The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi

MARGARET COHEN Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi H UMAN OBSERVATION OF THE AQUATIC environment received a dramatic boost with the development in England of the closed- helmet diving suit, designed by the German engineer Augustus Siebe, in the 1830s.1 Siebe’s invention was in wide use by the middle of the nineteenth century, part of a history of dive innovation, which in the 1940s would yield the basis of modern SCUBA, the aqualung, still the preferred equipment for diving today. As divers immersed themselves in the new underwater frontier, they observed life and conditions that differed dramatically from conditions on land. The underwater environment proved so unusual that the people who first sought to convey its features found themselves at a loss for words. Philippe Tailliez was the first captain of the French navy’s pathbreaking team for underwater research founded in 1945 (Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches Sous-marines, known as GERS), which, among its activities, tested the aqualung co-invented by its most famous member, Jacques-Yves Cousteau. When Tailliez was asked by a fellow diver in the orbit of GERS, Philippe Diolé, to describe ‘‘how things looked at ...a depth of 30 to 45 fathoms [about 180–290 feet],’’ then at the limit of accessibility, Tailliez responded with ‘‘a doubtful expression: ‘It’s not possible. You can’t describe it.’’’2 Diolé recounts, however, that Tailliez then ‘‘changed his mind and his face brightened: ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘have you a Rimbaud?’’’Diolé ‘‘went at once to get him the book,’’ whereupon Tailliez read ‘‘The Drunken Boat,’’ ‘‘under his breath’’and ‘‘marked some lines with his nail.’’In these lines Arthur Rimbaud writes of bathing in ‘‘le poe`me / de la mer infusé d’astres et lactescent .../ abstract While documentary is generally thought to value clarity and denotation, this article examines nonfiction documentary forms wheremorepoeticpracticeshaveservedas a communicative, if not denotative, tool. Accounts of the first extended underwater observation by pioneering divers like William Beebe, Hans Hass, Philippe Tailliez, and Philippe Diolé used literary allusions and fanciful rhetoric to express the implausible conditions of this alien environment, in a practice that reached its height before the flowering of underwater color and documentary cinema in the mid-1950s. Representations 125. Winter 2014 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 103–26. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http:// www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2014.125.6.103. 103 Baisers montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteur .../Etl’éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs.’’3 ‘‘Each of these images,’’Diolé observes, ‘‘radiated by strange lights, enabled ...[Tailliez] to evoke a distant world.’’4 I start with this anecdote of a dive explorer citing Rimbaud because it shows that the distinction between denotative and figurative language can be as unstable in a documentary as it is in a literary text. Along with denotation, documentary norms across the twentieth century into the present include clarity, precision, and the presentation of objective details cordoned off from excessive emotional expression—all at the antipodes of the hallu- cinatory images of ‘‘The Drunken Boat.’’ Tailliez was not the only pioneering diver to use fantastic images to translate the underwater environment into words. Such passages recurred throughout a corpus of nonfiction books from the 1920s to the 1950s, by authors who might be called the first dive naturalists: the first to document this new planetary frontier based on extended observation at depth. These writers dove with a variety of motives: marine biology, adventure, military interests, and engineering. They included the scientist and co-inventor of the bathysphere, William Beebe; the Austrian innovator in dive photography, Hans Hass; and several divers associated with the French navy’s GERS, which also pioneered underwater photography along with SCUBA, including Diolé and Tailliez, as well as Cousteau together with Frédéric Dumas. The narratives of the first dive naturalists are works of popular science, combining descriptive reporting and episodes of danger in the style of adventure tales. Yet at moments these techniques of narration give way to passages using literary figures of speech and allusions like Tailliez’s citation of Rimbaud. This article argues that such imaginative moments are more than mere ornament and have a communicative, if not denotative, relation to the specific features of the environment when they appear. Writers drew on literary fantasy to communicate aspects of undersea geology, biology, and phenomenology that defied physical conditions on land. Emphasizing the particularities of the undersea world at issue in documentarians’ literary techniques, my case study contributes to the burgeoning field of the marine and maritime humanities, which has more frequently attended to transport across the ocean’s surface than to the human history of its depths.5 The study also aims to expand the environmental purview of materialist literary and cultural studies more generally, showing the impact on documentary protocols of an extreme planetary frontier in the early years of its explora- tion before technologies had been developed to reveal extensive vistas of the natural ocean environment in film, the reigning documentary medium of the time. 104 Representations From the 1860s until the 1920s, people plumbed the depths with practical aims, such as marine engineering, salvage, and warfare. Their activities yielded some of the first Western narratives about experience underwater based on empirical observation. In these early accounts of work beneath the sea, the marine environment was of little interest in and of itself, as divers reported primarily on their procedures and represented the environment as a dangerous obstacle to be negotiated with caution and overcome. The engineer Sir Robert Davis, a prominent figure in commercial diving in the first half of the twentieth century, provides a historical overview of the practical narratives written by British divers in Deep Diving and Submarine Operations, A Manual for Deep Sea Divers and Compressed Air Workers. Even the extraordinary tales in the section on ‘‘Divers’ Yarns and Adventures,’’ were practical in content and style.6 Divers recounted what they did, how they did it, dangers and problems, disasters and solutions. Their narratives thus followed the patterns of a long-standing tradition of writing about work at sea, which I have described in The Novel and the Sea, where the details of the environment were transmitted through the problem-solving pattern of adventure fiction.7 During the second half of the nineteenth century, working divers’ practical descriptions of the underwater realm contrasted with another kind of underwater documentation, a different technology for a glimpse of the underwater world, even if the glimpse was quite circumscribed. This technology was the modern aquarium, offering viewers the chance to contem- plate aquatic creatures alive in their element, for both scientific study and popular pleasure. The first modern public aquarium, dating to 1853, opened in London’s Regent’s Park zoo, engineered by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse. Tellingly, Gosse entitled his how-to book on aquarium- keeping published in 1854, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (by ‘‘deep,’’ Gosse meant beneath the water’s surface; the depth of the ‘‘deep’’ would sink, as new technologies enabled people to push percep- tion further below the surface).8 In The Aquarium, Gosse included ornamen- tal descriptions praising the enchanting beauty of aquatic creatures amidst engineering details and naturalist information. When Gosse discussed prawns, for example, as ‘‘particularly pleasing inhabitants of the Aquarium,’’ he provided information on different species, how to collect and identify them, as well as their habitats and habits, such as how prawns clean themselves and feed.9 Yet amidst these documentary details, Gosse used figurative, fantastic comparisons, writing for example, that ‘‘their bodies are so pellucid that a lady who was this moment looking at the Tank compared them to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid the similitude.’’10 A similar mixture of practical, naturalist, and imaginative description would thread through entire books, when people went from the contained space of the aquarium to moving about in the undersea environment. Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 105 Extended eyewitness accounts attentive to the natural features of this environment appeared in the early twentieth century. One of the first and certainly the most famous entire books devoted to dive naturalism was Wil- liam Beebe’s Beneath Tropic Seas (1928). Beebe undertook the dives described in this book while on an expedition for the New York Zoological Society’s Department of Tropical Research in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A work with information for professionals and piquant anecdotes for amateurs, Beneath Tropic Seas captivated audiences when it appeared. By 1932, five years after its initial publication, it had gone through seven printings: four in 1928, one in 1929, one in 1930, and one in 1932. In the course of Beebe’s dives off of Haiti, he observed a range of different kinds

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