Tag Archives: bluehumanities

Realistic Representations in Blue Humanities

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As our environmental policies regress under a regime which declines to accept the harpooning of our planet, it is more necessary than ever to pay attention to the blue humanities. But, as policies shift, so too must the aim of blue humanities. As captivating as it is, it is time to stop romanticizing the sea. It is no longer a scene that unveils “pristine nature” in contrast to the industrialized land we inhabit. Industrialization has meandered its way into the ocean, into the water. Steve Mentz uses Aristotle’s conceptualization of poetics to help define his term: “Poetics of planetary water”. In this concept, Aristotle explains poetics as “a system of representations”. Mentz is drawn to the notion that “poetics combines pleasure and pain” in regard to water that both “allure and threaten human bodies”. Mentz furthers Aristotle’s claim that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them”, as a parallel of the enchanting, yet dangerous relationship we have had with the ocean throughout human history. In blue humanities future, this notion will have to be reversed: Though the ocean, the water, may be a beautiful sight, we must agonize over the most realistic representations of it. The trash ridden, biomagnificated, micro-plastic filled animals that inhabit the bleached, dead, splintering coral of the acidified ocean. We need depictions of a climate changed future. Paintings of risen seas. New York halfway under water. Undiscovered life straining to create ecosystems in the shipwreck that was once Manhattan. Netflix series that delineate a climate fueled apocalypse rather than a zombie or digital one. That is, if we want to see another societal push for eco-change. Mentz coins the phrase “watery criticism” the aims of which “include both describing the complex working of water in our environment and also imagining ways to change our relationships to it.” The immensity and resilience of the ocean conceals hundreds of years of pollution the way small bodied ecosystems cannot. Refocusing the blue humanities to embody all forms of water, captures the deterioration climate change imparts on small ecosystems. Therefore, adapting our attention to all forms of water changes our relationship with it. As much as the blue humanities depends on water, water depends on the blue humanities.

The Greatest American Novel

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In his article “The Blue Humanities” John R Gillis informs us that the blue humanities are a “belated recognition of the close relationship between modern western culture and the sea.” The seascape is nothing more than a backdrop until the nineteenth century. Gillis notes that one of the first novels representing the sea in more than just a utilitarian concept is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. According to Gillis the “metaphysical sophistication” of the novel is what sets it apart. But it is more than just Melville’s allusions of pelagic grandeur that buoys Moby Dick into the blue humanities. It is the centric of whaling. Whaling is humanity’s first glimpse, our first attempt, at conceptualizing oceanography. It sounds like a paradox. Whaling, this egregious act against one of nature’s most majestic oceanic creatures. But, considering Gillis’ assertion of early ocean explorers that “Oceans were explored as a means to reach distant lands, little attention was paid to the waters themselves… they used the sea merely as a highway to get to the next landfall.” One can say whalers were the first voyagers who sought what was within the ocean instead of what was across it. Whaling expeditions that extended years only relied on land as a means to resupply their ships. The ocean became the anchor for whalers, their constant. And knowing these whales, their migration patterns, their feeding grounds, their habits, was arguably humanity’s first dive into marine biology. Specifically, the Nantucket whaling industry, where the Pequod hails from. In 1712 the first documented kill of a sperm whale occurred at the hands of Nantucketer Christopher Hussey. Thus launching an industry of deep-ocean whaling specialized in Nantucket.* The same time Americans began to cast their war upon sperm whales, Europeans were shifting “terror and awe religious folk held for the supernatural to nature itself”. Reshaping the Enlightenment era into the emergence of Romanticism. Gillis mentions a 1712 anecdote by Joseph Addison: “Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects imagination so much as the sea or ocean.” Americans were conquering some of the most fearsome creatures in the world’s most fearsome environment. The centric of whaling not only gives Moby Dick a place in blue humanities, but it hoists it up as America’s greatest novel, honoring the culture and heroes of America’s first past time.

* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/whaling-history-whaling-america/