but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed.….” Having “prepared the mind of the spectator by employing, for the little town, only marine terms, and urbanterms for the sea.” Elstir gives the “impression of harbours in which the sea entered into the land, in which the land was already subaqueous and the population amphibian.…”28
Over the course of this chapter, Proust engages in a double and contradictory movement: participating both in a romantic revival of the deluge and in the counter-tendency to domesticate the maritime sublime by converting its perceptual properties into the raw material of still life. This ambivalent strategy is entirely consistent with surrealism.
But this ambivalence, which allows the features of classical and romantic seascape to atrophy and hypertrophy at the same time, has also become a routine and unconscious staple of journalistic prose. A reporter for the New York Times produced a series of accounts of the oil tanker Braer breaking apart on the rocky coast of the Shetland Islands:
The Braer’s final hours came in the overnight darkness, in a setting of almost primeval fury, as 30-foot surf and winds gusting up to 95 miles an hour smashed the writhing superstructure. Every so often, flashes of lightning illuminated the dark cliff and the wild seascape 29
But two days before this, the scene is described with an almost Proustian taste for the banality of culinary metaphors: “At its worst, patches of cappuccino-colored foam swirl along the shore, barely staining the beaches and rocks.”30
If this account seems to veer between Lord Byron and Proust with a shift in the weather, the reporter’s confusion may have more to do with an epistemological difficulty than with any migration of modernist indifference or postmodern semiotic play into journalistic discourse. Confronted with an oil spill and a tempest, the reporter is hard-pressed to differentiate between the destructive workings of first nature (the storm) and manufactured second nature (the leaking oil). The result is the forced simile by which leaking crude oil is repeatedly and reassuringly likened to upscale coffee. Wittingly or not, this metaphoric loop takes us back to the very origins of maritime risk insurance at Lloyd’s coffeehouse in eighteenth-century London.
But it is unlikely that most readers of the New York Times would make this connection. If Proust can be said to have rigorously enacted the exhaustion and death of seascape within the modernist literary canon, then the elite newspaper of a coastal cosmopolis, the New York Times, can be said to have taken the lead in turning its back to the sea. When maritime news appears it is restricted to stories of disaster, war, and exodus: thus the subject is compressed into a weirdly blasé and episodic faux-sublimity. The sea is the site of intermittent horrors and extraordinary but brief expenditures of energy, quite distinct from the dramas of everyday life.
The disappearance of the sea took place slowly, over two decades. In the 1960s, the New York Times typically ran a page of shipping and transport industry news, alongside the weather, which was charted far into the Atlantic. Cargo and passenger ship departures and arrivals were reported daily. By 1970, the “Shipping/Mails” section was restricted to passenger and mail ships only, excluding cargo vessels. By 1980, the “Shipping/Mails” listing had migrated to a small corner of the “Stock Options” pages of the newspaper’s business section. The weather maps, placed elsewhere, were more likely to hug the Eastern seaboard. By the end of 1985, in the middle of the Reagan-era decade of speculative accumulation, the everyday shipping news sank entirely from sight. By contrast, a paper such as Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post continues to make shipping news a major feature of daily coverage, rivaling the more specialized press, such as the New York-based Journal of Commerce, in the depth of its reporting.
One can argue correctly that this disappearance is coincident with New York City’s decline as a seaport. But this argument misses the point that the combined Port of New York and New Jersey remains second only to Los Angeles and Long Beach on the west coast as the preeminent port in the Americas. But the working port is invisible from Manhattan and increasingly so from Brooklyn, with the main cargo terminals relocated with the advent of containerization to Port Elizabeth and Port Newark.
The metropolitan gaze no longer falls upon the waterfront, and a cognitive blankness follows. Thus despite increasing international mercantile dependence on ocean transport, and despite advances in oceanography and marine biology, the sea is in many respects less comprehensible to today’s elites than it was before 1945, in the nineteenth-century, or even during the Enlightenment.
This incomprehension is the product of forgetting and disavowal. In this sense elites become incapable of recognizing their own, outside of narrow specialist circles. Consider, by contrast, the obscurity of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated containerized cargo movement in 1956, alongside the historical and cultural importance accorded to Donald McKay, the nineteenth-century Boston clipper-ship builder. In his American Renaissance of 1941, F.O. Matthiessen reproduced as a frontispiece a striking daguerreotype portrait of McKay by Southworth and Hawes:
McKay’s portrait makes the most fitting frontispiece, since it reveals the type of character with which the writers of the age were most concerned, the common man in his heroic stature, or as Whitman called the new type, “Man in the Open Air.”31
Matthiessen’s choice reflects both the legacy of American romanticism and the pragmatism of a nation entering a convoy war in the North Atlantic. But the line leading from American romanticism to American pragmatism has since been broken. The new model hero, in an age that celebrates cunning survivors of corporate bankruptcies and victorious commanding generals in wars against abysmally inferior opponents, is less Walt Whitman’s “common man” than Herman Melville’s archetypal American swindler, the Confidence-Man.
MIDDLE PASSAGE
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GHOST SHIP
Le Corps d’un Américain découvert à bord d’un voilier à la dérive
FALMOUTH. – Le corps d’un Américain de 63 ans mort dans des circonstances mystérieuses a été retrouvé samedi à bord d’un voilier dérivant à plus de 1.000 kilomètres au sud-ouest des côtes britanniques, tandis que sa femme ne se trouvait plus à bord. Les gardes-côtes ont précisé que le “Happy End” était enregistré dans l’Alabama et qu’il avait quitté les côtes américaines le 1er novembre à destination de l’Irlande avec à son bord le propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty et son épouse Carol, âgée de 60 ans. Un membre d’équipage d’un porte-tontainer américain, le “Sealand Quality”, a pu monter sur le voilier repéré à la dérive vendredi par un cargo norvégien et voir le corps du propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty, mort selon lui depuis deux ou trois jours.
Enlarged photocopy of clipping from unidentified Cherbourg newspaper brought aboard by the North Sea pilot and posted by the captain without translation in the
