here runs against the commonly held view that the computer and telecommunications are the sole engines of the third industrial revolution. In effect, I am arguing for the continued importance of maritime space in order to counter the exaggerated importance attached to that largely metaphysical construct, “cyberspace,” and the corollary myth of “instantaneous” contact between distant spaces. I am often struck by the ignorance of intellectuals in this respect: the self-congratulating conceptual aggrandizement of “information” frequently is accompanied by peculiar erroneous beliefs: among these is the widely held quasi-anthropomorphic notion that most of the world’s cargo travels as people do, by air. This is an instance of the blinkered narcissism of the information specialist: a “materialism” that goes no farther than “the body.” In the imagination, e-mail and airmail come to bracket the totality of global movement, with the airplane taking care of everything that is heavy. Thus the proliferation of air-courier companies and mail-order catalogues serving the professional, domestic, and leisure needs of the managerial and intellectual classes does nothing to bring consciousness down to earth, or to turn it in the direction of the sea, the forgotten space.
Large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute: the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of this century. It still takes about eight days to cross the Atlantic and about twelve to cross the Pacific. A society of accelerated flows is also in certain key aspects a society of deliberately slow movement.
Consider, as a revealing limit case, the glacial caution with which contraband human cargo moves. Chinese immigrant-smuggling ships can take longer than seventeenth-century sailing vessels to reach their destinations, spending over a year in miserable and meandering transit. At their lowest depths, capitalist labor markets exhibit a miserly patience.
For those who face the sea under such conditions, the imagination both seeks, and is coaxed, to leap over the middle passage. This brings us back to the aesthetic questions posed earlier. In a short story by Bharati Mukherjee, a Tamil schoolteacher hoping desperately to emigrate from Sri Lanka seeks the services of a smuggler’s go-between:
“Options!” the man sneered. Then he took out a foreign-looking newspaper from a shopping bag. On the back page of the paper was a picture of three dour sahibs fishing for lobster. “You get my meaning, sir? They have beautiful coves in Nova Scotia. They have beautiful people in the Canadian maritimes.”19
Having “heard stories of drowned Tamils,” her protagonist dreams of safe passage to the north, “crisscross[ing] national boundaries on skates that felt as soft and comfortable as cushions.”20 Mukherjee’s schoolteacher is a striking figure: a postcolonial “throwback” to the fearful Irish and Scottish emigrant passengers of the age of sail. And yet the image of danger is presented in the form of a grotesquely improvised tourist brochure; the counter-image of safe passage from tropical south to frozen north is conjured up as if from textbook reproductions of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is in diasporic texts such as Mukherjee’s, full of desires sparked by images from elsewhere, that the threats and lures of actual maritime space continue to live.
The “forgetting” of the sea by late-modernist elites parallels its renewed intransigence for desperate third world populations: for Sri Lankans, Chinese, Haitians, Cubans, for the Filipinos and Indonesians who work the sealanes. Air travel assures that bourgeois cosmopolitanism no longer requires any contact with the sea. Social classes no longer rub shoulders in the departure terminals of the great steamship lines. And cruise ships, the floating apartheid machines of postmodern leisure, have a way of obscuring from passengers the miserable conditions endured by the third world crews who cater to their mobility and their desires.
Culturally, the sea becomes a vast reservoir of anachronisms, its representation redundant and overcoded. The last aesthetic movement to claim the sea with any seriousness was surrealism. It is both perverse and fitting that the founder of structural anthropology should later in life sustain this surviving surrealist spirit, asserting his preference for the eighteenth-century maritime painting of Joseph Vernet while dismissing cubism and lamenting the modernist “shipwreck of painting.” Of Vernet he says:
By means peculiar to the art, one is transported into a vanished world. And even more marvelous, perhaps this world never existed, for the painter didn’t slavishly reproduce what he saw; he rearranged the elements and combined them into a lyrical synthesis. One of Vernet’s great harbors is not far from the evening at the Opera that Proust described!21
In keeping with the surrealist love of obsolete didacticisms, Claude Lévi-Strauss is producing here a radical recoding of the classical edification demanded from the port scene. This earlier project of waterfront enlightenment, toward which we can orient the ironical figure of Engels as well, has been described in a recent book by Alain Corbin:
The practice of walking along wharfs and stone piers … expressed the fascination exerted by a stage on which spectators could observe particularly manifest displays of energy, activity, heroism, and misfortune. It fitted logically into the classical journey. Here nature had retreated before the labors of man, who had cut stones and reshaped the boundaries that God had set to the ocean.22
Corbin remarks further that “Vernet made the harbor view into a privileged panorama. In his work, the port is first and foremost a picture that walkers in the hills examined with their spyglasses.”23 We can better understand Lévi-Strauss’s point when we realize that Vernet’s viewpoint, described thus, corresponds to Proust’s initial “naive” attitude toward the theater: “… real people, just living their lives at home, on whom I was thus able to spy without their seeing me.…”24 But Lévi-Strauss’s discovery of Marcel Proust in Vernet is all the more perverse and comical when we turn to some of what Proust had to say about seascapes:
A few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set. Like the one I used to see at Combray, behind the Calvary, when I was coming home from a walk and looking forward to going down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky over the sea, compact and clear-cut as a layer of aspic over meat, then a little later, over a sea already cold and blue like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we would presently be ordering at Rivebelle reawakened the pleasure which I was to derive from the act of dressing to go out to dinner.25
This paragraph, in which the mundane synesthesia of culinary anticipation slides into a reverie of shipborne escape from “the necessity of sleep and … confinement in a bedroom,” ends with the line, “I was on all sides surrounded by pictures of the sea. “But it is precisely the unity of the “picture” that Proust is dissolving, by stripping the perceptual qualities of iconic signs away from the larger visual field. As Walter Benjamin observed:
It is the world in a state of resemblances, the domain of correspondances; the Romanticists were the first to comprehend them and Baudelaire embraced them most fervently, but Proust was the only one to reveal them in our lived life.26
Throughout this chapter, “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls,” Proust repeatedly forces the tropes of romantic longing up against a de-psychologized post-impressionist treatment of seashore space. On the one hand, his narrator speaks of “the shipwreck of my nervous storms.” At the other extreme, the optical superimposition of a garden in the foreground and a steamship in the far distance is described in this way: “… the tiniest slice of blue still separates the questing prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steaming.”27
Proust’s deconstruction avant la lettre of seascape is all the more striking for being staged within the realistic idiom of the novel. For Proust, it is photography that initiates the collapse of seascape into an increasingly undifferentiated spatiality. His character Elstir, a painter of seascapes and port scenes, produces confusions of terrestrial and maritime
