Chapter 2 - Oceanic States

Summary

‘BLESS ALL SEAFARERS’, wrote Wyndham Lewis in BLAST (1914): ‘THEY exchange not one LAND for ANOTHER, but one ELEMENT for ANOTHER. The MORE against the LESS ABSTRACT.’ This chapter attends to the sea’s capacity to substitute the concrete for the abstract, the local for the global, in the work of canonical modernist writers. If the laying of undersea telegraph cables rendered ‘the breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves … as nothing’, for T. S. Eliot such marine nothings famously represented an aesthetic opportunity to ‘connect’, while the invention of wireless telegraphy at the turn of the twentieth century gave Virginia Woolf a sense of permanent immersion in the ‘murmur of the waves in the air’. The rise of oceanography made the formerly unknowable space of the sea seem newly present and palpable, while newly routinised maritime networks of exchange were established. At the centre of this chapter’s focus on the sea as both formal and contextual stimulus for modernist writing is the question of how far the internal schisms and collapses of modernist form attend to the pressures and demands of British global imperialism.