In-Depth Learning

The Literature of the Sea

his is principally a story about stories about the sea.

It began when I was asked to participate in an experimental learning community consisting of an entire semester of ocean-related courses entitled "Semester at Sea." Offered to undergraduate majors in the environmental sciences, it was to be the only humanities-based course in a curriculum taught by faculty of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Not sure what I was supposed to teach, I considered whether to go the usual route of sea-lit courses and read a couple of swash-bucklers, sing a few sea chanteys, and end the course with an abridged, sanitized version of Moby Dick. But instead of merely providing a diversion for the real (scientific) business of the semester, I wanted to present a paradigm for the ways literary humanists might consider some of the problems that the students were dealing with in their science courses.

I began by raising the issue of why there is an ongoing human fascination with lore and literature of the sea, relating it to our subliminal and mythic origins, and how people formulate narratives (religious, mythic, and scientific) that satisfy our desire to reconstruct where we came from and understand what we are doing. As an example, we read a postmodern story of origins, John Barth's "Night Sea Journey," about an intellectual, existentially harried sperm cell wondering why he was chosen among the multitudes of his fellow swimmers to survive the gynecologic journey. Moving from philosophy to history, we read the Odyssey, situating the journey and its geography in terms of trade routes, commerce, and history concerned with the importance of Troy, and the relationship of the narrative to existing oceanic phenomenon, the ordering of Greek deities, and human household politics.

Next we read Shakespeare's Tempest from the perspective of water as the source of regenerative and rebirth narratives, with its attendant implications arising from Shakespeare's sources in journals concerning island colonization and colonialized native populations. Moving to the psychological properties of water in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we explored the relationship of the Congo to unbridled libidinous license, and seamanship as a model for restraining social conduct.

Moby Dick, with its religious, scientific, and economic ambiguities regarding nature and our formation of narratives in relation to the sea, constituted the central text of the course, while Middle Passage, Charles Johnson's parody of Melville's book, tied it to the slave trade and contemporary attitudes. Finally, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea investigated the sea as the arbitrator of religious, biological, ethical, and moral values.

The course was not easy, the reading demanding-its humanistic essence sometimes difficult to define-and often in contrast to the more precise methodologies and structured implications of the other courses in the program. It was not every science student's cup of tea. But if the university is not a marketplace for the exchange of ideas, if the specialization of our disciplines renders human knowledge so fragmented as to prevent communication, then the explosion of knowledge itself dictates a fragmentary, solitary existence for each of us, and the whole enterprise, to borrow a scientific idea, ultimately degenerates into unproductive entropy.