In just a few weeks’ time, Julyers will be heading for the beach, followed in just over a month’s time by Augusters – weather permitting. The seaside remains a favorite destination for holidaymakers: as landlubbers, we yearn for a change of scenery – the English have a word for it, seascape, answering to landscape. The first images of paid vacations are associated with the possibility for the working classes to see the sea and stay in one of these « seaside resorts », whose history goes back to the middle of the 18th century and begins, again, in England, as Alain Corbin masterfully recounts in Le territoire du vide : l’Occident et le désir du rivage (1750-1840), published in 1988.
This summer, we’ll be commemorating an anniversary: the first sea bath in France, a veritable « happening » avant la lettre, when the Duchesse de Berry entered the water at Dieppe on August 3, 1824, surrounded by a crowd of amazed onlookers. The history of sea bathing, first therapeutic, then recreational, passing from the British aristocracy to France and trickling down from social class to social class to the common people, is now well known.
Despite the ritual and hectic rush of flip-flops to the beach, towel and parasol in hand, the Ocean – with a capital O, the term by which we designate the global ocean – remains little known.
Ever since man first took to the skies in a spaceship, we’ve been calling our Earth the blue planet. In fact, two-thirds of « earth » is covered by sea. We already knew this in theory, but we needed images to help us perceive the strangeness, beauty and uniqueness of our planet.
Has this made us more maritime? Not really. Even less so in France, with the exception of coastal regions that are still all too often considered marginal, in a centralizing country whose radiating center is somewhere between Paris and the home of the Sun King.
And yet, in addition to its geographical and political reality – France boasts three coastlines and a number of overseas departments and regions, making it the world’s second-largest maritime domain, just behind the United States and well ahead of the United Kingdom – France’s maritime reality translates into considerable economic potential and geopolitical responsibility in a world where geopolitical disruption rivals climate change.
Let’s hope that the President’s Year of the Ocean will enable the country to meet the many challenges and seize the no less numerous opportunities of a country that should live up to its maritime destiny. However, we shouldn’t think of ourselves as Neptune. Ever since the tragedy of Les Perses, we know the cost to anyone who claims to dominate the sea. In the meantime, for many of our fellow citizens, it’s « shellfish and crustaceans » on the beach.
The Ocean in Literature
Aren’t we forgetting the essential? No vacation worthy of the name without – at least – a good book. In fact, there can be no « real life » without literature, whatever the season. In fact, over the last fifteen years or so, a movement has emerged across the Atlantic that places the sea at the heart of its investigations. The « blue humanities » are working to bring the ocean out of the invisibility to which all of us landlubbers, in all countries, have relegated it. A few names stand out: Margaret Cohen, Steve Mentz, Søren Frank. There are many others. As far as authors are concerned, we cannot overlook the wealth of Caribbean literature, both English- and French-speaking, without making a mistake and being surprised that Derek Walcott’s splendid contemporary epic Omeros, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, has still not been translated and published in French.
What’s special about « Blue Humanities » is that it brings to light the functions and meanings of the Ocean in texts, even where we might not have thought to look for them. The « Blue Humanities » show us an ecopoetic ocean – we know that the ocean is our planet’s main thermal regulator – but also a fatal sea, that of the Atlantic slave trade and that of migrants today, reviving the tragic sea of the Greeks and reminding us that the Mediterranean, far from being just the Riviera or what’s left of it, is also a great cemetery.
So did we need American academics to remind us of the importance of the ocean in our lives and in our deaths? You’d have to think so. But as the sea does not hold the privilege of aquatic « currents » and thought, it might be time to summon the memory of Fernand Braudel, Gaston Bachelard, even Michelet and, closer to us in time if not in space, Glissant, or, further away in time but closer in space, Homer. Our colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic, as well as those in Northern Europe, have done so with talent, Søren Frank reminding us of the Viking contribution to navigation and literary inspiration, a Scandinavian margin that is sometimes overlooked.
One of the advantages of the ocean, apart from the fact that it offers an infinite reservoir of aesthetic emotions, is that it frees us from the question of a center, because it doesn’t have one, at least geographically speaking. Geopolitics is a different matter, and the territorialization of the sea, the existence of exclusive economic zones and naval rearmament all over the world are there to remind us of the harsh realities of a man’s world, and to encourage us to be vigilant.
Science and humanities meet
An international community of researchers is forming around the Ocean. It would even seem that this community can envisage Michel Serres’ beloved North-West Passage: the meeting of sciences and humanities. Oceanographers, historians, philosophers, artists and literary scholars from all horizons are discovering the fruitfulness of exchanging points of view, each with the methods of his or her discipline, or, within a discipline, with the inflections that are specific to it.
In the humanities, social sciences and arts, this year saw the following events in France: the seminar on Arctic literature co-organized by the Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV and the EPHE, a colloquium « Une histoire de l’art bleue. Création artistique, biodiversité et environnement océanique (XIXᵉ-XXIᵉ siècle) », at the MUCEM and the Endoume marine station, followed by another colloquium organized by the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE): « Sea more blue : approches écopoétiques et interdisciplinaires des mers et des océans ». At the École normale supérieure, the seminar on « Philosophie de l’Océan », co-organized by the Institut Jean Nicod and EHESS, completed its second year, while the thalassopoetics seminar was created as part of the Centre de Recherches sur les Relations entre Littérature, Philosophie et Morale, within the République des savoirs (USR 3608 ENS, CNRS, Collège de France).
So whether the sea is blue – the color that has recently come to the fore – or the color of wine, as in the Odyssey, there’s no doubt that it holds in store for the researchers who devote themselves to it a vast palette of discoveries and a whole range of possible relationships to our world.
Source: The Conversation
