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Stories of the Seas Conference with Ross Ballaster and Jonathan Lamb - 4/5/24
Stories of the Seas Conference with Ross Ballaster and Jonathan Lamb - 4/5/24, or read the full transcript below.
Stories and the Seas
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[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Ros Ballaster, Professor of 18th Century Studies in the faculty of English at Mansfield College, Oxford University, and Jonathan Lamb, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Literature at Vanderbilt University. Both of them visited the Center to speak at this year's CSN conference titled "Stories and the Seas" on April 5th, 2024. This conversation was recorded the day before the conference, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: I'm so glad you could join us, and give our audience a taste of what we're going to be talking about tomorrow with our annual conference, "Stories and the Seas." I, I framed the topic
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pretty broadly because I was interested in the way in which the seas stimulate the imagination.
And so I wondered if I could ask each of you to talk about what stories it conjures for you.
Ros Ballaster: Wow, that's a big question. I was thinking about, actually, your title. Because I was thinking about, um, Salman Rushdie has a lovely 1992 novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories in which a father's telling stories to his son, and I like that idea of stories being a sea. The idea that they're a sort of whirl of water that you can pick stories out of and then they go back into them and that they don't have a kind of clear original direction or that you can't, or you can't see the horizon. So, so what you have is an infinity of water rather than a sense of a kind of limit to story and where it stops and where it starts.
Margaret Cohen: It's beautiful. I'm so glad you noticed that because that was one of
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my son's favorite books when he was a kid and we used to, to read it to him. So for me, just briefing a little bit, it also has an oral component of, like, something that you share.
Ros Ballaster: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. There's also a sort of verbal exchange.
And I think it's also partly about getting away from that idea. I suppose there's a lot of discussion. I'm most interested in stories and Oriental tales and sort of the notion that stories travel along the Silk Road. But thinking about how stories travel across seas and are told on the seas as well.
As someone who works in the 18th century, I love the, you know, Penelope Aubin has all these stories in which people are on, on a boat telling a story of their abduction or their liberation. So, so there seems to, the sea seems to be a place where stories get told that's between two places where things have happened.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I've been reading recently the stories of Sinbad,
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The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. And that, that's, that's a weird collection of stories. But one of the things that happens twice actually in, in, in his, in the seven tales is that he goes into the sea with, which nobody knows, I mean, without any kind of map or sign or signal of where to go.
And all the same thing happens twice. The helmsman gets really nervous and, and, and finally goes manic and the ship sinks. And that's usually when Sinbad, by some means or other, gets into a current of water that washes him towards an island.
Ros Ballaster: And nobody else does.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh no!
Ros Ballaster: It's just Sinbad that survives, isn't it?
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's something extraordinarily
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egotistical, I think, about, about extreme voyages. You know, it just becomes you. It's like the ancient mariner. All, all alone, you know, nobody, nobody with me. Everybody on the ship is dead. Well, they may as well be dead. And they're going to be dead at the end, but they're all inert.
Ros Ballaster: And that's true to Robinson Crusoe, isn't it? That that survival story is one of kind of being the only one who survives. And I suppose they are also linked in that they're both providential stories. So there's something about Sinbad and Crusoe where they, they at least, I mean, you can call it egotism or you could call it providentialism. They, they have a version of their story, which means they've survived because God wanted them to.
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's a very funny end story for Sinbad. I think that the Sinbad author or tale teller was, was worried about repetition. Because those stories do begin to repeat in one form or
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another. They have sort of, you know, he's going to be destitute. I mean, he's going to be cast away, then destitute. Then he's going to be rich again. It's simple. But I mean, in the last story, he, he has a, he meets some people who are within a cloud of birds, and the birds all fly up to the heavens, and he flies with them, and he meets all of these angels singing the praises of God.
And so he starts singing along, you know, until he realizes that he's, he's actually in a different religion. So he stops. And at that point he falls back to the earth. And he sees a serpent with a man halfway down its throat. And, and then he sees two
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people from the moon, who've landed on the earth too. And, and they praise him for his fidelity to Allah.
Ros Ballaster: Right.
Jonathan Lamb: And I thought, what on earth is this story about?
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting as well, that business of the, I've just been reading there's an essay by Jerome Cohen, I think it's called "The Sea Above," and he talks about these medieval myths of, and stories as an Irish 13th-century bishop who tells them of sort of people looking up to the sky and seeing, and it's a sea, and there's a boat flying above them, and someone throws down an anchor. And it gets hooked on a church, and then a little man has to climb down from the ship above and try and get the anchor up. People on the earth are trying to hold him down. He's saying, no, let me go, I'm drowning. And this, this, this, these stories seem to be partly about, I think there's something about the sea
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always taking you to the sky, or some, somehow lifting you to it, or, or, that there's some kind of reflective state.
Jonathan Lamb: Reflective, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Where I, I mean, I always think about that weird bit in Marvell when he talks about the fish jellied in air.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: So, so there's a kind of mirage that happens when you are at sea, when you start to think maybe the sea's above you rather than you being below it. But those are also clearly sort of tales that have something to do with religious epiphany and a necessary separation between the sky and the sea, that you must let the man go back, do you see what I mean, to the sea above, that is?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, well, in my theology, I mean, they, Rangi and Papa. Papa is the female earth spirit and Rangi is the sky spirit, male. And they have to come apart if there's to be any kind of
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human development on Earth. And so rain is Rangi weeping for Papa, and it's a very tender kind of story, but I mean there's no, there's not going to be any kind of happy, happy ending.
Margaret Cohen: I mean that's such a profound theme, the kind of elusiveness of the ability to contact, you know, from one element to the other. I think you're going to talk about that a little bit.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, yes, I'm interested in that, well that's sort of elemental theory. And I was thinking about, you know, Empedocles says about the elements that it's only, they're always pulled together by love or by strife.
But he says you see them most clearly in strife and in love they want to mix. And in strife they must, their shape becomes more apparent.
And actually, sorry, this is, maybe it's a distraction, but one of the books I was, I've got very interested
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in is Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch and actually what you've just described explains something. There's a character called Rain. Who lives at, who's a, on a Caribbean island who's a sort of descendant of white plantocracy.
And she has a, a mixed race child. But she lives on an estate that's called Paradise, and they have a tree called Papa Bois, or Papa Bois, where there's a kind of epiphanic moment in the novel. And so clearly, I mean, Roffey is riffing on all of these sort of African and Caribbean myths. So she's clearly picked up on the rain, Mama Rain and Papa Bois story and put it into that novel.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: I mean, I think that's another thing about, I mean, maybe that does relate to that idea of the sea of stories. Do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That they, they are in a, they're
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a kind of melting pot or a whirlpool.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And they have, they may originate in particular regions, but they circulate.
Margaret Cohen: They circulate.
Ros Ballaster: And people encounter them afresh and don't necessarily recognize them.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And then might join them up.
I mean, I think that's a big question for me always about story, about, you know, are there routes that stories travel or are they actually kind of just common patterns?
Margaret Cohen: Structurally, or yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: A sort of structuralist versus historicist account of English literary history, or literary history in general, not English literary history.
Jonathan Lamb: I suppose the big one is, is the Arabian Nights. I mean, that traveled.
Margaret Cohen: I was going to ask you both, as very distinguished scholars of the 18th century, that we're delighted to have with us, if Defoe read Sinbad and how the Arabian Nights traveled around the, the maritime writing of the 18th century?
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it certainly, it travelled
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in spirit in Oriental tales because everybody was writing Oriental tales. Hawksworth and Addison and all those people, but yeah. But I think that certain, certain elements of the Arabian Nights, like Sinbad, I mean, stuck in people's imagination. So you've got Swift, who borrows from, from Sinbad's story of the rook, the rock, you know, for the escape from Brobdingnag, isn't it, in the second book?
Ros Ballaster: Does he get lifted up by a big bird at the end of that?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think they must both have, I, I can't think of a moment when Defoe mentions Sinbad. But we don't have a lot of that kind of documentation from Defoe. We have a lot of his essays and so forth, but I can't, but I'm quite sure he must have read Sinbad.
I mean, there's
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so the pattern of this kind of, I went to sea, I got shipwrecked. I swore I'd never do it again. Then I got, then I had to do it again. The kind of compulsion to keep going on a sea voyage.
Jonathan Lamb: The compulsion is really strong at the beginning of the, the continuation, you know, after Robinson Crusoe, it's such a big hit.
And there's the second part and it starts with, with, and, and you, you don't know if it's Defoe or Robinson Crusoe. He, he says, I could not get out of, in my, my mind the, the picture of my island, and even when I would fall asleep is what I would dream of.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And I think that's what happened to Defoe. I think, I think his imagination was taken over by the product of his own imagination.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And, it's, with Defoe, it does seem to me that he's impatient with, with,
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a tissue of imaginings. You know, what he wants are facts, really, it's a highly empirical imagination. But that fascinates him, and he can't, he can't let it go.
Ros Ballaster: I suppose I sometimes wonder about how easy it is to tell stories, you called it "Stories and the Seas," didn't you? Stories that are actually on the sea or in the sea. That they always seem to land up on the island, do you see what I mean? Or that somehow the, the, the sort of the desire, the sea, the problem that the sea always seems to be something that you're crossing or washed up from rather than, So the stories that are actually about being on the sea are often, more the sort of stories that you talk about, Margaret, about, you know, they're kind of mariners stories.
They're stories. I mean, how interesting is it, I suppose, is my question, to tell a
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story about the technical business of being at sea, which I imagine a lot of the time is pretty boring.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
It's dull until everything goes wrong.
Ros Ballaster: Yes. And then it's, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: You run into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and you, it collapses.
And then, I mean, I've then had Conrad on my mind a lot in the past few days, thinking of the, I think they may be Sri Lankans. The ship was going to Sri Lanka and there are Indian seafarers who are stuck on board in Baltimore, keeping the ship working and just wondering, like, what would Conrad's version of that story be?
But I mean, but to your point, yeah, there's, there's, when you see very often, like in Conrad, if you want to get a story that's actually set on the sea, it's like you have to frame it with all these kind of buffers because it's so scary when you actually get there, and traumatic. So I'm thinking of the story "Falk."
I don't know if you've read that, that's
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About a German mariner who turns out to have engaged in survival cannibalism. And he can only tell this to someone else who is, you know, part of this community of seafarers in a secret, you know, kind of pact, which can't really fully be related to the land people because it's so, you know, transgressive and taboo, but, but they understand each other.
So I think I guess what I'm saying, and I, one could even, you know, amplify this to Melville or take in different places is that to get to the traumatic conditions of what's going on at sea, you need a lot of filters and preparation and it just can't be offered without any qualifications and disclaimers.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting, I've just been watching the, that film, Nyad, you know, about swimming for a hundred hours from Cuba to
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Florida, and she does it about four attempts and there's this sort of two hour film and she's most, and it cannot show you the kind of utter tedium of a hundred hours of swimming. So all you can get are the moments of crisis.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: You know, the moments when a box jellyfish gets her or a moment when a storm means she has to, to sort of stop. There's a wonderful line in it when she sort of, when her friend Bonnie is sort of saying, oh, all the things that were going on the boat, you didn't see any of that.
No, I was just swimming.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: Putting one arm over another.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I saw it too in my preparation to be able to see all the films for the Oscars this year. It's a sort of a jolly, but, but that disconnect between what the crew is doing and what she is doing, I think is something which is one of the stronger narrative elements of that film. Yeah. You know, that she's
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just off in this other world, actually in the sea compared to all the challenges that they're facing in terms of navigation and keeping her safe.
Ros Ballaster: But, and that story about cannibalism is interesting as well, I suppose, because I was thinking about, you know, the sort of African myth of, of Mami Wata, who's a sort of mermaid serpent figure of African, folklore.
And the story there is one in which people who are taken to Mami Wata's abode return with their clothes entirely dry and having undergone some kind of spiritual transformation or transfiguration. So there's something that happens. When you go in the sea, do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That is not, that gives you a kind of knowledge that you can't share again on land.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That you have been changed. But precisely not been changed by getting wet. The obvious.
Jonathan Lamb:
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What is it, E. E. Cummings, it's always ourselves we find by the sea.
Ros Ballaster: Right. Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Do you agree with that?
Jonathan Lamb: No.
I think, I think the sea is magnetic, however. I mean, you know, it's always where you want to go and look, stare. But I mean, on, on the question of cannibalism, it's, it's interesting because there was, there was a notorious, well it wasn't notorious actually, case of the Minionette, have you ever heard of this?
It was a yacht and it, it sank on the way to Australia. I mean it was quite a, you know, big yacht, and there were only, sort of, three people on board, the, the skipper, his mate, and a cabin boy. And, they, they are in a boat and, the, the cabin boy's in a coma. So they say, well, we've got to eat him, if we're to survive, and they do
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eat him and they get picked up soon afterwards.
And of course in maritime law, they haven't done anything wrong. There was a, there was a, there was laid down in the Black Book of Admiralty a sequence that had to be observed if you were going to eat somebody, kill them and eat them. And they did observe it. But when they came ashore in Portsmouth, they were arrested under common law and charged with murder.
But already the captain had gone to the, there was a memorial service for the boy and his family knew exactly what had happened. And they went up to the captain and thanked him for being so careful of the boy in his last moments. And, and I think because he had eaten him, he was like a relation. So they embraced him.
So it's funny, really.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting. I was thinking about Don Juan,
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of course. There's a cannibalism scene --
Jonathan Lamb: That's right, that's right.
Ros Ballaster: In Don Juan, when they're sort of, they're just a small boat, aren't they, and they draw lots as to who's going to be, and that was the scene that people found beyond the pale in Don Juan. All of the rest of it was okay, but that was the kind of stopping point for a lot of readers.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah. Well, I worked with somebody who did a lot of research into, into maritime law and how, and also navigation acts and how they were constantly being abused in the Caribbean and beyond. But she had a story from Norfolk Island, which was one of the grimmest of the convict colonies in the settlement of Australia, where in order to get off the island because it was so hideous and the punishments were so, so torturous.
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they, they would make a pact but six or seven people would make a pact, usually Irish Catholics. And one would draw a straw, well they'd all draw straws, but one, one would have a straw that said that they had to kill somebody.
And one would be, the other straw would be the victim. And the, then they would be arrested, but they'd be sent to Sydney. They'd all get a trip to Sydney. The, the, offender would be hanged. No doubt. I mean, certainly. But it was, it was just a form of release and it was all done by, you know, nobody was dissenting from the, from the business. It just shows you.
Ros Ballaster: And I was thinking, because I have been preparing for our
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conference by writing a paper about mermaids and seagulls and their connection, but particularly, but looking at mermaids, I've just been reading a very recent sort of short work of Afrofuturist fiction by Solomon Rivers called The Deep, which is a kind of fantastic tale based on, it happened to coincide, I think, it's based on an 18th century controversy about a ship called the Zong, where they, where they ran out of water and trying to get back, I think it's to Jamaica or the Caribbean, so, so, well, what happened on the ship was that slaves were thrown off the ship in order that, sailors said, in order to preserve, to keep enough water for the rest of the people to survive. And then when they came back to England, they were charged. This is one of these Mansfield cases, wasn't it?
Margaret Cohen:
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Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Mansfield was in charge of the review case, certainly.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And they were charged, they were, I mean, it was thought to be an insurance, well, there was a big debate, wasn't there, about the owners of the ship and whether they could claim insurance for the loss of those bodies.
And this, this little work of fiction, it's a lovely work of fiction based on a piece of music. But then it's sort of the, the conceit of it is that the, the children or the, the babies that the pregnant women are carrying are born underwater, they're raised by whales, they form their own little colony.
And then there's a kind of fantastic tale about how the pain of this past is so hard for them to deal with that they sort of store it in one figure, one mermaid called, or one sea girl called the historian. And she can't bear the responsibility of this, insists that they must all share it, and sort of flees from them.
So it's a lovely story about fleeing the sea to the land, and then she has a kind of romance with a fisherwoman.
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So it's both a sort of, yeah, it's a kind of gender fluid, it's sort of interracial fantasy. It's a clever conceit, I think, the book, and an interesting way of telling that story. For me, it coincided with, there was a play in London last year called Zong, which tried to retell that story.
And interestingly, in terms of what we've been talking about, the second part act, the second part of that play had to move into fantasy, I think, to kind of recover from the real horror of the story. So there's a sort of fantasy second part in which the, you see Caribbean women sort of holding a line together and forming a kind of imaginary community --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- out of that horror. But it does seem as though there's a kind of need for a sort of fantasy stories about the sea to come back against the sort of often the horror
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stories that we --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, there's an African American artist who, who worked on, on those lines with the Zong. Her name was Emily something and I can't remember what the second one was.
Which, her fantasy was, with the, they all drown and come to the bottom and then various sorts of seaweeds grow out of them and at each node of the seaweed there is a face.
Margaret Cohen: Scary. Very scary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Jonathan Lamb: No, I was going to say though that Mansfield was in a, in an awful position.
Because it was, it was again, a collision between common law and, and maritime law. I mean, Collingwood, the, the skipper of the Zong, I mean, had behaved according to maritime law, perfectly correctly. In fact, what I think was
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wrong was that there was cholera on the ship. And he thought, well, if we, if we keep the people who've got cholera on the ship, everybody's going to get cholera.
So that was what he did. But Mansfield couldn't bear it. He said, it's like murder. But he said, he actually gave the judgment, on the, you know, on the second sort of readout of the trial and said, well, they had to pay the insurance.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I think we're surfacing again this, this ambivalence on the one hand, and, and I've seen this in different ways in which the Zong massacre has been written about.
On the one hand, there's, like, this melancholy and a sense of an inability to, to access the, the horror, that I, I don't know if you know the, the poem by NourbeSe Philip called Zong! -- it's, she takes the actual trial language and she cuts it up and she does a kind of Mallarmé
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scattering of it across, across a number of different, I forget what she calls this.
Oh, zongs, the actual, like, song and zong. Okay. And, and, by the end, there's a Derridian component too. You have, like, the ghosts of the African ancestors who were being evoked through this. So, like, this profoundly, I mean, I'm getting kind of goosebumps as I talk about this, profoundly chilling and melancholy and eerie affect.
And then in the Afrofuturist kind of fantasy of, like, a kind of, you know, sea creature that's able to emerge in a sense of hope for, for the future. There's this transmutation of some sort. And that's a really profound, like, tension that runs through I think different aspects of this effort to, like, encompass what, what Conrad calls a destructive element, right?
In the destructive element immerse.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah,
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yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Well, um, I feel we should talk about beauty. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Beauty.
Jonathan Lamb: What's beauty?
Margaret Cohen: I mean, we started with more entrancing aspects of stories and the seas, and then we, we fell into the abyss and, you know, the horror and the trauma, maybe we just stay there, I don't know.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh, I don't know, I, I, think we should strive for the skies.
Ros Ballaster: I don't know, I do, I suppose, I think there is a kind of, I don't know, this is, may not help us that much. I mean, one of the problems now, isn't it? It does seem to be that it's very difficult to talk about the sea except in terms of sort of ecological disaster and sort of, so that, and the sort of problem that all that you can, that often the way that that's counted is by talking about the sea as though it was some kind of pure space that has been polluted, do you see what I mean? Rather
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than the extent to which, you know, was there ever, was there ever a sort of a world of the sea, which was not subject to man's interference, or was not something that was, you know, it might not have been drowning in plastics, but it's, or even is there, is there a kind of concept of this? Is, is the sea, actually you could answer this better than me, but I sort of was wondering whether, you know, in the same way as we might say race is a construct, you know, is the sea a construct, do you know what I mean? Or is the way we've been talking about it, do we want to sort of say no, actually it's an elemental reality, that man's always been, that humankind's always been struggling to kind of conquer, manage, manage, map.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's sort of, the history, I mean, well, the mythology of the sea, I mean, is, is circular
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in fact, isn't it? Because after the deluge, what the sea is, is an offensive element because it has absorbed all the sin that's been annihilated by the deluge.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: And so for a long time, as, as Alain Corbin says, you, it, it's been regarded as filthy. And then, you know, in the 18th century when people, or before that, I mean, start swimming in the sea and finding it really healthy, it, it attracts a new kind of purity.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm .
Jonathan Lamb: Or it may be that just, you know, belief in, in, Christianity has weakened and, and, you know, it, but now it seems as if we've repeated the whole cycle.
I mean, what's happened to the
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waterways in Britain is a scandal. I mean, all of the privatized water companies have neglected to control sewage outlets. I mean, recently there was a triathlon in the north of England and all of the people, 59 people who went in the sea off Saltburn in the north of England, northeast, had to go to hospital.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And I was just watching the boat race this last weekend and some of the, yeah, some of the Oxford crew had --
Jonathan Lamb: Did they?
Ros Ballaster: -- diarrhoea and sickness that they think is a result of high waters in Oxford, which meant that they haven't been able to practice as much either.
Jonathan Lamb: Wow.
Ros Ballaster: So.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I do want to return though to what you said about, Ros, about the, the idea that the sea exists without us, you know, it reminds me of an article by William Cronon, it's called "The Problem of Wilderness."
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And the idea that wilderness is a construct which, you know, excludes the human. But if you look at how we practice the planet, humans are part of the ecosystem, you know, and it gets, it actually just raised one of my pet peeves when I watch nature documentaries are the ways in which the filmmakers go to such great lengths to exclude the human from the frame, you know, when, when, you know, they're sort of doing all kinds of things to massage the environment so that it looks like those penguins are flinging themselves on the rocks, you know, but actually they're sitting there in their boats waiting, waiting for those penguins to do it or whatever it may be.
And I do think that, that, part of an environmental imagination going forward. And this is just kind of something that, that is my suggestion is that we include humans in the frame, you know? So,
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so I really, I liked, I don't know if you saw My Octopus Teacher.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, I did.
Margaret Cohen: I liked that because it's, it's that film has a kind of, a very specific and eccentric individual who is in relationship with a specific marine creature and you get to observe their interaction. You get to observe him on land, you know, it, it doesn't have this mystical blue planet sense that the seas are this magnificent environment without us. So, yeah, that, what you said really resonated with things I think about.
Ros Ballaster: That is interesting. I mean, I wonder whether. I mean, I hadn't thought about it this way, but I wonder whether some of the mermaid tales I've been talking about are partly about imagining that interaction or, or finding a way of putting humans in connection with sea creatures. But they're just a sort of fantastic way of trying to tell that desire, which is very strong in, in My
[00:34:00]
Octopus Teacher.
I think this is a ridiculous confession to make, but I'm very, I was very struck years ago. I took my children to see Finding Nemo when they were tiny. And the CGI was so effective in that film, I was having a sort of slight panic attack in the cinema about the idea of being Nemo underwater and all of that sea.
And I still feel slightly that way when I get on a boat. I don't, you know, getting too far out, the idea of an infinity of sea and not being able to see land --
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- I find really quite terrifying. And the idea of being way underwater, even though I love swimming, there's something about that, those experiences that are so other to one's normal positioning in the world. I think that's probably what it's about.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Not having some, you know, something on your eyeline, do you see what I mean? That organizes
[00:35:00]
where you are.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I mean, I think that the connection between the sea and the sky in that respect as mirror, mirrors of one another.
Ros Ballaster: Mm.
Jonathan Lamb: I mean, kicks in because, I mean, both Locke and Hobbes were quite convinced that infinity was an impossible concept.
I mean, you could not absorb it, you couldn't make anything of infinity. It, it left you in the sea, in fact.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: But you know, Newton came along and said, no, no, no, no. He said, infinity is in fact, a double negative. And what's, what's negative is the end. So you've got here an infinity, the word infinity, an end to the end, infinity, you see, and therefore it leaves the residue of a positive by means of a double
[00:36:00]
negative, which the definition of a double negative is what? Can you remember? You affirm something by denying it's opposite.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, it's a positive. And that's as far as Jonathan's going to let us go with beauty.
[Margaret and Ros laugh]
Jonathan Lamb: No, no, no, I'm not. I've got something more to say. And I mean to say it. No, what, what you can pick up from Newton is, is what people do in infinity then. It becomes an excitement that causes the imagination to work in a very, very liberated way.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, and that's, yes, and I suppose that's, you know, the idea of the sublime, isn't it?
It's a kind of perception of infinity. is the sublime experience. You can't actually --
Jonathan Lamb: Articulate it.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think that's probably true. It
[00:37:00]
may account for the kind of mixture of terror and delight that you get in fantastic tales.
Margaret Cohen: Terror and delight, that's a very powerful, yeah, coordination. Do you think we still experience the sublime in relationship to the sea today?
Jonathan Lamb: I think I keep thinking of polymers.
Margaret Cohen: Polymers.
Jonathan Lamb: There are, there are more polymers in, in the, in the city of Auckland than, than in London because the waves of the Pacific Ocean all are very good at generating or concentrating the polymers in the ocean. And then they burst on the shores of New Zealand.
And there you go. I don't know. You see, the Anthropocene is, is a form of, of species self-hatred isn't it?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
[00:38:00]
Jonathan Lamb: Sorry?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's as if, it's as if we have lost any sense of our own evil. So what we have to do is recover it in a secular context. And that's, that's what the Anthropocene is.
I mean, we say, if it weren't for human beings, I mean, the earth would be a better place, there would be certainly more animals, more creatures in the sea, and more, you know, more of everything that would be natural to the earth. And so we, I mean, it's not everybody who thinks like that, but there is a, I mean, certainly the green movement is, is accelerated by that kind of feeling that we've done something terribly wrong to the planet.
Margaret Cohen: So you mean the discourse on the Anthropocene? Yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose what's, I mean,
[00:39:00]
I'm thinking about sort of the problem of how you have a kind of imaginative solution is often that the, the response, perhaps it is a sublime response is what, is one of kind of almost total passivity. Do less. Yeah. That's the only answer.
And yet that, that doesn't --
Jonathan Lamb: As an individual. Just do less, live a clean life.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Exactly. Or just, yes. Try and, yeah. Make as little, yeah. Actually, it's an interesting idea. I suppose I was thinking about carbon footprints, but can you make a footprint in the sea? What does that mean? Maybe that's part of the imaginative kind of grip or non-grip of the sea is that you can't measure quite as easily as you can like that kind of, that, that footprint.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: "My name is writ in water."
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, so that's Keats.
Margaret Cohen: Yes, on his grave, his stone in Rome. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's,
[00:40:00]
it's also reminding me of conversations I've been involved in here with scientists at Stanford and Jonathan, we're going to go down and meet some of them on Monday. And they're, they're kind of so solution oriented that the kind of discourse, almost a tragic discourse of mourning that people in the humanities have about the Anthropocene is really not something that they kind of take to, you know, and so they're, they're looking for how can we know more about the ocean?
How can we know more about what we do to the ocean? How can we solve the problems that we cause? You know, and it's just been really interesting to, to sort of be steeped in that rhetoric of not optimism exactly, but very active solution oriented rhetoric, you know, I mean, they're doing pure research, so it's not that they're coming up with, you know, technologies or devices.
Ros Ballaster: Ways to move this on.
Margaret Cohen: But yeah, but, but, it's just so different.
Ros Ballaster:
[00:41:00]
I suppose then you sort of, we don't want to argue, we wouldn't want to argue our profession out of a responsibility or an engagement with these with, with those issues. And there's a book I really liked by a critic called Tim Clark called Anthropocene on the Edge. And one of the things that I like about his argument there is, he does talk a lot about sort of, sort of disaster thinking, but he also sort of says perhaps literature and the arts are a place which allow you to sort of think through, or address the problem of scale, you know, that problem of kind of, What will this tiny piece of work here, how does that relate to the scale --
Margaret Cohen: It's a powerful argument.
Ros Ballaster: -- of overfishing or, or plastic pollution, do you see what I mean? Or, or any of the other kind of global or climate change?
And it's partly that literature and the arts allows you to kind of, yeah, get close to the
[00:42:00]
reality, do you see what I mean? In a way that one could argue, well, science is very solution oriented, but it's also in a way, not always persuading people or people are not hearing science, do you see what I mean? All those solutions and finding a way of, well, it's, it's getting a dialogue where both of those elements are working together.
Margaret Cohen: And the science communication piece is something which has drawn the scientists into this project is how to reach audiences because they feel that, I mean, generalizing from the couple that I'm in dialogue with that they do this research, but they can't get it out there. They don't have a way imaginably to have it gain traction.
So, yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think what, what's worrisome and what sort of defeats that, that kind of pragmatic research, you know, that was something we can find out about the problem and, and maybe solve it is, is, is this, I've forgotten the term
[00:43:00]
for it, but I mean, when, when temperatures get to two and a half degrees higher, I mean, what kicks in is not controllable.
You know, there's gonna be so many forest fires. I mean, there's going to be so many inundations, that, that there's going to be so much movement of refugees over the planet that it won't be controllable. I mean, nothing will solve the problem except, I'm sorry to say, war.
It's grim, you know. I mean, a lot of, a lot of stuff I, cause I live alone in the country, you know, with my wife away in Nashville, and it, you know, the, so many films I'm watching are about, about the Second World War or the lead up to it. Or the results of it. And Oppenheimer was a, you know, it, it brought back to me the terror of
[00:44:00]
1963, you know, by the, the, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I think we've forgotten the nuclear threat, you know? We'll do it to ourselves, probably. We'll self-cancel.
Ros Ballaster: Hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: I'm sorry if that's too pessimistic, but I mean –
[laughter]
Margaret Cohen: I was going to say --
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I haven't heard a good argument against that. I mean, you know, it's what Einstein says to, to Oppenheimer. I was the first to do this and I can't forgive myself.
And of course that's what Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer is paralyzed by guilt.
Ros Ballaster: It feels very, it feels like, it feels very paradoxical. I suppose I was thinking about, you know, I was thinking about an analogy with the sort of arguments around the pandemic. It seemed to me that another way of looking at it is to say that if we weren't so, still so much in the grip of a sort of nation statism, we would be able to come to
[00:45:00]
global solutions.
But we are so, yeah, and actually talking about the sea is good place to talk about that, because you would imagine that the sea should be a place where, where, where nations, yeah, well, I mean, think about what's going on in England at the moment, I suppose, you know, around the kind of, you know, can we put the border between England and Ireland down the middle of the sea?
[laughter]
Jonathan Lamb: I know.
Ros Ballaster: What is it to call a, you know, to say here's a border in the middle of water? It's a sort of shifting border again. So, yeah, so, but I suppose that the kind of, you know, you know, that's why I'm saying it seems pessimistic because, in a way, what you're suggesting, Jonathan, or saying what's going to happen is that nation statism will be the solution as well as the cause.
Because war will be the thing that wipes out populations. So that we are making less demand on the planet.
Jonathan Lamb: What seems to be happening all over the
[00:46:00]
place is that global institutions, you know, like the UN, are being completely ignored, um, at the moment, you know, in the Gaza situation. And, China is animated by nothing but a vast sense of nationalism.
And, you know, I, I don't know, I was just looking at a film about the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany. And if you've got people in a, in a state of, severe deprivation and of national humiliation. That, that is the result, actually. I mean, you're going to overarm, you're going to become too, you know, I mean, imperial, not nationalist, imperial, and you're going to want other people's land.
And, and there will be a fight for resources, won't there?
Margaret Cohen: My gosh, we're really getting into Mad Max territory here.
[00:47:00]
Jonathan Lamb: I think, I think, I am not, I'm not, you know, avid about this. It's just, it's borne in on me. I mean, I can feel fear. I felt fear today walking through Stanford. I mean, the buildings are so massive.
They make you feel like a pygmy and, and then I walked past this new building that's being put together by, which is going to be about science, science research and digital research. And I thought, you know, there's this terror about AI. If you can't find terror in one place, you can certainly find it in another.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I'm looking for a cheery note to end this podcast on. I think it's the note that I'm going to see you both tomorrow and listen to your papers.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: So there is a, there is a tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb: We won't be dead by then.
Margaret Cohen: And I hope you'll get a good dinner before that.
[00:48:00]
Ros Ballaster: Well, we, yeah, maybe there will, I'm sure there will be conversation which comes up with other ways of thinking about solutions.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly the Anthropocene is such a challenging and important subject and the sea is so deeply involved in it that I think it has also drawn people.
I mean, I'm not, it's not that I'm looking for a silver lining, but I think it has animated the conversation around the seas in a way that it was hard to do 20 or 25 years ago when we first started working on the seas. It was hard to convince people that they really were at the center of human history and now we realize that they are.
Jonathan Lamb: Students will queue up for courses on the sea. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It's a good sign.
Margaret Cohen: Well, thank you both. It was so great to have a chance to speak, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb:
[00:49:00]
Yeah.
[outro music plays]
[00:00:00]
[intro music plays in the background throughout the description of the episode]
Jessica Monaco: Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Café, the podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Margaret Cohen, is joined by Ros Ballaster, Professor of 18th Century Studies in the faculty of English at Mansfield College, Oxford University, and Jonathan Lamb, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Literature at Vanderbilt University. Both of them visited the Center to speak at this year's CSN conference titled "Stories and the Seas" on April 5th, 2024. This conversation was recorded the day before the conference, and we are delighted to be sharing it with you now. Thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal exchanges.
Margaret Cohen: I'm so glad you could join us, and give our audience a taste of what we're going to be talking about tomorrow with our annual conference, "Stories and the Seas." I, I framed the topic
[00:01:00]
pretty broadly because I was interested in the way in which the seas stimulate the imagination.
And so I wondered if I could ask each of you to talk about what stories it conjures for you.
Ros Ballaster: Wow, that's a big question. I was thinking about, actually, your title. Because I was thinking about, um, Salman Rushdie has a lovely 1992 novel called Haroun and the Sea of Stories in which a father's telling stories to his son, and I like that idea of stories being a sea. The idea that they're a sort of whirl of water that you can pick stories out of and then they go back into them and that they don't have a kind of clear original direction or that you can't, or you can't see the horizon. So, so what you have is an infinity of water rather than a sense of a kind of limit to story and where it stops and where it starts.
Margaret Cohen: It's beautiful. I'm so glad you noticed that because that was one of
[00:02:00]
my son's favorite books when he was a kid and we used to, to read it to him. So for me, just briefing a little bit, it also has an oral component of, like, something that you share.
Ros Ballaster: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. There's also a sort of verbal exchange.
And I think it's also partly about getting away from that idea. I suppose there's a lot of discussion. I'm most interested in stories and Oriental tales and sort of the notion that stories travel along the Silk Road. But thinking about how stories travel across seas and are told on the seas as well.
As someone who works in the 18th century, I love the, you know, Penelope Aubin has all these stories in which people are on, on a boat telling a story of their abduction or their liberation. So, so there seems to, the sea seems to be a place where stories get told that's between two places where things have happened.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I've been reading recently the stories of Sinbad,
[00:03:00]
The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. And that, that's, that's a weird collection of stories. But one of the things that happens twice actually in, in, in his, in the seven tales is that he goes into the sea with, which nobody knows, I mean, without any kind of map or sign or signal of where to go.
And all the same thing happens twice. The helmsman gets really nervous and, and, and finally goes manic and the ship sinks. And that's usually when Sinbad, by some means or other, gets into a current of water that washes him towards an island.
Ros Ballaster: And nobody else does.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh no!
Ros Ballaster: It's just Sinbad that survives, isn't it?
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's something extraordinarily
[00:04:00]
egotistical, I think, about, about extreme voyages. You know, it just becomes you. It's like the ancient mariner. All, all alone, you know, nobody, nobody with me. Everybody on the ship is dead. Well, they may as well be dead. And they're going to be dead at the end, but they're all inert.
Ros Ballaster: And that's true to Robinson Crusoe, isn't it? That that survival story is one of kind of being the only one who survives. And I suppose they are also linked in that they're both providential stories. So there's something about Sinbad and Crusoe where they, they at least, I mean, you can call it egotism or you could call it providentialism. They, they have a version of their story, which means they've survived because God wanted them to.
Jonathan Lamb: Well there's a very funny end story for Sinbad. I think that the Sinbad author or tale teller was, was worried about repetition. Because those stories do begin to repeat in one form or
[00:05:00]
another. They have sort of, you know, he's going to be destitute. I mean, he's going to be cast away, then destitute. Then he's going to be rich again. It's simple. But I mean, in the last story, he, he has a, he meets some people who are within a cloud of birds, and the birds all fly up to the heavens, and he flies with them, and he meets all of these angels singing the praises of God.
And so he starts singing along, you know, until he realizes that he's, he's actually in a different religion. So he stops. And at that point he falls back to the earth. And he sees a serpent with a man halfway down its throat. And, and then he sees two
[00:06:00]
people from the moon, who've landed on the earth too. And, and they praise him for his fidelity to Allah.
Ros Ballaster: Right.
Jonathan Lamb: And I thought, what on earth is this story about?
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting as well, that business of the, I've just been reading there's an essay by Jerome Cohen, I think it's called "The Sea Above," and he talks about these medieval myths of, and stories as an Irish 13th-century bishop who tells them of sort of people looking up to the sky and seeing, and it's a sea, and there's a boat flying above them, and someone throws down an anchor. And it gets hooked on a church, and then a little man has to climb down from the ship above and try and get the anchor up. People on the earth are trying to hold him down. He's saying, no, let me go, I'm drowning. And this, this, this, these stories seem to be partly about, I think there's something about the sea
[00:07:00]
always taking you to the sky, or some, somehow lifting you to it, or, or, that there's some kind of reflective state.
Jonathan Lamb: Reflective, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Where I, I mean, I always think about that weird bit in Marvell when he talks about the fish jellied in air.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: So, so there's a kind of mirage that happens when you are at sea, when you start to think maybe the sea's above you rather than you being below it. But those are also clearly sort of tales that have something to do with religious epiphany and a necessary separation between the sky and the sea, that you must let the man go back, do you see what I mean, to the sea above, that is?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, well, in my theology, I mean, they, Rangi and Papa. Papa is the female earth spirit and Rangi is the sky spirit, male. And they have to come apart if there's to be any kind of
[00:08:00]
human development on Earth. And so rain is Rangi weeping for Papa, and it's a very tender kind of story, but I mean there's no, there's not going to be any kind of happy, happy ending.
Margaret Cohen: I mean that's such a profound theme, the kind of elusiveness of the ability to contact, you know, from one element to the other. I think you're going to talk about that a little bit.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, yes, I'm interested in that, well that's sort of elemental theory. And I was thinking about, you know, Empedocles says about the elements that it's only, they're always pulled together by love or by strife.
But he says you see them most clearly in strife and in love they want to mix. And in strife they must, their shape becomes more apparent.
And actually, sorry, this is, maybe it's a distraction, but one of the books I was, I've got very interested
[00:09:00]
in is Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch and actually what you've just described explains something. There's a character called Rain. Who lives at, who's a, on a Caribbean island who's a sort of descendant of white plantocracy.
And she has a, a mixed race child. But she lives on an estate that's called Paradise, and they have a tree called Papa Bois, or Papa Bois, where there's a kind of epiphanic moment in the novel. And so clearly, I mean, Roffey is riffing on all of these sort of African and Caribbean myths. So she's clearly picked up on the rain, Mama Rain and Papa Bois story and put it into that novel.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: I mean, I think that's another thing about, I mean, maybe that does relate to that idea of the sea of stories. Do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That they, they are in a, they're
[00:10:00]
a kind of melting pot or a whirlpool.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And they have, they may originate in particular regions, but they circulate.
Margaret Cohen: They circulate.
Ros Ballaster: And people encounter them afresh and don't necessarily recognize them.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: And then might join them up.
I mean, I think that's a big question for me always about story, about, you know, are there routes that stories travel or are they actually kind of just common patterns?
Margaret Cohen: Structurally, or yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: A sort of structuralist versus historicist account of English literary history, or literary history in general, not English literary history.
Jonathan Lamb: I suppose the big one is, is the Arabian Nights. I mean, that traveled.
Margaret Cohen: I was going to ask you both, as very distinguished scholars of the 18th century, that we're delighted to have with us, if Defoe read Sinbad and how the Arabian Nights traveled around the, the maritime writing of the 18th century?
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it certainly, it travelled
[00:11:00]
in spirit in Oriental tales because everybody was writing Oriental tales. Hawksworth and Addison and all those people, but yeah. But I think that certain, certain elements of the Arabian Nights, like Sinbad, I mean, stuck in people's imagination. So you've got Swift, who borrows from, from Sinbad's story of the rook, the rock, you know, for the escape from Brobdingnag, isn't it, in the second book?
Ros Ballaster: Does he get lifted up by a big bird at the end of that?
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think they must both have, I, I can't think of a moment when Defoe mentions Sinbad. But we don't have a lot of that kind of documentation from Defoe. We have a lot of his essays and so forth, but I can't, but I'm quite sure he must have read Sinbad.
I mean, there's
[00:12:00]
so the pattern of this kind of, I went to sea, I got shipwrecked. I swore I'd never do it again. Then I got, then I had to do it again. The kind of compulsion to keep going on a sea voyage.
Jonathan Lamb: The compulsion is really strong at the beginning of the, the continuation, you know, after Robinson Crusoe, it's such a big hit.
And there's the second part and it starts with, with, and, and you, you don't know if it's Defoe or Robinson Crusoe. He, he says, I could not get out of, in my, my mind the, the picture of my island, and even when I would fall asleep is what I would dream of.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And I think that's what happened to Defoe. I think, I think his imagination was taken over by the product of his own imagination.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: And, it's, with Defoe, it does seem to me that he's impatient with, with,
[00:13:00]
a tissue of imaginings. You know, what he wants are facts, really, it's a highly empirical imagination. But that fascinates him, and he can't, he can't let it go.
Ros Ballaster: I suppose I sometimes wonder about how easy it is to tell stories, you called it "Stories and the Seas," didn't you? Stories that are actually on the sea or in the sea. That they always seem to land up on the island, do you see what I mean? Or that somehow the, the, the sort of the desire, the sea, the problem that the sea always seems to be something that you're crossing or washed up from rather than, So the stories that are actually about being on the sea are often, more the sort of stories that you talk about, Margaret, about, you know, they're kind of mariners stories.
They're stories. I mean, how interesting is it, I suppose, is my question, to tell a
[00:14:00]
story about the technical business of being at sea, which I imagine a lot of the time is pretty boring.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
It's dull until everything goes wrong.
Ros Ballaster: Yes. And then it's, yeah.
Margaret Cohen: You run into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and you, it collapses.
And then, I mean, I've then had Conrad on my mind a lot in the past few days, thinking of the, I think they may be Sri Lankans. The ship was going to Sri Lanka and there are Indian seafarers who are stuck on board in Baltimore, keeping the ship working and just wondering, like, what would Conrad's version of that story be?
But I mean, but to your point, yeah, there's, there's, when you see very often, like in Conrad, if you want to get a story that's actually set on the sea, it's like you have to frame it with all these kind of buffers because it's so scary when you actually get there, and traumatic. So I'm thinking of the story "Falk."
I don't know if you've read that, that's
[00:15:00]
About a German mariner who turns out to have engaged in survival cannibalism. And he can only tell this to someone else who is, you know, part of this community of seafarers in a secret, you know, kind of pact, which can't really fully be related to the land people because it's so, you know, transgressive and taboo, but, but they understand each other.
So I think I guess what I'm saying, and I, one could even, you know, amplify this to Melville or take in different places is that to get to the traumatic conditions of what's going on at sea, you need a lot of filters and preparation and it just can't be offered without any qualifications and disclaimers.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting, I've just been watching the, that film, Nyad, you know, about swimming for a hundred hours from Cuba to
[00:16:00]
Florida, and she does it about four attempts and there's this sort of two hour film and she's most, and it cannot show you the kind of utter tedium of a hundred hours of swimming. So all you can get are the moments of crisis.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: You know, the moments when a box jellyfish gets her or a moment when a storm means she has to, to sort of stop. There's a wonderful line in it when she sort of, when her friend Bonnie is sort of saying, oh, all the things that were going on the boat, you didn't see any of that.
No, I was just swimming.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: Putting one arm over another.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I saw it too in my preparation to be able to see all the films for the Oscars this year. It's a sort of a jolly, but, but that disconnect between what the crew is doing and what she is doing, I think is something which is one of the stronger narrative elements of that film. Yeah. You know, that she's
[00:17:00]
just off in this other world, actually in the sea compared to all the challenges that they're facing in terms of navigation and keeping her safe.
Ros Ballaster: But, and that story about cannibalism is interesting as well, I suppose, because I was thinking about, you know, the sort of African myth of, of Mami Wata, who's a sort of mermaid serpent figure of African, folklore.
And the story there is one in which people who are taken to Mami Wata's abode return with their clothes entirely dry and having undergone some kind of spiritual transformation or transfiguration. So there's something that happens. When you go in the sea, do you see what I mean?
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That is not, that gives you a kind of knowledge that you can't share again on land.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: That you have been changed. But precisely not been changed by getting wet. The obvious.
Jonathan Lamb:
[00:18:00]
What is it, E. E. Cummings, it's always ourselves we find by the sea.
Ros Ballaster: Right. Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Do you agree with that?
Jonathan Lamb: No.
I think, I think the sea is magnetic, however. I mean, you know, it's always where you want to go and look, stare. But I mean, on, on the question of cannibalism, it's, it's interesting because there was, there was a notorious, well it wasn't notorious actually, case of the Minionette, have you ever heard of this?
It was a yacht and it, it sank on the way to Australia. I mean it was quite a, you know, big yacht, and there were only, sort of, three people on board, the, the skipper, his mate, and a cabin boy. And, they, they are in a boat and, the, the cabin boy's in a coma. So they say, well, we've got to eat him, if we're to survive, and they do
[00:19:00]
eat him and they get picked up soon afterwards.
And of course in maritime law, they haven't done anything wrong. There was a, there was a, there was laid down in the Black Book of Admiralty a sequence that had to be observed if you were going to eat somebody, kill them and eat them. And they did observe it. But when they came ashore in Portsmouth, they were arrested under common law and charged with murder.
But already the captain had gone to the, there was a memorial service for the boy and his family knew exactly what had happened. And they went up to the captain and thanked him for being so careful of the boy in his last moments. And, and I think because he had eaten him, he was like a relation. So they embraced him.
So it's funny, really.
Ros Ballaster: It's interesting. I was thinking about Don Juan,
[00:20:00]
of course. There's a cannibalism scene --
Jonathan Lamb: That's right, that's right.
Ros Ballaster: In Don Juan, when they're sort of, they're just a small boat, aren't they, and they draw lots as to who's going to be, and that was the scene that people found beyond the pale in Don Juan. All of the rest of it was okay, but that was the kind of stopping point for a lot of readers.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah. Well, I worked with somebody who did a lot of research into, into maritime law and how, and also navigation acts and how they were constantly being abused in the Caribbean and beyond. But she had a story from Norfolk Island, which was one of the grimmest of the convict colonies in the settlement of Australia, where in order to get off the island because it was so hideous and the punishments were so, so torturous.
[00:21:00]
they, they would make a pact but six or seven people would make a pact, usually Irish Catholics. And one would draw a straw, well they'd all draw straws, but one, one would have a straw that said that they had to kill somebody.
And one would be, the other straw would be the victim. And the, then they would be arrested, but they'd be sent to Sydney. They'd all get a trip to Sydney. The, the, offender would be hanged. No doubt. I mean, certainly. But it was, it was just a form of release and it was all done by, you know, nobody was dissenting from the, from the business. It just shows you.
Ros Ballaster: And I was thinking, because I have been preparing for our
[00:22:00]
conference by writing a paper about mermaids and seagulls and their connection, but particularly, but looking at mermaids, I've just been reading a very recent sort of short work of Afrofuturist fiction by Solomon Rivers called The Deep, which is a kind of fantastic tale based on, it happened to coincide, I think, it's based on an 18th century controversy about a ship called the Zong, where they, where they ran out of water and trying to get back, I think it's to Jamaica or the Caribbean, so, so, well, what happened on the ship was that slaves were thrown off the ship in order that, sailors said, in order to preserve, to keep enough water for the rest of the people to survive. And then when they came back to England, they were charged. This is one of these Mansfield cases, wasn't it?
Margaret Cohen:
[00:23:00]
Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Mansfield was in charge of the review case, certainly.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And they were charged, they were, I mean, it was thought to be an insurance, well, there was a big debate, wasn't there, about the owners of the ship and whether they could claim insurance for the loss of those bodies.
And this, this little work of fiction, it's a lovely work of fiction based on a piece of music. But then it's sort of the, the conceit of it is that the, the children or the, the babies that the pregnant women are carrying are born underwater, they're raised by whales, they form their own little colony.
And then there's a kind of fantastic tale about how the pain of this past is so hard for them to deal with that they sort of store it in one figure, one mermaid called, or one sea girl called the historian. And she can't bear the responsibility of this, insists that they must all share it, and sort of flees from them.
So it's a lovely story about fleeing the sea to the land, and then she has a kind of romance with a fisherwoman.
[00:24:00]
So it's both a sort of, yeah, it's a kind of gender fluid, it's sort of interracial fantasy. It's a clever conceit, I think, the book, and an interesting way of telling that story. For me, it coincided with, there was a play in London last year called Zong, which tried to retell that story.
And interestingly, in terms of what we've been talking about, the second part act, the second part of that play had to move into fantasy, I think, to kind of recover from the real horror of the story. So there's a sort of fantasy second part in which the, you see Caribbean women sort of holding a line together and forming a kind of imaginary community --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah, yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- out of that horror. But it does seem as though there's a kind of need for a sort of fantasy stories about the sea to come back against the sort of often the horror
[00:25:00]
stories that we --
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, there's an African American artist who, who worked on, on those lines with the Zong. Her name was Emily something and I can't remember what the second one was.
Which, her fantasy was, with the, they all drown and come to the bottom and then various sorts of seaweeds grow out of them and at each node of the seaweed there is a face.
Margaret Cohen: Scary. Very scary. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.
Jonathan Lamb: No, I was going to say though that Mansfield was in a, in an awful position.
Because it was, it was again, a collision between common law and, and maritime law. I mean, Collingwood, the, the skipper of the Zong, I mean, had behaved according to maritime law, perfectly correctly. In fact, what I think was
[00:26:00]
wrong was that there was cholera on the ship. And he thought, well, if we, if we keep the people who've got cholera on the ship, everybody's going to get cholera.
So that was what he did. But Mansfield couldn't bear it. He said, it's like murder. But he said, he actually gave the judgment, on the, you know, on the second sort of readout of the trial and said, well, they had to pay the insurance.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah, I mean, I, I think we're surfacing again this, this ambivalence on the one hand, and, and I've seen this in different ways in which the Zong massacre has been written about.
On the one hand, there's, like, this melancholy and a sense of an inability to, to access the, the horror, that I, I don't know if you know the, the poem by NourbeSe Philip called Zong! -- it's, she takes the actual trial language and she cuts it up and she does a kind of Mallarmé
[00:27:00]
scattering of it across, across a number of different, I forget what she calls this.
Oh, zongs, the actual, like, song and zong. Okay. And, and, by the end, there's a Derridian component too. You have, like, the ghosts of the African ancestors who were being evoked through this. So, like, this profoundly, I mean, I'm getting kind of goosebumps as I talk about this, profoundly chilling and melancholy and eerie affect.
And then in the Afrofuturist kind of fantasy of, like, a kind of, you know, sea creature that's able to emerge in a sense of hope for, for the future. There's this transmutation of some sort. And that's a really profound, like, tension that runs through I think different aspects of this effort to, like, encompass what, what Conrad calls a destructive element, right?
In the destructive element immerse.
Jonathan Lamb: Yeah,
[00:28:00]
yeah.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Well, um, I feel we should talk about beauty. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Beauty.
Jonathan Lamb: What's beauty?
Margaret Cohen: I mean, we started with more entrancing aspects of stories and the seas, and then we, we fell into the abyss and, you know, the horror and the trauma, maybe we just stay there, I don't know.
Jonathan Lamb: Oh, I don't know, I, I, think we should strive for the skies.
Ros Ballaster: I don't know, I do, I suppose, I think there is a kind of, I don't know, this is, may not help us that much. I mean, one of the problems now, isn't it? It does seem to be that it's very difficult to talk about the sea except in terms of sort of ecological disaster and sort of, so that, and the sort of problem that all that you can, that often the way that that's counted is by talking about the sea as though it was some kind of pure space that has been polluted, do you see what I mean? Rather
[00:29:00]
than the extent to which, you know, was there ever, was there ever a sort of a world of the sea, which was not subject to man's interference, or was not something that was, you know, it might not have been drowning in plastics, but it's, or even is there, is there a kind of concept of this? Is, is the sea, actually you could answer this better than me, but I sort of was wondering whether, you know, in the same way as we might say race is a construct, you know, is the sea a construct, do you know what I mean? Or is the way we've been talking about it, do we want to sort of say no, actually it's an elemental reality, that man's always been, that humankind's always been struggling to kind of conquer, manage, manage, map.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's sort of, the history, I mean, well, the mythology of the sea, I mean, is, is circular
[00:30:00]
in fact, isn't it? Because after the deluge, what the sea is, is an offensive element because it has absorbed all the sin that's been annihilated by the deluge.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: And so for a long time, as, as Alain Corbin says, you, it, it's been regarded as filthy. And then, you know, in the 18th century when people, or before that, I mean, start swimming in the sea and finding it really healthy, it, it attracts a new kind of purity.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm .
Jonathan Lamb: Or it may be that just, you know, belief in, in, Christianity has weakened and, and, you know, it, but now it seems as if we've repeated the whole cycle.
I mean, what's happened to the
[00:31:00]
waterways in Britain is a scandal. I mean, all of the privatized water companies have neglected to control sewage outlets. I mean, recently there was a triathlon in the north of England and all of the people, 59 people who went in the sea off Saltburn in the north of England, northeast, had to go to hospital.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. And I was just watching the boat race this last weekend and some of the, yeah, some of the Oxford crew had --
Jonathan Lamb: Did they?
Ros Ballaster: -- diarrhoea and sickness that they think is a result of high waters in Oxford, which meant that they haven't been able to practice as much either.
Jonathan Lamb: Wow.
Ros Ballaster: So.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I do want to return though to what you said about, Ros, about the, the idea that the sea exists without us, you know, it reminds me of an article by William Cronon, it's called "The Problem of Wilderness."
[00:32:00]
And the idea that wilderness is a construct which, you know, excludes the human. But if you look at how we practice the planet, humans are part of the ecosystem, you know, and it gets, it actually just raised one of my pet peeves when I watch nature documentaries are the ways in which the filmmakers go to such great lengths to exclude the human from the frame, you know, when, when, you know, they're sort of doing all kinds of things to massage the environment so that it looks like those penguins are flinging themselves on the rocks, you know, but actually they're sitting there in their boats waiting, waiting for those penguins to do it or whatever it may be.
And I do think that, that, part of an environmental imagination going forward. And this is just kind of something that, that is my suggestion is that we include humans in the frame, you know? So,
[00:33:00]
so I really, I liked, I don't know if you saw My Octopus Teacher.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, I did.
Margaret Cohen: I liked that because it's, it's that film has a kind of, a very specific and eccentric individual who is in relationship with a specific marine creature and you get to observe their interaction. You get to observe him on land, you know, it, it doesn't have this mystical blue planet sense that the seas are this magnificent environment without us. So, yeah, that, what you said really resonated with things I think about.
Ros Ballaster: That is interesting. I mean, I wonder whether. I mean, I hadn't thought about it this way, but I wonder whether some of the mermaid tales I've been talking about are partly about imagining that interaction or, or finding a way of putting humans in connection with sea creatures. But they're just a sort of fantastic way of trying to tell that desire, which is very strong in, in My
[00:34:00]
Octopus Teacher.
I think this is a ridiculous confession to make, but I'm very, I was very struck years ago. I took my children to see Finding Nemo when they were tiny. And the CGI was so effective in that film, I was having a sort of slight panic attack in the cinema about the idea of being Nemo underwater and all of that sea.
And I still feel slightly that way when I get on a boat. I don't, you know, getting too far out, the idea of an infinity of sea and not being able to see land --
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: -- I find really quite terrifying. And the idea of being way underwater, even though I love swimming, there's something about that, those experiences that are so other to one's normal positioning in the world. I think that's probably what it's about.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Not having some, you know, something on your eyeline, do you see what I mean? That organizes
[00:35:00]
where you are.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I mean, I think that the connection between the sea and the sky in that respect as mirror, mirrors of one another.
Ros Ballaster: Mm.
Jonathan Lamb: I mean, kicks in because, I mean, both Locke and Hobbes were quite convinced that infinity was an impossible concept.
I mean, you could not absorb it, you couldn't make anything of infinity. It, it left you in the sea, in fact.
Ros Ballaster: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: But you know, Newton came along and said, no, no, no, no. He said, infinity is in fact, a double negative. And what's, what's negative is the end. So you've got here an infinity, the word infinity, an end to the end, infinity, you see, and therefore it leaves the residue of a positive by means of a double
[00:36:00]
negative, which the definition of a double negative is what? Can you remember? You affirm something by denying it's opposite.
Ros Ballaster: Yes, it's a positive. And that's as far as Jonathan's going to let us go with beauty.
[Margaret and Ros laugh]
Jonathan Lamb: No, no, no, I'm not. I've got something more to say. And I mean to say it. No, what, what you can pick up from Newton is, is what people do in infinity then. It becomes an excitement that causes the imagination to work in a very, very liberated way.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, and that's, yes, and I suppose that's, you know, the idea of the sublime, isn't it?
It's a kind of perception of infinity. is the sublime experience. You can't actually --
Jonathan Lamb: Articulate it.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think that's probably true. It
[00:37:00]
may account for the kind of mixture of terror and delight that you get in fantastic tales.
Margaret Cohen: Terror and delight, that's a very powerful, yeah, coordination. Do you think we still experience the sublime in relationship to the sea today?
Jonathan Lamb: I think I keep thinking of polymers.
Margaret Cohen: Polymers.
Jonathan Lamb: There are, there are more polymers in, in the, in the city of Auckland than, than in London because the waves of the Pacific Ocean all are very good at generating or concentrating the polymers in the ocean. And then they burst on the shores of New Zealand.
And there you go. I don't know. You see, the Anthropocene is, is a form of, of species self-hatred isn't it?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
[00:38:00]
Jonathan Lamb: Sorry?
Margaret Cohen: Say more about that.
Jonathan Lamb: Well, it's as if, it's as if we have lost any sense of our own evil. So what we have to do is recover it in a secular context. And that's, that's what the Anthropocene is.
I mean, we say, if it weren't for human beings, I mean, the earth would be a better place, there would be certainly more animals, more creatures in the sea, and more, you know, more of everything that would be natural to the earth. And so we, I mean, it's not everybody who thinks like that, but there is a, I mean, certainly the green movement is, is accelerated by that kind of feeling that we've done something terribly wrong to the planet.
Margaret Cohen: So you mean the discourse on the Anthropocene? Yeah. Yeah.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose what's, I mean,
[00:39:00]
I'm thinking about sort of the problem of how you have a kind of imaginative solution is often that the, the response, perhaps it is a sublime response is what, is one of kind of almost total passivity. Do less. Yeah. That's the only answer.
And yet that, that doesn't --
Jonathan Lamb: As an individual. Just do less, live a clean life.
Ros Ballaster: Yeah. Exactly. Or just, yes. Try and, yeah. Make as little, yeah. Actually, it's an interesting idea. I suppose I was thinking about carbon footprints, but can you make a footprint in the sea? What does that mean? Maybe that's part of the imaginative kind of grip or non-grip of the sea is that you can't measure quite as easily as you can like that kind of, that, that footprint.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: "My name is writ in water."
Ros Ballaster: Yeah, so that's Keats.
Margaret Cohen: Yes, on his grave, his stone in Rome. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's,
[00:40:00]
it's also reminding me of conversations I've been involved in here with scientists at Stanford and Jonathan, we're going to go down and meet some of them on Monday. And they're, they're kind of so solution oriented that the kind of discourse, almost a tragic discourse of mourning that people in the humanities have about the Anthropocene is really not something that they kind of take to, you know, and so they're, they're looking for how can we know more about the ocean?
How can we know more about what we do to the ocean? How can we solve the problems that we cause? You know, and it's just been really interesting to, to sort of be steeped in that rhetoric of not optimism exactly, but very active solution oriented rhetoric, you know, I mean, they're doing pure research, so it's not that they're coming up with, you know, technologies or devices.
Ros Ballaster: Ways to move this on.
Margaret Cohen: But yeah, but, but, it's just so different.
Ros Ballaster:
[00:41:00]
I suppose then you sort of, we don't want to argue, we wouldn't want to argue our profession out of a responsibility or an engagement with these with, with those issues. And there's a book I really liked by a critic called Tim Clark called Anthropocene on the Edge. And one of the things that I like about his argument there is, he does talk a lot about sort of, sort of disaster thinking, but he also sort of says perhaps literature and the arts are a place which allow you to sort of think through, or address the problem of scale, you know, that problem of kind of, What will this tiny piece of work here, how does that relate to the scale --
Margaret Cohen: It's a powerful argument.
Ros Ballaster: -- of overfishing or, or plastic pollution, do you see what I mean? Or, or any of the other kind of global or climate change?
And it's partly that literature and the arts allows you to kind of, yeah, get close to the
[00:42:00]
reality, do you see what I mean? In a way that one could argue, well, science is very solution oriented, but it's also in a way, not always persuading people or people are not hearing science, do you see what I mean? All those solutions and finding a way of, well, it's, it's getting a dialogue where both of those elements are working together.
Margaret Cohen: And the science communication piece is something which has drawn the scientists into this project is how to reach audiences because they feel that, I mean, generalizing from the couple that I'm in dialogue with that they do this research, but they can't get it out there. They don't have a way imaginably to have it gain traction.
So, yeah.
Jonathan Lamb: I think what, what's worrisome and what sort of defeats that, that kind of pragmatic research, you know, that was something we can find out about the problem and, and maybe solve it is, is, is this, I've forgotten the term
[00:43:00]
for it, but I mean, when, when temperatures get to two and a half degrees higher, I mean, what kicks in is not controllable.
You know, there's gonna be so many forest fires. I mean, there's going to be so many inundations, that, that there's going to be so much movement of refugees over the planet that it won't be controllable. I mean, nothing will solve the problem except, I'm sorry to say, war.
It's grim, you know. I mean, a lot of, a lot of stuff I, cause I live alone in the country, you know, with my wife away in Nashville, and it, you know, the, so many films I'm watching are about, about the Second World War or the lead up to it. Or the results of it. And Oppenheimer was a, you know, it, it brought back to me the terror of
[00:44:00]
1963, you know, by the, the, the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I think we've forgotten the nuclear threat, you know? We'll do it to ourselves, probably. We'll self-cancel.
Ros Ballaster: Hmm.
Jonathan Lamb: I'm sorry if that's too pessimistic, but I mean –
[laughter]
Margaret Cohen: I was going to say --
Jonathan Lamb: Well, I haven't heard a good argument against that. I mean, you know, it's what Einstein says to, to Oppenheimer. I was the first to do this and I can't forgive myself.
And of course that's what Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer is paralyzed by guilt.
Ros Ballaster: It feels very, it feels like, it feels very paradoxical. I suppose I was thinking about, you know, I was thinking about an analogy with the sort of arguments around the pandemic. It seemed to me that another way of looking at it is to say that if we weren't so, still so much in the grip of a sort of nation statism, we would be able to come to
[00:45:00]
global solutions.
But we are so, yeah, and actually talking about the sea is good place to talk about that, because you would imagine that the sea should be a place where, where, where nations, yeah, well, I mean, think about what's going on in England at the moment, I suppose, you know, around the kind of, you know, can we put the border between England and Ireland down the middle of the sea?
[laughter]
Jonathan Lamb: I know.
Ros Ballaster: What is it to call a, you know, to say here's a border in the middle of water? It's a sort of shifting border again. So, yeah, so, but I suppose that the kind of, you know, you know, that's why I'm saying it seems pessimistic because, in a way, what you're suggesting, Jonathan, or saying what's going to happen is that nation statism will be the solution as well as the cause.
Because war will be the thing that wipes out populations. So that we are making less demand on the planet.
Jonathan Lamb: What seems to be happening all over the
[00:46:00]
place is that global institutions, you know, like the UN, are being completely ignored, um, at the moment, you know, in the Gaza situation. And, China is animated by nothing but a vast sense of nationalism.
And, you know, I, I don't know, I was just looking at a film about the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany. And if you've got people in a, in a state of, severe deprivation and of national humiliation. That, that is the result, actually. I mean, you're going to overarm, you're going to become too, you know, I mean, imperial, not nationalist, imperial, and you're going to want other people's land.
And, and there will be a fight for resources, won't there?
Margaret Cohen: My gosh, we're really getting into Mad Max territory here.
[00:47:00]
Jonathan Lamb: I think, I think, I am not, I'm not, you know, avid about this. It's just, it's borne in on me. I mean, I can feel fear. I felt fear today walking through Stanford. I mean, the buildings are so massive.
They make you feel like a pygmy and, and then I walked past this new building that's being put together by, which is going to be about science, science research and digital research. And I thought, you know, there's this terror about AI. If you can't find terror in one place, you can certainly find it in another.
Margaret Cohen: Well, I'm looking for a cheery note to end this podcast on. I think it's the note that I'm going to see you both tomorrow and listen to your papers.
[laughter]
Ros Ballaster: So there is a, there is a tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb: We won't be dead by then.
Margaret Cohen: And I hope you'll get a good dinner before that.
[00:48:00]
Ros Ballaster: Well, we, yeah, maybe there will, I'm sure there will be conversation which comes up with other ways of thinking about solutions.
Margaret Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly the Anthropocene is such a challenging and important subject and the sea is so deeply involved in it that I think it has also drawn people.
I mean, I'm not, it's not that I'm looking for a silver lining, but I think it has animated the conversation around the seas in a way that it was hard to do 20 or 25 years ago when we first started working on the seas. It was hard to convince people that they really were at the center of human history and now we realize that they are.
Jonathan Lamb: Students will queue up for courses on the sea. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. It's a good sign.
Margaret Cohen: Well, thank you both. It was so great to have a chance to speak, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
Jonathan Lamb:
[00:49:00]
Yeah.
[outro music plays]