The Novel and the Sea by Margaret Cohen (review)

Margaret Cohen’s excellent and original The Novel and the Sea creatively explores the current rise in transnational studies, investigating the “traveling genre” of what she calls “sea fiction.” Sea fiction not only narrates voyages of contact and discovery that connect distant nations across the trackless sea, but as a genre it crosses borders, gaining international audiences and inspiring adaptations in new national contexts where these adaptations go on to perform revised cultural or ideological work for differing collective needs (167). Cohen thus is able to engage in a fluid form of comparative study that naturally works around the semi-visible Edge zones of national literary traditions, revealing where these edges overlap or even overflow into one another.

Modern critics have largely ignored adventure fiction, with the exception of Bakhtin, who (as Cohen notes) argues in The Dialogic Imagination that the adventure genre subjects its protagonists to a series of tests in order to make them affirm their identity—“an identity that expresses a culture’s constitutive values” (3). Cohen brilliantly shows that the major cultural value affirmed by the protagonists of sea fiction is craft, a term that encompasses experience, skill, rational intelligence, and the strength of character to remain resolute under any circumstances. Cohen identifies craft with practical reason, a value that she contrasts with instrumental reason. Craft employs a person’s experience and imagination in constructing solutions to complex and often unforeseen problems; it’s an ennobled, fulfilling model for depicting work. Cohen rereads Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment to depict Odysseus the mariner as a practitioner of craft, closely linked to his metis, or cunning, even as she sees him as at the edge of the rise of bourgeois abstraction of labor, the repetitive rationalized work that takes no imagination and that makes a dull, disenchanted object of worker and work alike, turning the natural world itself into just another object to be made productive. Cohen explores the notion of craft not just philosophically but also literarily, demonstrating how this value is meticulously constructed in a range of texts from Cook’s diaries to fiction by Daniel Defoe, James Fenimore Cooper, Captain Frederick Marryat, Eugène Sue, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, and Joseph Conrad, among others. Cohen shows the tight relationship between the craft of the seaman and literary craft, a relationship that dates back to the formation of the novel as a genre and a bravura argument that alone is worth the price of admission.

By taking seriously the genre of sea fiction, and by tracing its development in the margins of British, French, and American literary production, Cohen’s book performs the two perpendicular movements that Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao suggested in a 2008 PMLA article as characteristic of the “New Modernist Studies”: a “spatial” expansion away from national traditions of literature toward the conceptualization of new transnational spaces, and a “vertical” expansion away from modernist hierarchies of taste towards popular culture, works by marginalized groups, and more ephemerally disseminated types of literary works. This makes her work a good model for understanding and developing the methods of a rapidly changing field. Given her subject, it is at times puzzling that Cohen does not commit even more to the comparative nature of maritime literature. She focuses on British, American, and French literature, bracketing the literary output of other major sea powers. While she does discuss the great sea-faring epics of the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, the highly literary diaries of Christopher Columbus are never mentioned (unlike Captain Cook’s). Strictly speaking, they fall outside Cohen’s own definition of the scope of her project, but the treatment of major maritime authors outside the Anglo-French tradition, such as the German novelist Wilhelm Raabe, or an important precursor such as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th Century Pirates, often called Latin American’s first novel, would certainly be a worthy discussion.

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