Studies in the Novel

Literary scholars of race, empire, and the environment, to name three distinct though increasingly interrelated fields, have in recent decades reckoned with the problem of the sea—that is, the challenges posed by cognizing and representing something so geographically and historically vast. A burgeoning body of work investigating aspects of this problem is the blue humanities, where scholars such as Kerry Bystrom, Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Steve Mentz, and Markus Vink (among many others) have probed how best to disciplinarily and methodologically conceptualize the study of the sea and the cultural histories the sea invokes, both in the transatlantic context as well as in spaces beyond the Atlantic Ocean. Those studies that engage with the Atlantic world (as well as some that don't) seem just as often to be working with Hortense Spillers in mind, especially her essential formulation of the spatial and historical dislocation of captured African persons involuntarily brought to the Americas. "Those African persons in the 'Middle Passage' were literally suspended in the 'oceanic,'" she writes in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." "Inasmuch as, on any given day, we might imagine, the captive personality did not know where s/he was, we could say that they were the culturally 'unmade,' thrown in the midst of a figurative darkness that 'exposed' their destinies to an unknown course" (Diacritics, 17.2 [1987], 72). This text of course reverberates through Black diaspora studies and critical race studies as an essential document of Black feminist thought. Spillers's attention to the "figurative darkness" that forms part of the oppression of enslaved persons on board the ship shows how being "suspended in the 'oceanic'" is a constitutive part of the maritime world and its cultural representations.

Figuration, suspension, and representational difficulty in the oceanic world are the subjects of Matthew P. M. Kerr's The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language: All at Sea. Kerr explores how novelists in the nineteenth and early twentieth [End Page 343] centuries dealt with the representational challenges posed by the sea's vastness through the deployment of "marginalized representational techniques" such as repetition, cliché, and inaccuracy (2). Kerr claims that these aren't markers of clumsy writing, but instead are ways that both sea fiction and more terrestrially-minded nineteenth-century realism nonetheless register "the sea's sublime resistance to description" (25). Kerr renders his literary-historical intervention as such:

I seek to nuance the perception that literary writing in the nineteenth century, and novels in particular, deployed marine metaphor—drawing on the sea's associations with nationalism and militarism, the aesthetics of maritime Romanticism, and so forth—with uncomplicated gusto up until a modernist problematization (and experimental utilization) of the sea in the early twentieth century.

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In this way, the historical and theoretical claims of All at Sea (Kerr abbreviates his monograph using its subtitle) also connect the Romantic, Victorian, and modernist periods. The long nineteenth century, an age of high imperialism, is a fitting era for a study focused on the novel and the sea.

The promise of these claims is to bridge maritime fiction with the terrestrial novel, and perhaps Kerr's most daring gambit is to unite the work of Frederick Marryat with that of William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf as forms of "sea-writing" (13). For Kerr, the maritime abstractions in Vanity Fair's narration, the storm in David Copperfield, and the shipwreck that closes Villette reflect the "sometimes complementary, sometimes competing commitments to form and formlessness in the novelistic project" (145). These formal disruptions—long acknowledged by novel theorists and historians as varied as Mikhail Bakhtin, Ian Duncan, Katie Trumpener, Elaine Freedgood, and George Levine—allow Marryat's popular maritime novels to share time with high realists as well as with Conrad's incipient modernism, to say nothing of Woolf's The Waves...