The sea is not only a surface, “a world theatre on which the geopolitical dramas of history are played out” (p. 9). Only in recent years, though, have we begun to chart and understand the depths of the sea. As Frits Andersen points out in the foreword to this extensive, illuminating exploration of the literary history of the sea, “the topography of Mars is still better known” than our own planet's oceans (p. 9). While technological advancements have been crucial in helping us to demystify this alien world and begin to comprehend the ocean's depths, there is a longer history of artistic and literary engagement with the sea that “can help us sense and imagine the sea as an element fundamental to all life” (p. 12). By bringing this long-standing preoccupation with the world's oceans to light, Andersen demonstrates the enduring importance of responses from the arts and humanities to how we have conceived, and how we continue to conceive, of our planet's maritime expanses, which is one of the main aims of the ever-growing field of the Blue Humanities. Wonders is divided into six sections, each of which is made up of individual chapters or essays on a particular artistic, cinematic, or literary representation of the sea. At least, the selected work for each chapter acts as a starting point, but the ensuing discussion is never rigidly focused on only one representation of the ocean. All in all, Andersen demonstrates a vast scope of knowledge as his book takes in a myriad of sources, academic, and scientific texts as well as artistic and literary, to have dealt with the seas and oceans. Furthermore, while Andersen deals with some of the classic and canonical literary representations of the sea, for example, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) and works by Hans Christian Andersen, his analysis is informed throughout by more recent artistic and academic work. This brings fresh interpretations to well-known pieces of work, while at the same time emphasizing the enduring vibrancy of artistic responses to the seas and oceans. Even with continuing technological advancement, the seas and oceans are not only the concern of scientists and oceanographers but also the concern of artists, writers, and filmmakers as well. The three chapters that make up Part I emphasize the sense of wonder that has long been attributed to the world's oceans. This discourse of wonder “has had – and continues to have – a massive influence on ideas about the oceans” (p. 36). As Andersen observes with reference to the work of Johann Reinhold Forster and Henry Davenport Northup, conceiving of oceanic depths could prove impossible, and so the sea was viewed from a “land-based” perspective, as a surface that connected the different continents. Anything of consequence occurred on land and what was under the surface of the sea was inconceivable. Andersen traces the sense of wonder that continues to pervade discourse of the oceanic depths, for example in television programs such as the BBC's Blue Planet series, to earlier depictions of the seas from the 18th and 19th centuries that emphasized the unchartered, alien nature of the oceans. While a shift can be identified in the work of Athur Mangin, in which the sea begins to be understood not only as a surface but as a three-dimensional space, “a new planetary model that counts the deep both as what is found undersea and as an element” (p. 35), Andersen nonetheless observes the enduring sense of wonder related to the sea across genres, nonfiction as well as fiction, and across history. In Part II, the focus moves more permanently to consideration of what is under the surface, beginning with a discussion of the laying of the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable in 1866 and an overview of the “telegraphic” or “cable” literature that was published in the wake of this landmark event. The subsequent analysis of Hans Christian Andersen's The Great Sea Serpent (1871) shows how the fairy tale differs from cable literature by giving the perspective of the underwater creatures as they react to the cable that they see on the ocean bed. In this way, the discourse of wonder is subverted, as the cable becomes the “alien artifact” that has invaded the creatures' seabed (p. 57). Hans Christian Andersen's work was impressed by a visit to the aquarium at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 and, indeed, Wonders show how the aquaria that were on show at the international expositions in European capitals during the 19th and 20th centuries played an important role in public perceptions of the seas and oceans, and heavily influenced artistic and literary representations. Overall, the aquarium, in all its forms, reveals itself to be a recurring and significant trope in the book. The increasing popularity of aquaria at this time, whether the elaborate, large-scale versions found at the international expositions or smaller scale versions found in the home, is attributed to the perception that they produce “an exact replica of the mysterious and unknown ocean.” Therefore, the aquarium “corresponds to the period's concept of the sublime as an experience of the indescribable and infinite” (p. 73). This fascination with the aquarium was not limited to the realm of the popular but was “also a vital undercurrent in both science and art” (p. 74). Indeed, the aquarium, seen both as something that reflects and produces esthetic appeal and as a means by which to learn of the natural world, demonstrates the interdependence of science and art when considering the seas and oceans. As already mentioned, the trope of the aquarium recurs throughout the book, as evidenced by the short entry on the aquarium at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris that begins Part III. The aquarium is “quasi-mystical in its approach to the dizzying diversity of life, framing it as abundantly visible and as the absolute opposite – impenetrably obscure and secretive” (p. 86). It is this dual quality of transparency and opacity of the aquarium that reflects our perceptions of the wider ocean, as something wondrous, alien, something we crave to, but perhaps can never, fully understand. These ideas regarding the aquarium are explored further in the ensuing chapters on another of Hans Christian Andersen's works, The Dryad (1870), and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, both Verne's original text (1870) and John E. Williamson's film adaptation (1916). In particular, the essay on Verne's text shows how the aquarium is a misleading representation of the ocean, which “cannot be represented mimetically by scaling it down for the Exposition or the aquarium” (p. 105). Indeed, the success of Verne's text does not lie in its realistic description of the sea, but in its experimentation “with the screens that the new visual devices and technologies like the aquarium use to shape our view of reality” (p. 119), an aspect of the text that is enhanced further in its film adaptation. A further crucial aspect of the aquarium is how it functions not “as a vista or window but as a mirror showing the spectator's reflection” (p. 143). This idea is explored in the analysis of The Dryad and is developed further in Part IV with reference to the 1900 Paris Exposition and to a prose poem by Jules Laforgue on the Berlin aquarium. Like Hans Christian Anderson and other artists discussed, Laforgue subverts perceptions of the aquarium, imagining the privileged ways of seeing of the underwater creatures behind the glass of the aquarium rather than focusing on the ways of seeing of the human observers. This challenging of the dichotomy between the observer and the observed is taken further in another account of the Berlin aquarium, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which depicts the “rhetorical removal of the glass barrier between internal and external.” The subsequent “liquid state” consists of delineations being “removed between species, kingdoms and elements, between water and earth, between plants and animals, and between humans and demons” (p. 157). Part V begins with a more detailed entry on the 1900 Paris Exposition, showing how the exposition reflected the fin-de-siècle art of the period, a movement that was, along with the later Surrealist movement, itself influenced by the notion of transcending barriers enabled by the motif of the aquarium. This chapter also explores in more detail an important recurring figure in the second half of the book, that of the mermaid. The Paris Exposition of 1900 featured female swimmers as mermaids in its aquarium as a spectacle “intended to titillate” (p. 177). Such performance art featuring mermaids continues in the present-day Paris Aquarium, as well as in the Den Blå Planet aquarium in Copenhagen. Beyond the common, “disneyfied” perception, though, the mermaid also represents “a curiosity, something in between, a mythical being of two worlds, a messenger between the elements” (p. 177). An example of this description can be seen in the existence of what was known as the Feejee Mermaid, to which an entire chapter is dedicated. The Feejee Mermaid was a hoax, made up of the upper body and head of a monkey and the lower body and tail of a fish, but in the 19th century, it was displayed as a “real creature that must be taken seriously by natural historians” (p. 181). The grotesque nature of the assembled skeleton was at once believable and unbelievable, due precisely because it was so far removed from the popular, mythical image of beauty of the mermaid. As such, the Feejee Mermaid added to the wider sense of wonder and “curiosity culture” in perceptions past and present of the seas and oceans. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.
John E. Lewis (Thu,) studied this question.