2007 / 14 Prospero. Rivista di Letterature Straniere, Comparatistica e Studi Culturali

In Herman Melville’s last novel, "The Confidence Man", space is completely absent: the action is set on a steamboat sailing down the Mississippi on Fools’ Day from Saint Louis to New Orleans, but ends without an explanation nearby Cairo. The scenario is never described, and this detail is more striking because space has always played a peculiar role in Melville’s work. Scholars have agreed upon the idea that Melville was trying to create a structure and a language that reflected his disillusionment towards the United States’ society, and, perhaps, the disappearance of the landscape from the narration is just another telling sign of the author’s set of mind. "The Confidence-Man" is Melville’s attempt to explore space and its meaning – that of the archetypical, symbolic core of the nation, rather than merely the geographical one. The archetypical significance of the ship and the river is what is explored in this analysis of "The Confidence-Man". Melville deconstructs space as he deconstructs the Con-Man: both are the sign of an American identity that is definitely lost, the signs of a broken confidence in American future.

The brothers Georges and Jacques, light-skinned mulattos and main characters of Dumas’s novel "Georges", have very different points of view about the impact race has on their lives. Georges is more idealistic and tries to act against racial prejudice and to defeat it by conquering the love of a white woman and by heading the slaves’ revolt in Saint-Maurice. His brother Jacques is less romantic and more pragmatic, and decides to embark on the pirate ship Calypso first, and then to take part in the slave trade. His passion for the life at sea and for sailing will lead him to die with his ship because he completely identifies with it and cannot even imagine to leave it and save his life. "Georges" has much in common with "Paul and Virginie", a sentimental novel written by Bernardin de Saint Pierre at the end of the 17th Century and equally set in Saint-Maurice: both are divided in three parts (the island, the sea and the French mainland) and both give a great importance to the symbolic value of the journey, although this symbol is quite ambiguous in Dumas. The negated utopia, the ambiguity of vessels’ roles, the distinction and the opposition between legal and clandestine ships – all this elements demonstrate that the adoption of a ‘roman marin’ is a literary choice made in order to represent the racial confrontation in an alternative way.

In Kafka’s "America", Karl, the main character, leaves his suitcase on the ship he travelled on from Europe because he feels it belongs more to the ship than to himself. The emigrant’s suitcase is the symbol of a caesura, the watershed between past and present, between a non-place like the ship and the place of Karl’s destination. The transatlantic is the quintessential backdrop for any drama, the place where destinies may cross one another in a choral setting, a place without an ‘outside’, just like the Grand Hotel, where relationships are ruled by etiquette and people arriving from different paths come close for a moment, and then part ways again. The Grand Hotel may look like an oasis, while the transatlantic as a floating island: the ship, just like the island, has been a powerful symbol from Homer down to Shakespeare and H.G. Wells because it witnesses the developments its passengers are subjected to. The essay examines the images of the Grand Hotel and the transatlantic in works by Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus, Arnold Bennett, and Pascal Bruckner, as well as the image of the ship in Fellini’s films. The recurrence of images and figures (like that of the missing man) in the oeuvres by Kafka, Baricco, and Spielberg is discussed and investigated, as it moves between quotation and plagiarism.

America is evoked as a destination in this essay which pictures a Neapolitan version of the popular perception of big steamships, as it is represented in the play "Scalo marittimo" by Raffaele Viviani. In this comedy, Viviani deals for the first time with a social, economic, and political problem: emigration. By describing the life of the Neapolitan harbour, Viviani can limit himself to a photography of it, letting this world explain and partly condemn itself. Beside the theme of emigration, on which the play is focused, the conflict between social classes is also foregrounded: on the one side, there are wealthy people going on a cruise in first class, on the other, there is the working class, forced to leave its country in order to produce riches in America. Moreover, Naples lives through another image, that of tourists who see places described to them in marvellous stories, who fall in love with the enchanted setting, rather than with the reality they are directly experiencing. What emerges is finally a clear judgement on a reality characterised by misery, on parasitic wealth, and on pernicious forms of speculation.

The English ships travelling through the Atlantic during the 17th Century were not only the necessary means for trade and colonisation, but as well a kind of umbilical cord which enabled the European colonies to receive a spiritual nutrition too, through the transfer of traditions, knowledge and institutions. This connection, however, was also unsteady because of the extent of the ocean and the perils entailed in the voyage. The ocean became then a symbol of isolation, favouring the progressive differentiation of the American culture from the European one and the consolidation of new lifestyles. Thus, the ship gained the function of a privileged place in which it was possible to sign agreements that could go beyond the laws of the mainland, an isolated microcosm protected by the world’s influence. Events of this kind are narrated by the protagonist of such an endeavour, William Bradford, who decided to write the history of Plymouth, the colony he founded. The essay investigates this work, with its intention to demonstrate how the difficulty of the Pilgrims’ voyage was then rewarded with the help of God, thus proving the sanctity of the enterprise. The analysis regards as well other examples of ‘sea-deliverance narratives’, especially those relating to the three ships which have an exceptional importance for American history: 'Speedwell', 'Mayflower' and 'Arbella'. On them, significant speeches were made, which would later become foundational images of the American myths of exceptionality and democratic citizenship.

Peter Hektorović was born in 1487 in Stari Grad on the island of Hvar, where he spent most of his life. He was born into a noble family and had the kind of life expected by a man of his station, mixing the care of his family’s wealth with the study of literature, philosophy and architecture. Hektorović was a learned man: schooled in Latin and Italian, he knew also the local Croatian vernacular and his main work "Ribanje I ribrasko prigovaranje" ("Fishing and Fishermen’s Talk") was written in 1557 during one of the most fecund periods of Croatian literature. According to Hektorović, the text is the result of a boat trip to the islands of Hvar, Brač and Šolta, together with two fishermen. Sailing and fishing were the main industries of the time in that area, and Hektorović had a genuine interest in them: his fascination with the sea brought him to describe the surroundings in great detail, to the point that modern scholars could exactly re-trace the route of his peregrinations, since the places’ names have not changed during the centuries. The essay examines the three days of the journey narrated in the text and focuses as well on the bugarštica, two of which are accompanied by their melody: it is the first musical notation of Dalmatian popular songs.

One of the first best sellers in Croatian literature has been "Korabljica" (“The Ship”) written by Andrjia Kačić Miošić in 1760. The book narrates the events that took place in the south of the Slavic territories from Jesus’ birth to contemporary times, but features no maritime narrative nor any adventurous tale. The reason for its name is due to the fact that the text contains “every kind of thing and event”, just as Noah’s Ark did. Literature uses the image of the vessel as a metaphor for riches because of the wide variety of objects it can store: Serbo-Croatian had many words to define vessels of any kind because the idea of the ship was fascinating and evocative. The representation on the stage of such an all-encompassing idea, however, was not that easy. The essay proposes the reading of three dramas written in what was once called Serbo-Croatian: "Cristobal Colon" by Miroslav Krleža, "Amerikanska jahta u splitskoj luci" by Milan Begović, and "My name is Mitar" by Vida Ognjenović. The three plays take all place (entirely or partially) on a ship and they are all characterised as a sociological study of the period in which they were written. This sociological element is here analysed.

Ahdaf Soueif is an Anglo-Egyptian writer who spends her time between London and Cairo, finding herself in what Abdul JanMohammed calls ‘border position’ because she is divided between two cultures, what Edward Said referred to as ‘contrapuntual’. The author investigates how people cope with the conflicts between tradition and modernisation, thus contributing to the topical cultural debate on Westernization. Soueif’s Aisha, protagonist of the homonymous collection of short stories, is a girl who has to follow her parents from Cairo to London, and who finds herself switching from Arab to English culture depending on her location, later discovering that this internal conflict shapes her own identity. The essay examines Soueif’s semi-autobiographical short story and the experience of Soueif’s protagonist during her trajectory from the East to the West on the ship Stratheden. Soueif is concerned with how identity can be negotiated on a cross-cultural terrain as exemplified by the ship. She explores what happens when East and West meet, when men and women are involved in a cross-cultural relationship. From a female point of view, migration intersects with many different issues, like social position, gender and even sexuality, and Soueif explores how cross-cultural relationships evolve and how different characters try to reach a balance by carving out a place for themselves. Soueif creates new identities that are “neither soft-edged amalgamation nor slavish mimicry”.

Quite differently from what we might expect, for the 16th-century Spanish subjects the most momentous event was the Reconquista and the fall of Granada, not the discovery of the New World. Surely enough the Spanish people read eagerly the adventures of the conquistadores, but there are not many literary works about the New World, while the Reconquista had much greater appeal. The essay wants to analyse one of the few texts dedicated to the theme, "La famosa comedia del Nuevo Mundo Descubierto por Cristòbal Colòn" by Lope de Vega, in order to investigate the reasons behind this conspicuous void. The main aim of Lope de Vega is to certify the ‘buen nascimiento’ of the main character and the fact that his enterprise received the blessing of the Lord, in addition to the help of the Reyes Catòlicos. At the beginning of the 16th Century, the Conquista of the New Continent did not represent the ground for adventure and for heroic and chivalric deeds, which was still to be found, instead, in the Mediterranean area and in the war against the Ottoman Empire. Apparently, in America heroic deeds were too contaminated by the gold rush to be interesting and become matter for mythology.

The essay proposes a reading of Baudelaire’s oeuvre by focussing the attention on the terms related to the voyage at sea in order to delineate their modalities, values and meanings. The analysis will include in its corpus the works "Fleurs du Mal", "Les Paradis artificiels" and especially "Le Spleen de Paris". Jean-Marie Viprey already examined the main themes of the "Fleur du Mal" and designed a kind of ‘cartography’ of the poet’s vocabulary, underlining the dynamism of Baudelaire’s lexicon. Elettra Bordino Zorzi observed how the nautical terms were associated to the soul, as it happens in "Les Sept Vieillards"’s final strophe, where the reason is unable to steer the ship of the soul, leaving it at the mercy of the waves in the middle of the raging sea. The essay investigates the vocabulary and the recurrent theme of the sea, which gives rhythm to the oeuvre of Baudelaire.

Eliza Fay (1756-1816) and Maria Graham (1785-1842) authored travel narratives and journals of their journeys to India in a time when the British Empire was undergoing important political and economic changes: they were not travelling for their cultural betterment, like the people undertaking the Grand Tour, but, in most cases, to join their families on the subcontinent. The essay focuses on the voyage and the ship, a place in which desires and hopes are discovered and formed. It is exactly during this physical transfer, between the far away port of the past and the still far away dock of the future, that travellers, perhaps for the first time, observe the other travellers and themselves, all participating in the same emotions. According to the writer of the essay, the 'Journals' and the letters by Maria Graham could constitute an ideal continuation not only of the innovations introduced by Fay, but also of the female dimension of the journey seen as a moment of self-exploration and self-knowledge. The two authors interiorise the experience of the sea voyage. Moreover, the quest for themselves, for a role, for a stable identity, is a quest which happens indeed while travelling, and ships, vessels, and boats gain from time to time a crucial importance for both women.

Pascal D’Angelo and Francesco Ventresca were among the many Italians who passed through Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th Century, and wrote about their experience in the autobiographies "Son of Italy" (1924) and "Personal Reminiscences" (1936). Cynthia Wong underlines that in those same years the phenomenon of ethnic autobiographies began. The ‘autobiographies of Americanisation’ were written by emigrants to reaffirm their identities while showing at the same time the struggle to reconcile the need to preserve one’s heritage with the desire to assimilate into the mainstream American culture. Both authors hail from the village of Introdacqua in Abruzzo, and both follow a linear path in their text: the life before emigration, the travel to America, and the conflict between the life the emigrants hoped for and reality. The essay examines the two narratives by following their similar approaches towards a shared history of loss, voyage, hard work, disillusionment, difficulties, but especially (and differently from other emigrants) of desire to be acknowledged in their openness towards ‘alterity’, trying, as both authors are, to acquire the new language, its poetics and culture. Both autobiographies become then the expression of a real cultural transition and of the capability of their authors to build bridges between different cultures and different versions of themselves.

The first known ship without sails is the Ark, and the absence of the sails makes it clear that it can float only because of divine intervention: Noah’s family trusted God’s commands and boarded the Ark without questioning its capacity of floating over the waters during the deluge. The second reference to this image in the Bible, albeit as an allegory, is in the tale of Moses: he was abandoned in a basket floating on the river’s waters until he was found. The basket could be seen as a little ‘sail-less boat’ and Moses’s rescue is clearly due to divine intervention. During the Middle Ages the iconography of the ‘sail-less ship’ was very popular, and it was used in prayer books and church paintings as a sign of supernatural situations. People were frequently forced to board one of such vessels as a punishment or as a death sentence. In some tales there were corpses abandoned in ‘sail-less vessels’ for various reasons. In Medieval literature, several cases of the ‘sail-less’ or ‘captain-less ship’ can be found. Various characters and ‘special’ objects (obviously with very different fates) board on such a ship: Mary Magdalene, James the Great, the Holy Face of Lucca, knights and dames from England and Catalonia, even the Holy Grail. Examples of these journeys are presented and discussed.

Fabienne Kanor’s works, "D’eaux douces" and "Humus", deal with the comparison between a past lived in faraway countries, like Martinique or the Africa of the origins, and a present in metropolitan France, and uses the themes of water, sailing, and the permanence of slavery in the collective mind to explore the effects of this displacement. Kanor was born in Martinique but raised in France, and defined herself as a ‘negropolitaine’. In her first novel, "D’eaux douces", the focus of the narration lays on the initiatory journey to France made by a young French speaking Antillean girl. The journey will help the girl in the discovery of her identity and sexuality. Slavery is a very marginal theme here, barely mentioned as a metaphor of young Frida’s present condition. The second novel, "Humus", is completely devoted to the description of the journey undertaken by the slave ship 'Le Soleil' that left Nantes in 1774 to collect slaves along the African coasts in order to deport them to the French Antilles, and the decision of a dozen slaves to throw themselves at sea to avoid a life in captivity. The essay investigates the postcolonial poetics of the two novels and focuses in particular on the isotopy of water and the image of the ship.

The article considers the theme of the ship in Chateaubriand’s "Les Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe". It includes three thematic sections: the first focuses on the poet’s great sea-voyages, the second and third foreground the many symbolic implications suggested by the 'navire'. Like a foreign country endowed with a language of its own, the ship is the object in which the intellectual and artist identifies himself, as the symbol of his existential vagrancy.

Georges Simenon did a long journey through Africa with his spouse Tigy, a voyage that took them from Marseille to Egypt, Sudan, Congo and then back home on the West African route with a cargo ship. After that, Simenon wrote a reportage, three novels and four short stories, all set in Africa, and often referred to that journey to criticise the colonial system. The first book written after the African tour was "Coup de Lune", an important literary undertaking since it harbours many of the most significant themes that Simenon will develop during his future literary career. The journey is the focus of the narration, especially as a passage from quietness to unquietness, from clarity to obscurity. The main character, Joseph Timar, travels to Africa with his head filled by exotic fantasies which later abruptly dissolve against the difficult and corrupt situation of the continent. The journey ends up in a failure on the professional and personal side, and it reveals the colonial society in all its decline. The motif of the journey on a ship is pivotal in the first of the “romans durs” by Simenon. It carries different and multiple aspects (the condemnation of the colonial system, the inflexibility of the newly arrived French man, the love for the world of 'bateliers') but concentrates especially on the need to represent human beings as victims of their own anxiety and as incapable of finding a positive answer to their uninterrupted questions on acts and events.

The essay analyses the marine metaphors of Enzensberger’s poetry. In the poems prevails the evocation of a primary and elementary relationship with nature, undisturbed by technique and civilisation. The first phase of this relationship is distinguished by an utopian character which, from the mid-Sixties, starts to be reduced by the consolidation of an argumentative line with a ‘kulturkritisch’ character centred on the images of shipwreck and death by water. During the Eighties, the initial utopian enthusiasm regains strength and the use of marine metaphors is accompanied by the evocation of a European and transnational community as an opportunity of civil regeneration.

Derek Walcott wrote that “History is sea”: sailing, as a movement, goes beyond the borders and in the postcolonial narratives the transatlantic is a powerful symbol of the transnational space. The essay wants to analyse the images of the marine world, of the ocean and especially of the ship, the transatlantic as the fundamental and chronotopic figure of the postcolonial theories, particularly in relation to the delineation of a contemporary cultural and global reality as a transnational space in which take shape political and aesthetical expressions that challenge the modern conceptions on nationality, ethnicity and on cultural authenticity. The theories on postcolonialism by Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant are here examined. Gilroy considers the ship that moves through the archipelagos as the representation of the instability and the mutability of identities that are in perpetual development, since the ship’s movement is transversal, not linear, and it crosses the “Black Atlantic”, transmitting multicultural, hybrid ideas during its journey. Édouard Glissant is the theorist of the ‘Antillanité’ as the place of choice for the crossing of different cultures in the French-speaking Caribbean, and moves from his vision of the American and Caribbean landscape towards a broader, global identity.