- 1 The water@leeds network provides an excellent overview of some of the research taking place in this (...)
- 2 Steve Mentz was one of the first scholars to display this sort of water thinking in his work on the (...)
- 3 Mentz, p. 2.
- 4 Ian Buchanan, ‘blue humanities’ in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, 2nd Ed., Oxford, Oxford Univers (...)
- 5 Patricia Yaeger, ‘Sea Trash, Dark Pools and the Tragedy of the Commons,’ PMLA, 125, 2010, 523-45; R (...)
1Due to the pressures of climate change and the rising global population, in recent years water has increasingly been at the forefront of academic research across multiple disciplines, including the humanities.1 Within the study of literature, this preoccupation with water has often consisted of revisiting texts and reconsidering the centrality of ocean imagery within their construction.2 Such studies aim, in the words of Steve Mentz, to show that the sea is ‘at once the most meaningful and the most overlooked feature of our cultural imagination.’3 This body of scholarship is often referred to as the ‘blue humanities,’ which Ian Buchanan defines as aiming to ‘re-establis[h] a kind of poetics of the ocean, thus re-establishing a humanistic connection with it.’4 As can be seen in Buchanan’s definition, the sea as a point of connection or ‘commons’ is at the heart of much of the work done in this field.5 Given this focus on connectivity, in this article I will be arguing that the water-thinking which characterises the study of blue humanities can be applied productively within the field of comparative literature.
- 6 Katie Ritson, ‘The View from the Sea: The Power of Blue Comparative Literature,’ Humanities, 9 2020 (...)
- 7 Ritson, p. 10.
- 8 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980, p (...)
2Katie Ritson has previously proposed a ‘blue comparative literature.’6 Her work discusses how looking at places from ‘the vantage point of the sea’ allows us to envision new sites of comparison, with the ocean acting as ‘the spatial and figurative link’ between them.7 For Ritson, then, the sea is a third impartial space that joins together two places, allowing us to draw comparisons between them. I would argue however, that a limitation of Ritson’s work here, and with the study of the blue humanities more generally, is that in treating the sea as a third place she is imposing borders upon it. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that ‘human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomenon discrete, just as we are: entities bound by surface.’8 In taking this bordered, anthropocentric approach to water, then, Ritson and other scholars like her overlook the flexibility and fluidity that characterise water and the implications that this quality has for narrative.
- 9 Catherine Brown, ‘What is Comparative Literature?,’ Comparative Critical Studies, 10, (2013), 67-88 (...)
3In this article, I will be extending the scope of blue humanities to consider not just the spaces that are designated as ocean but the way all water is bound together, permeating land masses such as rivers and rain and flowing through all life forms. Rather than connecting places border-to-border, water troubles borders in much the same way as does the study of a comparative or world literature, creating one large interconnected body. With Ritson, then, I will be arguing that texts which employ water imagery encourage comparative reading. However, I also wish to build on Ritson’s argument by considering how water imagery within novels can signal a wider fluidity within the text which is equally important for effective comparison. Catherine Brown argues that “[c]ertain works of literature call especially clearly for a comparative approach, through allusion to other works, or through establishing internally comparative structures.”9 I believe that textual fluidity goes some way towards demonstrating how these two forms of comparison are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that whilst reading texts for their fluid form enables internal comparisons (such as those between time frames, or settings), it also creates a kind of textual environment that encourages, and often necessitates, intertextual reading.
- 10 Daisy Johnson, Everything Under, London, Harper Collins, 2018; Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot, Plonger, Pa (...)
4In this article I will be reading Daisy Johnson’s 2018 novel Everything Under and Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot’s 2013 novel Plonger as examples of fluid texts.10 By their very titles, these two texts encourage us to dive into their narratives, directing us towards the wateriness which is so central to their construction and content. Using these novels, I hope to demonstrate how textual fluidity invites a comparative reading, encouraging us to read beyond the bounds of the text, just as water flows beyond established borders.
5There are three properties of water that are particularly applicable when considering narrative itself as a fluid medium. Firstly, there is the perpetual motion of water, since even apparently still water is always shifting at the level of its particles. Secondly, there is the shapelessness of water and its propensity to fill any vessel, delving into its cracks and imperfections. Finally, there is the connective potential of water, as it reaches beyond borders, drawing places together. Each of these properties is present in both Everything Under and Plonger, and each of them invites a specific aspect of comparative reading.
6Both Everything Under and Plonger contain multiple journeys that take place on, next to or over water. In Everything Under, Gretel, the narrator, lived most of her childhood on a canal boat with her mother. Further to this, during the course of the narrative, almost all of the main characters travel along canals and rivers on boat or by foot, either in search of something or fleeing something. Similarly, in Plonger, the narrator, César, travels from Europe to the Middle East to identify the body of his partner, Paz, which has washed up on a beach. As in Everything Under, though, several additional journeys are also described as César recalls his travels around Europe with Paz. Just as the repeated motif of the waterway system ties journeying to water for Johnson, Ono-dit-Biot’s characters travel by boat at times, and even when they do not, he notes that on their travels ‘tout menait à la plage’ [everything lead to the beach] (p. 113).
- 11 Robert Foulke, The Sea Voyage Narrative, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 26.
- 12 Foulke, p. 8.
7This association between voyaging and water is obviously not new. Robert Foulke’s book, The Sea Voyage Narrative, discusses at length the way that ‘from the Odyssey to the present, [the sea] has served as a place for quests, hunts, and tests of human endurance.’11 I am, however, less interested in the way the sea works as a ‘place’ and more in the way that it destabilizes the traditional notion of a setting. Foulke describes how ‘ashore, healthy human beings desire bodily movement and gain a sense of freedom and power through it; at sea, motion is imposed upon them.’12 Unlike in a text with a fixed setting, journeying within a text forces motion onto both the reader and the characters. Accordingly, the watery journeys in both Everything Under and Plonger are a significant marker of their wider fluidity; the shifting and unfixed setting of the novels puts movement rather than stasis at their centre.
8The journeys that flow throughout both novels, then, point towards other types of movement which are equally integral to their construction; in particular, the movements between time frames. In Everything Under, we find the following three main time frames: Gretel caring for her mother, Sarah, who has dementia; Gretel’s attempts to find Sarah by revisiting places associated with her past; and Margot’s walk along the river – during which she changes her name to Marcus – away from her family home, which inadvertently leads her to Gretel and Sarah’s canal boat. The time frames in Plonger are slightly more difficult to separate. However, they too fall loosely into the following two categories: César’s journey to find Paz’s body and the formation, and subsequent collapse, of their relationship. The texts then are constantly shifting, moving between temporal levels rather than moving chronologically through them. I will return to the plotting of the novels in more detail in the next section of this article. However, for now, I want to focus briefly on the moments in the plot that lie outside of these established time frames. Always analeptic, these supplementary narrative frames either provide background information or act as bridges between the larger frames. Significantly, in both texts, these acts of remembering are often explicitly linked to experiences with water.
- 13 Charles Forsdick, ‘“Worlds in Collision:” The Languages and Locations of World Literature’, in Ali (...)
9This is perhaps most explicit in Johnson’s text when Gretel, unable to remember what happened to Margot (whom she knew as Marcus), jumps into a swimming pool to save a little girl from drowning. Johnson describes how Gretel ‘looked under the water for what [she] had forgotten, lingering by the steps or slinking along the bottom, rising, dragging itself along the shallow end, drawing close to us’ (p. 132). She goes on to say that ‘on the way back from the swimming pool [she] remembered more and more, the trickle turning into a flood’ (p. 143). Here, through the events in the novel and Johnson’s language, we see how the movement between different time frames is being aligned with water. A similar event occurs in Plonger when César is in Venice. During a nocturnal trip throughout the city, César sees an art installation of a boy holding a frog which has been locked away for the night. The sight of this ‘a fait remonter des souvenirs que je voulais enfouis’ [resurfaced memories that I wanted to be buried] (p. 153), namely seeing the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and being taken hostage in Beirut. Although less explicit than in Johnson’s text, here too water binds the act of remembering to the memory, as César’s mind transports him from one waterlogged place to another. Indeed, in both texts the water imagery enables movement between time frames just as it enables many of the characters’ physical journeys. In his work on the French littérature-monde, Charles Forsdick argues that travelogues and travel writing acted as a precursor to world literature.13 In keeping with this, then, I suggest that the perpetual movement, both on and with water, within Everything Under and Plonger encourages us to read comparatively. The fluid spatial and temporal settings of the texts leave them unbounded, enabling us as readers to travel in various directions and encounter multiple points of connection, some of which I will return to later in this article.
10Above, I spoke briefly about the ways in which the plots of Everything Under and Plonger can be linked to the movement of water through their shifting time frames. I will now apply this style of water-thinking to a further aspect of the novels’ plots via a second property of water; it’s shapelessness and capacity to fill any and all hollow spaces.
11Both Everything Under and Plonger have central plot lines that are fixed from the beginning. Plonger opens with the discovery of Paz’s body ‘nue et morte. Sur la plage d’un pays arabe’ [naked and dead. On the beach of an Arabic country] (p. 13) and a reference to César’s son, Hector. Opening the text with these two references removes potential points of suspense from the narrative; we know what will happen to Paz when she disappears; we know that Paz will keep the baby when falls pregnant, despite her reluctance. In Everything Under this effect is also present in that Margot/Marcus’s story is a retelling of the Oedipus myth, as well as the fact that we know from the beginning of the text that Gretel has already found her mother. The way that Johnson and Ono-dit-Biot have constructed their novels presents the narrative outcome as a sort of fait accompli, a vessel that, water-like, the narrative must fill. At first look, this may seem slightly incongruous with my article’s focus on fluidity. However, this is far from the case. Indeed, revealing a fixed plot within a text can open new spaces that the fluid properties of narrative can fill in unexpected ways.
12In Everything Under, Johnson describes how Fiona, the oracle-like character who predicts that Margot (later Marcus) will murder her father and have sex with her mother, knows that things will happen before they do. She says it is ‘as if parts of her brain were hollow like sea caves and occasionally became full with knowledge that had not been there before’ (p. 170). Johnson’s statement here is not only applicable to Fiona’s second sight but can be taken as a wider signal towards the way the form of her novel works. Indeed, so effective is this image that I think it can be applied beyond the scope of her text to reconsider some of the ways we think about literary form.
- 14 See: Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trad. Benjamin Sher, Dallas, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990; Ge (...)
- 15 Jeffery Williams, Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition, Cambridge, (...)
- 16 Williams, p. 30.
13From Viktor Shklovsky onwards, we have been encouraged to think about literary fictions in terms of the distinction between ‘story’/fabula/histoire and ‘plot’/sjuzhet/récit.14 Jefferey Williams has pointed out, however, that the story or ‘“real time” of a novel has no ontological validity.’15 This is because ‘while story presents a convenient short-hand for a certain comparative value of narrative, the events of the story level do not exist outside their narrative construal and economy.’16 For Williams, ‘story’ is not a good description of the dynamic that works in fiction, because it implies that there is a reality beyond the plot which in fact does not exist.
14Johnson’s “sea caves” comparison, when applied to literary structure, goes some way to demonstrating how we can use textual fluidity to begin to solve this problem. In the “sea caves” model of narrative, we take fixed plot points to act as the solid caves or shaping structure of the novel. These are events, such as Paz’s death in Plonger or Gretel’s discovery of her mother in Everything Under, which, were they to be removed, have the potential to completely alter the narrative. They are foundational events, but, because they are situated within a changing landscape, they are not static or unchangeable as the ‘story’ illusion would seem to suggest. Instead, they are positioned on the cliff face of the narrative in the order that we encounter them in the text. The “water,” then, which rises up the cliff face and comes to fill these solid caves, is the way the text negotiates and probes these fixed plot points. The overall movement is linear – because reading is a linear process –, but within this linear motion the narrative fluidly explores its key moments, pooling in some places before others and delving into their cracks before ultimately filling them. Unlike in the traditional story/plot model which encourages us to think about the plot as something to be unravelled, or rearranged, to locate the story, the “sea caves” model shows how foundational structure and narrative negotiations must work together in order to create a cohesive form.
- 17 Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 31.
15The “sea cave” model of narrative structure that I have been advocating for here resonates well with a Sartrean take on the story/plot debate. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature, Sartre uses the terms forme, often translated as form but equally translatable as shape, and fond, which is often translated as “content” but, significantly, can also be translated as “depths.”17 The terms used by Sartre here neatly demonstrate how the fond of the novel is the events and the foundational ideas that make up the narrative. The forme, on the other hand, is the way the narrative negotiates these foundational ideas. Sartre’s terminology is evidently far clearer than the more abstract “caves” and “water” that I have been using. However, the “sea caves” analogy has the benefit of specifying one aspect of his work: namely that the fond is immersed within the forme of the novel, rather than the forme being built upon the fond.
16We see this dynamic at work very clearly in both Plonger and Everything Under, particularly through their relationship to their endings. For example, in providing the reader early on with the idea that Paz will die, Ono-dit-Biot shifts the emphasis of his text. We are no longer intrigued by if Paz will die, instead we are interested in how this death will come about. The narrative, then, must explore not just what must have happened to lead to this point, but why things may lead there. Hence, in the case of Plonger, the shifting temporal frames demonstrate Paz’s fatigue with Europe, her interest in sharks and her preoccupation with the sea. The narrative must provide us with the knowledge of all these things for her drowning to gain sense, but it does so fluidly rather than linearly, flowing between past and present and filling in gaps as and when it needs to. This effect is equally exploited by Johnson as we wonder how Margot, fleeing her parents’ home, can possibly fulfil the Oedipal prophesy Fiona has made about her. Significantly she uses Fiona once again as a mouthpiece for how this works. She states that ‘nothing she [Fiona] predicted was without consequence. Mugs she had caught before they could fall smashed in her hands hours later’ (p. 172). The endings of what Fiona predicts are, therefore, inevitable, just as the endpoint of both plots is inevitable. The only thing that can change is how the ending arrives; the flow of the text in drawing events together becomes more important than its ending.
- 18 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, Oxford, Clarendon, 1984, p. 12.
17This does not only change how the novel is constructed, however. It also has a profound effect on how we read it, and herein lies the implication of this particular branch of textual fluidity for comparative literature. In his highly influential text Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks argues that ‘plots are not simply organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal oriented and forward moving.’18 Although, strictly speaking, this remains true for Plonger and Everything Under – both texts do move steadily towards their endings – the fact that we know where the texts are heading radically changes this dynamic. The text is not only moving forwards, but also moving down and around, filling in the gaps. Thus, in addition to reading for the plot, we are also reading into and around the plot.
- 19 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 62.
- 20 See Timotheus Vermeulen’s essay for a more comprehensive exploration of the relationship between wa (...)
- 21 Barthes, p. 58.
18To make this point more clearly, we can draw upon Roland Barthes’s work in From Work to Text which describes a text, as opposed to a work, in the following terms: a text ‘decants the work (if it permits it at all) from its consumption and recuperates it as play, task, production, practice.’19 Giving us the endings of their texts near the beginning, and thereby downplaying and subverting the narrative’s forward motion, is one of the ways that Johnson and Ono-dit-Biot can be said to create ‘texts,’ rather than ‘works.’ The fluid shape of the narrative does not allow the reader to easily consume it, but rather encourages them to dive into its depths.20 In terms of the study of comparative literature, the concept of a text has great relevance, because, according to Barthes ‘the text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); it’s constitutive moment is traversal.’21 This focus, which is once again on movement rather than stasis suggests that a text desires to reach beyond a self-referential structure towards something wider and points to a comparative potential that is enabled by fluidity.
19In terms of traversal, the image that both Ono-dit-Biot and Johnson choose to close their narratives with is particularly interesting. Plonger ends with César diving into the ocean to release Paz’s ashes. Similarly, just before the close of Everything Under Margot/Marcus falls into the river and is swept out to sea by the current. These two bodies, which played an integral part in the “endings” that are implied at the beginnings of the novels, are here shown to not be fixed at their point of death. They are not buried and closed but rather left to flow in the water, moving in death beyond the confines of their prescribed roles. Indeed, both authors draw their readers’ attention to the potential for traversal in these sea-bound bodies. César describes how he will ‘répandre ton corps, ma Paz’ [spread your body, my Paz] (p. 455), and Johnson ends her text by describing how ‘a heron stands in the chug of weir as if he’s waiting for something’ (p. 263). Whilst Ono-dit-Biot’s idea of spreading a body indicates a breaking down of boundaries, Johnson’s reference to the water ‘further upstream’ serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of the water-cycle, a reminder that things carried down river may return in unexpected ways. Thus, these images of a body being swept out to sea demonstrate how the texts are attempting to move beyond their own endings. In structuring their endings like this, both authors demonstrate how the narrative structure of their texts encourages us to read beyond the ending of the text – to follow the narrative towards new sites of interaction which I will be turning to in the final section of this article.
20This call to reach beyond the ending of the plot ties into a broader aspect of their ‘traversal,’ as Barthes puts it. In this final section of my article, I will be arguing that the inherently connected quality of the water system is embodied in Johnson and Ono-dit-Biot’s fluid texts via their preoccupation with communication. Indeed, whilst a solid is stable and bordered, fluids are dynamic and reach out. Thus, communication within the texts is an act of rebellion against their own solidity, not only inviting but necessitating comparison.
21According to Barthes, ‘the logic governing the Text is not comprehensive (trying to define what the work “means”) but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, cross-references coincide with a liberation of symbolic energy.’22 In Everything Under and Plonger, particularly the latter, this ‘activity of associations’ is perhaps manifested best through their intertextuality. Plonger is a dense weave of allusions to other art works. César reads both the Iliad and the Odyssey within the narrative, even naming his son after Hector; they visit the Louvre to look at the art works held there (most notably Bernini’s Sleeping Hermaphroditus, which appears as an image in the text); even Abu Nawas, the name of the place where Paz goes missing is an allusion to the poet of the same name. In Everything Under the intertextuality is more subtle but nonetheless present. As I mentioned previously, Johnson’s novel is a retelling of the Oedipal myth. Beyond this though, Gretel and Sarah read the encyclopaedia and as an adult Gretel works as a lexicographer. Although not as overtly tied to the artistic world as those in Ono-dit-Biot’s novel, these references all serve as markers towards a broader system of reference than that contained within the text. The intertextuality of both texts therefore demonstrates how, rather than existing as concrete and immovable individual works, they are fluid, flowing through and existing as part of, a far larger interconnected system.
22This movement between systems in the texts is also manifested in their use of different languages. Once again, Johnson and Ono-dit-Biot exploit this aspect of their texts in two different ways but, in both instances, it serves to highlight the fluidity of their texts and their capacity to resist bordering. Just as Plonger reaches out to different cultures throughout its use of textual references, Ono-dit-Biot includes phrases in Spanish, English, and Arabic. All these references are subsequently translated into French, allowing their meaning to be incorporated into the novel. Thus, the bordered nature of language is broken down through translation and the multilingualism of the text.
23Whilst Plonger overcomes linguistic borders through translation, the language used in Everything Under demonstrates the arbitrary nature of borders. In the text, Gretel and Sarah’s lives on the canal boat have been so isolated from the rest of the world that they have developed their own vocabulary. When Marcus arrives at their boat, he has to try to translate the things that they say in order to understand them. Intralingual translation must take place despite the fact that none of the characters have ever left England. In weaving this translation of dialect words into her text, Johnson demonstrates how even the spaces within national and linguistic borders that we would assume to be homogenous are not stable or impermeable. Given this idea then, it is interesting that Johnson says, ‘there were more words for the sound the water made or the river in different seasons and temperature than he [Marcus] could remember’ (p. 190). In this statement, Johnson is linking Gretel and Sarah’s language to the water itself. Just as water is constantly changing and moving, language must be fluid in order to act as an adequate signifier. Like Ono-dit-Biot, then, Johnson demonstrates the importance of a fluid language, which is not bound by one specific place or time and is always reaching out for new, more appropriate meanings.
- 23 Elizabeth Purdy, Lettres sans Lecteurs: Epistolarity, Apostrophe and the Use of the Second Person i (...)
24The most striking feature of both authors’ work in terms of their desire to connect though, is their use of the second person. The narrators of both Everything Under and Plonger address their text to another character. In the case of Plonger, César is responding to ‘une provocation. Une exhortation. À écrire ce livre, pour toi, mon fils’ [a provocation, an exhortation. To write this book, for you, my son] (p. 13). In Everything Under this dynamic is reversed as Gretel retells her mother the story of ‘how, a month ago, I found you’ (p. 9). I have argued elsewhere that use of “you” in a text, ‘when used to designate an intradiegetic narratee [as in Plonger and Everything Under], automatically aligns the text with the epistolary,’ putting communication at the heart of its usage.23
- 24 Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 198 (...)
- 25 Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Pr (...)
25Through their use of the second person then, both Ono-dit-Biot and Johnson foreground the reader figure in their texts as they call out for a response. As Janet Gurkin says of the epistolary, ‘in no other genre do readers figure so prominently within the world of the narrative and in the generation of the text.’24 Although here Altman is referring to the way characters act as readers in an epistolary novel, her points have salience for the real reader of both Ono-dit-Biot and Johnson’s texts. This is in part because the narratees of both texts are largely incapable of providing their own response: César’s son is an infant; Gretel’s mother has dementia. Thus, despite the clear identification of a “reader,” the position remains to some extent open. Irene Kacandes has noted that the second person can be a particularly ambiguous pronoun. She describes how ‘individuals encountering “you” may feel a residual appellative force even where other signs indicate that they are not the designated addressee.’25 It is this appellative force which I feel is at the core of both Everything Under and Plonger and is a key component of their fluidity. Both texts use the second person fluidly, allowing it to designate a multitude of people and thus perform the act of reaching out beyond itself to its readers whilst also reaching between characters in the text. Like the siren’s call of the sea, these texts literally call to their readers, to other works and to other cultures. In doing so, they create a space which transcends conventional borders and is full of myriad points for comparison.
- 26 Ali Behad and Dominic Thomas, ‘Introduction,’ in Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (éds), The Cambridge (...)
26In their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Literature Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas point to ‘the precarious and plural nature of the discipline itself, a discipline which defines itself as an inter-disciplinary, cross-cultural, and trans-national endeavor [sic].’26 Reading texts for their fluidity enables us to understand how they too are ‘precarious’ and ‘plural,’ how they are equally ‘cross cultural’ and ‘trans-national.’ In this article I have examined some of the ways that the inherent fluidity of a text can enable comparison by destabilising notions of setting and plot and by reaching out to other works and to the reader.
27Beyond this, however, my work here has been its own exercise in ‘water-thinking.’ None of the features I have identified are particularly new; many narratives contain multiple settings and we only need look at Tristram Shandy to understand that plots have long been something of a slippery phenomenon. However, as in the case of the water-prompted shifts in time frame or Johnson’s sea caves analogy, in both of the texts that I have been considering here the water imagery used brings the fluid properties of the text itself into the foreground.
28By using water and its properties as a site for comparison, I have been able to consider Ono-dit-Biot’s French text of international travel and the dynamics of a modern couple, alongside Johnson’s comparatively claustrophobic English retelling of the Oedipus myth. Reading these texts for their fluidity and the presence of water has enabled me to bring two very different novels into conversation with one another. A fluid text, in the Barthesian sense, then throws off borders and creates a space where comparison can more easily occur. Indeed, reading texts for their fluidity allows us to view them, in the words of Phillip Larkin, as
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
- 27 Phillip Larkin, ‘Water’, in Collected Poems, London, Faber and Faber, 2003, p. 91.
Would congregate endlessly.27
