Panel: The Great Beyonds
Copanelists: Micha Gerritt Philipp Edlich and Tino Ramirez
My paper engages with an as-yet barely visible component of lifewritings: underwater lifewritings. Should I call it a “field”? No! My paper explores the difficulties of “translating” aquanautic experience to people on dry land who have little idea of underwater existences. Among its communities I include divers, who have their own sign language; scientists, who describe their encounters with marine life-forms through autobiographies of adventure; photographers and filmmakers, who deploy innovative visual languages for “the deep,” accompanied by often conservative discourses; and poets, who use the double focus properties of metaphor to “translate” human concerns into a marine world and vice-versa. Each community makes its own “translations” of the underwater world. That world is so strange and rare that even when visual translations make us familiar with some of it, much remains that is difficult to translate. Lifewritings provide a helpful medium, because we understand the genre does established work in “translating” one person’s experience into a form accessible to others. Hence there are memoirs of marine experiences, where encounters with sea-life change people, and where lifewriting about those experiences changes people again. Marine biologists, adventurers, and photographers become writers; scientists become poets; humans become philosophers; readers become witnesses. Moreover, gender may be temporarily suspended or doubly returned. Recreational diving is a sport enjoyed by women and men, for instance, yet underwater lifewritings represent women patchily.
My paper outlines some principal characteristics of subaqua lifewritings, with reference to texts by Jacques Cousteau, Philippe Diole, Hans Hass, Cynthia Lee Van Dover, and others. Not many people know of this world, and yet, as one memoir proclaims, “We Come from the Sea.” In the context of recent environmental developments, moreover, this literature is necessarily involved with politics. Can we afford to ignore the sea? Have we outfished it forever? If so, marine lifewritings will be acting as elegies, for species and environments we left it too late to translate.
* My title alludes to the spectacular communication system of cuttlefish, who flash messages through chromatophores, iridiophores, leucophores, or special pigment cells—subtle, complex, and completely baffling to humans.
Dr Clare Brant is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at King’s College London, where she is also deputy director of the Lifewritings Centre. She is the author of a major study of letter writing in the eighteenth century, Eighteenth-century Letters and British Culture (Palgrave, 2006), has edited John Gay’s Trivia (1716), and co-edited three essay collections, and is the author of numerous articles on literature, culture, and gender. She is also a diver and enthusiast about all forms of marine life.