reader does not have to worry about him telling tall tales or imagining things. Add to this that Vingt mille lieues is written in the form of a journal, the marine form par excellence, and that its style is characterized by precision. If the scientific impulse vouches for accuracy and objectivity, the journal format rests on detailed chronology. Admittedly, if one examines the temporal design of the novel closely, mistakes and irregularities in Aronnax’s chronology can be found. But the most important aspect of this type of vraisemblance is not the veracity of the dates, but the very practice of dating. In addition, we can point to three types of near-convergence. The first is between Aronnax’s experiences and his writing them down. This endows the novel with intensity, presence, and even an emotional dimension that supplement the scientific neutrality. The second is between the voyage and the editing of the novel. This partially collapses the distinction between narrator and author and thus underlines the reliability argument. The third is between the end of the voyage and the publication, which enforces the impression of veracity. With its events taking place in 1866–67, Vingt mille lieues is the documentation of immediate history, very near the present of the first readers.
The chronological precision and the story’s temporal proximity to the year of publication is supplemented by geographical precision. Throughout the
1ère Carte and 2e Carte in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1871 edition, drawings probably by Jules Verne. Gallica.
© bibliothèque nationale de france
Verne’s novels were richly illustrated, and Vingt mille lieues is no exception. Besides the two maps (Figure 13), the novel abounds with drawings by Alphonse de Neuville (1835–1885) and Édouard Riou (1833–1900), engraved by Henri Théophile Hildibrand (1824–1897) (Figure 14 and 15). While many of the illustrations depict familiar phenomena and scenes (e.g., “Le cortège suivait toujours la frégate” and “Ned Land avait environ quarante ans”145), some of them also serve to naturalize the unnatural. The drawings are initially founded on Verne’s text and its descriptions. Words determine illustrations. At the same time, as a result of their detailed, realistic style, the illustrations create a feedback loop. Their visuality lends credibility to the descriptions. Illustrations verify the words. The radically different, yet not impossible, wonders of the submarine world—even the giant squids that had not yet been scientifically accepted at the time—are conveyed precisely as not impossible.
Édouard Riou, “Le cortège suivait toujours la frégate” (1871). Gallica
© bibliothèque nationale de france
Alphonse de Neuville, “Paysage sous-marin de l’île Crespo” (1871). Gallica
© bibliothèque nationale de france
In Verne, the fantastic is usually a result of existing, yet up to that point inaccessible, realms of reality (the undersea, the moon, the inner core of the Earth, etc.), which have been made accessible though scientific and technological progress. The spaces opened up for human exploration by the Vernian machines are thus both real and realistic, whereas the machines have futuristic components. The Nautilus is not a completely new innovation, but it is more advanced than contemporary examples of submarines. Although the Nautilus does not yet exist on the material plane, it is assuredly a nineteenth-century machine, and not of the twentieth or twenty-first century. This makes Verne
I have previously suggested that Verne and Conrad had different accentuations in the constellation of humans, technology, and nature. Although both authors employ technology and technological developments to examine the changing relationships between humans and the natural world, Conrad is traditionally considered an author more interested in the human understood as an individual person with a singular fate, whereas Verne’s focus is on the general progress of civilization through scientific and technological inventions. The role of the individual character as a singular person is sometimes questioned in Verne scholarship, and the characters are seen as types, carriers of ideas and representatives of a class or a nation.146 In the last stages of preparing the manuscript for publication, Verne indicated in a letter to Hetzel that he saw revisions of some of Riou’s illustrations necessary in order for them to convey the spirit of the vision more accurately: “I have received the sketches of Riou. I have some observations to make. I will write to him while I return them to him. I think that it is necessary to make the characters much smaller and show the salons much more in large. These are just corners of a salon that do not convey the idea of the wonders of the Nautilus. He will have to draw all the details with extreme finesse.”147 To Verne, the Nautilus, together with the undersea world, was clearly conceived as one of the novel’s protagonists alongside the more traditional choice of human protagonists (Aronnax and Nemo).
If science in the form of machine (the Nautilus) and a series of disciplines (geography, geology, hydrography, ichthyology, etc.) is a crucial element of Verne’s vision, he nevertheless had to endow science with a novelistic existence.148 To do so, Verne anchors science in the human characters, first of all in Aronnax, a doctor and a professor affiliated with the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris where he studied under Milne-Edwards, and in Captain Nemo, the chief engineer of the Nautilus and a savant. In the previous novels, the savants all had certain comic traits (e.g., Samuel Fergusson in Cinq semaines and Otto Lidenbrock in Voyage au centre de la terre), but in Vingt mille lieues business is more serious with Aronnax and Nemo. Similarly, adventure had primacy and science a secondary role in the previous novels; geography,
6.5 Ambiguities
It has been suggested that Aronnax and Nemo represent two opposite sides of Jules Verne, one side identifying with Aronnax’s logical and systematic aspects, perhaps also his humanist ethos, the other aspiring to emulate Nemo’s imaginative, energetic, and free spirit. Furthermore, the temperamental divergence between the two protagonists may even be transferred to the relationship between Verne and Hetzel, the latter embodying both the literalness and realism of Aronnax and the political idealism of Nemo.149 Whereas Aronnax represents the ideal of a measured, balanced, and reasonable science, which is legitimized by its respect for moral values and religious principles on which the bourgeois society are founded, Nemo is a more complex character oscillating between a seductive and charismatic visionary power and a superhuman, almost satanic temptation of omnipotence and complete knowledge.150 His moral compass is compromised by his anthropocentric yearning to unveil “the last secrets” of “our planet” and to not only “contemplate the works of the Creator in the midst of the liquid element, but also to penetrate the most fearful mysteries of the ocean.” This is accompanied by a demonic anger when his personal secrets are in danger of being disclosed: “You came and discovered a secret that no man on earth must penetrate—the secret of my entire existence.”151 There is an obvious parallel between Aronnax and Ishmael and between Nemo and Ahab. Although Melville’s duo is fleshed out more extensively, Ishmael is endowed with a greater artistic virtuosity and sensibility than Aronnax and Ahab embodies a deeper and more complex darkness than Nemo.
The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is healthy and pure. It is a spacious wilderness where man is never alone, for he can feel life throbbing all around him. The sea is the environment for a prodigious, supernatural existence; it is nothing but movement and love; it is a living infinity, as one of your poets has said. And indeed, sir, nature is present there in its three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, and mineral. […] The sea is nature’s vast reserve. It was through the sea that the globe as it were began, and who knows if it will not end in the sea! Perfect peace abides there. The sea does not belong to despots. On its surface immoral rights can still be claimed, men can fight each other, devour each other, and carry out all the earth’s atrocities. But thirty feet below the surface their power ceases, their influence fades, their authority disappears. Ah, sir, live, live in the heart of the sea! Independence is possible only here! Here I recognize no master! Here I am free!153
Nemo’s overture to the sea, recycling thoughts and passages from Michelet, is expressed on a background of tragic personal experiences of loss of family (a wife and two children) and political persecution. Nemo, Latin for nobody, is a freedom fighter, a Byronic hero, who supports the liberation struggles of small nations against the hegemonic oppression of great nations, concretely assisting the Cretan struggle for independence from his undersea world. But Nemo’s behavior and treatment of Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land as prisoners reveal an autocratic streak. Together with Nemo’s libertarian idealism, the motto of the Nautilus, mobilis in mobile (moving within a moving element), contrasts sharply with the forced immobilization of his guests. His autocratic streak also surfaces in his notion of ocean territories as his personal estate: “Sometimes I go hunting in the midst of this element thought inaccessible to man, and pursue the game living in my underwater forests. My flocks, like those of Neptune’s old shepherd, graze without fear on the immense ocean plains. There I have a vast property which I alone farm and which is always replanted by the hand of the Creator of all things.”154 Here, Crusoe’s name joins those of Ahab and Kurtz on the list of Nemo’s spiritual brothers.
Nemo’s overture has an additional point of interest, which has to do with the novel’s use of different temporalities. Verne and his protagonists are usually considered to be high priests of progress, and rightly so. But the linearity inherent in this pseudo-religion of the nineteenth century—the steady advancement of scientific knowledge and territorial discovery—is supplemented by
6.6 Apollonian Order, Dionysian Fertility
The Faustian drive in Nemo and Aronnax is linked with the pedagogical commission assigned to Verne when the Voyages extraordinaires was conceived with Hetzel. How does one convey the results of this wanting to see everything and wanting to know everything, including the things beyond the limits of the mere terrestrial? Verne resorts to the catalogue, a classical literary technique also employed in Moby-Dick and La Mer: He galvanizes the potentially dry listings with an imaginative impulse: “These long zoological or botanical enumerations, these long descriptions of volcanic, geological, or meteorological phenomena are also, paradoxically, the opportunity for Jules Verne to give free rein to his poetic fantasy, to get intoxicated with technical
If Hetzel wanted Verne to write didactic novels, Verne complied with his publisher’s demands and conveys extensive knowledge through the pedagogical form of the catalogue. The catalogue signals a belief in the accumulation of information and progress. It formally articulates the genuine spirit of the encyclopedia. Twenty Thousand Leagues is a utopian book, as the advancement of knowledge is infinite, never complete (Verne’s listings often end with “and so on” and “etc.”). The enumerative form is an emblem of knowledge and an effect of the richness of the documentation utilized by Verne and his publisher. It guarantees seriousness and methodological rigor and stands as a quantitative proof of the novel’s scientific quality. Superabundance is necessary for the encyclopedic ideal of totality.
Verne is also a literary writer with ambitions transgressing the mere didactic. Of Nemo’s complete oceanic existence Verne once wrote: “I believe that this ‘absolute’ situation will give much depth to the work. Oh! my dear Hetzel, if I don’t succeed with this book, I’ll be inconsolable. I’ve never held a better subject in my hands.”161 As Verne’s enthusiastic and anxious letter indicates, he was aware of the thematic potentials inherent in the novel’s unique spatial setting. The massive liquid space and the amazing wonders of the undersea creatures likely played essential roles in shaping the novel’s aesthetics by coercing a creative and poetic approach to the discoveries of scientific voyages. In numerous passages, Verne’s prose discloses uncertainties and ambiguities in the otherwise sober and sedimented scientific language. This causes it to morph into fantasies or exhibit signs of aesthetically motivated choices of bizarreness and melodiousness. Like Michelet, at times Verne seems caught up in self-referential linguistic games in which strangeness becomes its own qualification and quality.
The inability of scientific language to dominate the exuberant profusion of species is also a qualitative problem. In addition to the insufficiency of the catalogue as form, there are no words available to describe the strangeness and wonders: “And what a sight! What pen could ever describe it?” “What indescribable sights,” “What a sight! How can I depict it!” “And now, how can I possibly record the impression made on me by this excursion under the waters? Words are inadequate to recount such marvels! When even the artist’s brush is incapable of depicting the unique effects of the liquid element, how could a pen begin to portray them?”162 Verne’s problem is two-pronged: not enough words and not the right words to represent “this prodigious, inexhaustible wet-nurse.”163 In response to this twofold challenge Verne mobilizes passages of astonishing lyricism. It is a lyricism that sometimes has an elegiac tonality because it expresses the impotence of language when confronted with such marvels. At the same time, the elegiac tone transfers the enthusiasm of witnessing the marvels to the reader’s mind. It is here Vingt mille lieues sous les mers abandons the language of pure denotation (nomenclatures, classifications) for a more expressive figurative language; it is here classification is replaced by making the reader see and feel the extraordinary newly discovered splendors under the sea. Verne morphs science and scientific language into fable and poetic language. Michel de Certeau has observed that Verne’s writings are “closer to Borges’ ‘fictions’ than to Michelet’s ‘resurrections,’” and he traces in Verne “the interlinkage of the imaginary and the collection, in other
Anonymous, “Naufrage du grand Galion São João sur la Côte du Natal en l’année 1552,” in Histoires tragico-maritimes 1552–1563: Chefs-d’œuvre des naufrages portugais, ed. Anne Lima and Michel Chandeigne, trans. Georges Le Gentil, preface José Saramago (Paris: Chandeigne, 2016), 28, 36, my translation. One conto of gold corresponds to one million cruzados, that is, gold money worth 400 réis at that time.
The shipwreck of the São João also features in Margaret Cohen’s The Novel and the Sea (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), although it is only treated briefly. The most complete treatment in English of the Portuguese pamphlets relating the India Route shipwrecks can be found in Josiah Blackmore’s Manifest Perdition (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Steve Mentz devotes eight pages to the account of the shipwreck of the São João in his Shipwreck Modernity (2015). My reading has some similarity with Mentz’ analysis, which focuses on the pamphlet’s undecided position regarding the shipwreck’s cause between errors of seamanship and technology and a Providential punishment. As the following will show, I emphasize Providential punishment more than Mentz in my analysis of the pamphlet’s maritime vision, although the importance of acknowledging a technological dimension of seafaring in the Age of Sail is a significant objective behind my reading.
José Saramago, “La mort familière,” preface in Histoires tragico-maritimes 1552–1563, 10, 16.
For further bibliographical details concerning the twelve accounts, see Bernard Martocq, “Note bibliographique sur l’História Trágico-Marítima,” Cahiers d’études romanes, no. 1 (1998): 19–29, published online January 15, 2013, accessed March 31, 2017,
“Naufrage du grand Galion São João,” 27, 38.
“Naufrage du grand Galion São João,” 28, 27.
“Naufrage du grand Galion São João,” 27–28, 29.
Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1996), vii–viii.
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986; Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1989), 4–5; Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, trans. Robert P. Crease (2000; Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), vii, 1.
This idea characterizes essays and tales by Joseph Conrad such as “Ocean Travel” (1923) and “The End of the Tether” (1902), critical writings such as Robert Foulke’s The Sea Voyage Narrative (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) and Tobias Döring’s “The Sea is History: Historicizing the Homeric Sea in Victorian Passages” (2002), and J. M. W. Turner’s iconic painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 (1839).
Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (1959; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 71; Richard Wilk, Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 27; Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-between in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 33; Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century (1992; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 63.
Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990), 20, 70.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 56.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 48; Verbeek, What Things Do, 195.
Latour, Aramis, 15.
Mentz, Ocean, 56.
Latour, Aramis, viii.
Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, ix.
Thor Heyerdahl, Early Man and the Ocean: The Beginning of Navigation and Seaborn Civilizations (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1978), 19.
Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 6.
Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 9.
Bacon, Novum organum, 195.
Brenda J. Buchanan, “Editor’s Introduction: Setting the Context,” in Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A Technological History, ed. Brenda J. Buchanan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 2.
Hirth, The Ancient History of China: The End of the Chóu Dynasty, 133–34; Needham, The Shorter Science & Civilisation in China: 3, 27–29.
Digital library search engines such as mla show close to no results if one enters “technology” and, say, “Melville” or “Conrad.”
See e.g., Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005); Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator; Casarino, Modernity at Sea; Corbin, The Lure of the Sea; Alain Corbin, Le ciel et la mer (Paris: Bayard Culture, 2005); Alain Corbin and Hélène Richard, La mer, terreur et fascination (Paris: bnf, 2004); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seaman, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (London: Verso, 2004); Eric W. Sager, Seafaring Labour: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989); Schmitt, Land and Sea.
Bacon, Novum organum, 194.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 21.
Cohen, “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” 657.
Schmitt, Land and Sea, 2, 3.
Cohen, “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe,” 659.
Michelet, La Mer, 87–97.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 62, 65–66, 75, 76, 80.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1977), 13–14.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 75.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962; Oxford and Cambridge, ma: Blackwell, 2001), § 15, 97.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 74.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, 96, 95, 97.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, 97.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, 99, 97.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, 99, 99, 100.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 16, 102, 102–03, 105.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 14, 16, 17, 23.
Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, 100.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 16, 16.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 16, 4, 24, 12.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27, 27.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27, 28.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 20.
Hans Achterhuis, American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn, trans. Robert P. Crease (1997; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Verbeek: What Things Do.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 22.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 72.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 2.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 5.
Verbeek, What Things Do, 129–30.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 76.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 78.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 80, 88.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 43.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 97, 100.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 108, 112.
Joseph Conrad, “The Character of the Foe,” in The Mirror and the Sea, 73.
Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,”.
Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,”.
Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 27.
Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, in Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End of the Tether: Three Stories by Joseph Conrad, Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad (1902; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1960), 166.
Conrad, The End of the Tether, 165–66.
Conrad, The End of the Tether, 165, 166, 167, 167.
Conrad, The End of the Tether, 167.
Conrad, The End of the Tether, 167–68.
Robert Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” in Literature and Lore of the Sea, ed. Patricia Ann Carlson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 74, 75.
Conrad, “The Character of the Foe,” 72.
Conrad, “Ocean Travel,” 35.
Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” 84, 85.
Joseph Conrad, “Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic,” in Notes on Life and Letters, Collected Edittion of the Works of Joseph Conrad (1921; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1971), 238. Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” 85.
Conrad, “Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic,” 238.
Conrad, “Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic,” 238.
Martin Heidegger, “Memorial address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (1959; New York: Harper Perennial, 1966), 46.
Conrad, “Ocean Travel,” 27, 27, 35, 27–28.
Conrad, “The Character of the Foe,” 71, 71, 71, 71–72.
Conrad, “The Character of the Foe,” 72.
Conrad, “The Character of the Foe,” 72, 72, 73.
Conrad, “Ocean Travel,” 35, 38, 36.
Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” 89, 105, 90.
Foulke, “Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870–1910,” 87.
Jacques A. Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); C. B. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination (London: Dent, 1974); M. C. Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941); Douglas Hewitt, Conrad: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1952); Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1958).
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948); John H. Wills, “Conrad’s Typhoon: A Triumph of Organic Art,” The North Dakota Quarterly 30 (1962); Paul S. Bruss, Conrad’s Early Sea Fiction (London: Associated University Presses, 1979); H. M. Daleski, Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976); Jakob Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Leavis, Great Tradition, 183–85.
Ian Watt, Essays on Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97.
Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method, 116.
Conrad, Typhoon, 22, 24.
Conrad, Typhoon, 26, 17.
Conrad, Typhoon, 7, 17.
Conrad, Typhoon, 56, 36–37, 40.
Conrad, Typhoon, 45, 47.
Conrad, Typhoon, 68, 71, 61, 70, 66.
Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 15, 16.
Conrad, Typhoon, 42, 18.
Conrad, Typhoon, 40.
Conrad, Typhoon, 6.
Conrad, Typhoon, 84–85.
Conrad, Typhoon, 26.
Conrad, Typhoon, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53, 57, 62, 63, 74, 78.
Conrad, Typhoon, 80–81, 81, 88, 90, 91.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134, 143.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 147, 129, 144, 145, 144–45.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 145.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 145.
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 147–48.
Margaret Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea,” in The Novel, vol. 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2006), 658.
Conrad, Typhoon, 84.
Conrad, Typhoon, 32–33.
Conrad, Typhoon, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4.
Heidegger, “Memorial Address,” 54.
Michelet, La Mer, 299.
Conrad, Typhoon, 46, 89.
William Rodner, “Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth 1842. Painting by J. M. W. Turner,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, vol. 2, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 1063.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 1, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1843; London: George Allen, 1903), 571.
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 33–34.
Conrad, “Author’s Note,” in Typhoon and Other Stories, vi.
Jules Verne, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, transl., intro., and notes William Butcher (1864–65; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 284.
Michel de Certeau, “Writing the Sea: Jules Verne,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 143.
Jacques Noiray, “Préface,” in Jules Verne, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1871; Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 10–11.
Jean Chesneaux, Une lecture politique de Jules Verne (Paris: Maspéro, 1971), 12.
George Sand, Correspondance, letter no. 11807, July 25, 1865, ed. Georges Lubin (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1985), 322–23.
Noiray, “Préface,” 9.
Noiray, “Préface,” 10.
Noiray, “Préface,” 10.
William Butcher, “Introduction,” in Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, translated and with introduction and notes by William Butcher (1869–70/1871; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ix.
William Butcher, “Appendix” and “Explanatory Notes,” in Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, 383, 391–92; G.-L. Pesce, La Navigation sous-marine (Paris: Vuibert & Nony, 1906), 290–96; Jacques Payen, “De l’anticipation à l’innovation: Jules Verne et le problème de la locomotion mécanique,” Culture Technique, no. 19 (1989): 310.
Payen, “De l’anticipation à l’innovation,” 310.
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale University Press, 1977), ix.
Butcher, “Introduction,” xiv; Chesneaux, Une lecture politique, 21, ch. 2.
Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 3, 4, 6.
Cohen, The Novel and the Sea, 214.
Butcher, “Introduction,” ix–x.
Chesneaux, Une lecture politique, ch. 4; Noiray, “Préface,” 13.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 215.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 45.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 72.
Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, viii.
Ian Watt, “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness,” in Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration, ed. Norman Sherry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1976), 37–53.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 122.
Pages 17 and 24 in the original 1871 edition and pages 73 and 83 in the 2005 Gallimard edition. Unfortunately, no illustrations are printed in the 1998 Oxford edition.
Marie-Hélène Huet, L’Histoire des Voyages extraordinaires: Essai sur l’œuvre de Jules Verne (Paris: Minard, 1973), 12, 172.
Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel: 1863–1886, vol. I, 1863–1874, eds. Olivier Dumas, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs (Genève: Slatkine, 1999), folios 128–129, letter 60, p. 89. Date probably end of December 1868.
Noiray, “Préface,”21.
Butcher, “Introduction,” xxix.
Noiray, “Préface,” 22–23.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 65, 123, 65.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 65.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 68–69.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 67.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 72.
de Certeau, “Writing the Sea,” 147, 148.
Chesneaux, Une lecture politique, 28; see also Noiray, “Préface,” 27–33.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 240–41, 210–11, 74.
Rozwadowski, Fathoming the Ocean, 1–35.
Noiray, “Préface,” 30.
Correspondance, folios 71–72, letter 49, p. 80. Date probably end of March 1868.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 93, 209, 257, 108.
Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 68.
de Certeau, “Writing the Sea,” 139.