Tag Archives: ecocriticism

Water as Omnipresence and Its Influence on Othello and Coastal Sea-Wolves

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To Preface:

I am so glad to have attended the capacious discussion that was held in the Digital Humanities Center(It wholeheartedly inspired this exploration and curiosity between water in literature and evolution of the wild through water; It’s my own mini-exploration of a sliver of the Blue Humanities).

Introduction

From briefly talking about his book on Shipwrecks in Shakespearean literature, and how the “shipwreck is a visitation of supernatural power,” along with the shipwreck being a sort of condemnation of human hubris (Mentz). And water as this force of nature, both “omnipresent” as Dr. Mentz put it, in all facets of our lives. It also is a direct link to evolutionary traits within wild-life we traditionally wouldn’t associate with the sea, It really inspired me to talk about two different aspects in which water directly influences, changes, and is omnipresent among both man and animal. It is through the brief mentions of “Freud’s Oceanic-Feeling”, a space of mediation and self-reflection, along with the mention of the book The Abyss Stares Back, and mostly, focusing on its title, that it further alludes to this notion of water as a fluid space where one can deconstruct and reconfigure the self; Ernest Heminway’s The Old Man and the Sea is a good example.

Dr. Mentz also mentioned how water goes through us and comes out of us, which I wanted to further explore the ability of water to not only influence us as humans, but also the wildlife that lives and directly works in tandem and literally adapts to water: Namely, Coastal Sea Wolves. My other exploratory example would be found in the second act of William Shakespeare’s 1602 play, Othello. Namely, during the crossing of the Mediterranean Sea during a raging storm, and how this not only affects the narrative and its characters but also reflects them as well.

Water as an Inhibitor in Othello

In Act One of Othello, despite the predominant narrative of Iago’s sinister plan unfolding through the manipulation of Roderigo and Brabantio, the impending war between the Ottomans and Venetians on Cyprus is equally important. The mention of the explicit geographical vicinity in which the war is to take place is important. As they are surrounded by water whether on land(Cyprus) or on boat. It is also the sea that carries the Ottomans towards the outpost on Cyprus, and it is the only way in which this imminent threat can arrive. At the very beginning of Act Two, Scene One, we read about two soldiers observing the treacherous seas,

MONTANO. What from the cape can you discern at sea?

FIRST GENTLEMAN. Nothing at all. It is a high wrought flood;

I cannot twixt the heaven and the main

Descry a sail.(1-4)

In the next line, Montano follows up by equating the waves to mountains and how the wooden/manmade boats could withstand such a force. There’s a duality to this. On one hand, they are hoping the Ottomans are wiped out, but on the other, that their General is safe. The description of the waves, as well as the helplessness and the momentary loss of agency of our main characters, simply being demoted to passengers of a ship on thunderous waters, shows the sheer power the sea has. The characters are uncertain, anxious, and scared. It is this stripping of man’s perception of control(winning a war and gaining/defending land) that is swiftly attacked by the unstoppable force of nature. Once more, man is at the whim of nature.

And further into Act Two, Scene One we get the most direct change of the plot thus far explicitly attributed to the storm:

THIRD GENTLEMAN. News lads! Our wars are done.

The desperate tempest hath so banged the Turks

That their designment halts. A noble ship of Venice

Hath seen a grievous wreck and sufferance

On most part of their fleet. (20-25)

The war, which would have completely changed and altered the plot, is no more, and it is here that this miraculous storm has completely shifted the narrative. Not only does it get rid of what would have been a highly contestable war, but it also allows Iago’s sinister plan to truly come to fruition. And this is something that scholar Dennis Austin Britton picks up on in his journal article titled: RE-“TURNING””OTHELLO”: TRANSFORMATIVE AND RESTORATIVE ROMANCE: “The conspicuously-added shipwreck, however, is not only a miraculous solution to the Turkish fleet; it provides the occasion to transform identities. So often in the literature of the period, and always in Shakespearean drama, shipwreck dislocates individuals, either requiring or allowing for the creation of new social identities-“.(38-39)

This notion of a narrative literally allowing for the characters and the story itself to be able to transform is directly because of the storm. If it weren’t for the storm wrecking all of the Ottomans’ ships, the actual story of Othello sinking into madness via Iago would have never taken place. The water, and namely the sea, in this play is not mentioned again, nor does it play such a role in the narrative as it did at the beginning of Act two, but like Professor Mentz states, it is omnipresent. The characters are still on Cyprus which is still surrounded by water on all sides. The sea even had a hand in directly changing the narrative of the story. Water, even if for a moment, became a god-like character in this narrative and the characters of the play were all at its mercy and reflected the brutality of man and as Michael Flachmann put it in his article titled THE MORAL GEOGRAPHY OF OTHELLO: “-the tempest on sea and in Othello’s mind, the isolation of an island universe the reversion to brutish behavior…Shakespeare’s play takes us on a geographic and psychological journey into the wilderness of the human heart.”(par. 7) A striking reflection of Man and Sea.

The Vancouver Coastal Sea Wolf

Wolves have always been an animal I’ve traditionally seen limited to land, stalking prey in forests, howling at the moon, things only done on land. That being said, I recently came across an article talking about how a certain subspecies of gray wolf has evolved to fit their peculiar way of life: “Coastal wolves’ biology and ecology includes a unique diet heavily influenced by marine resources, distinct behaviours such as swimming in the open ocean between landmasses, and morphological differences to their interior conspecifics, such as darker pelage, smaller size, and distinct cranial and dental morphology. Coastal wolves are fast, powerful swimmers who often paddle miles between islands in search of food.”(Raincoast par.3)

While the evolutionary traits, adaptations, and resilience of the Gray Wolf are incredibly intriguing and a testament to the animal it is also incredibly important to know why: ‘”The Vancouver Island wolf was believed to be extirpated, or at least significantly reduced following decades of sanctioned eradication,’ Windle explains. In other words, they were nearly hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century. But starting in the 1960s, they reestablished themselves by swimming to Vancouver Island from mainland British Columbia across short channels like the Johnstone Strait or perhaps even island-hopping across the Salish Sea.” (Yogerst par. 10) Not only through hunting have the Gray Wolf population gone down(which is still legal on Vancouver Island) but also through deforestation and human expansion. Joe Yogerst continues this thought in paragraph 23 of his article titled The Secret World of Canada’s Coastal Wolves, “However, Allen says that’s not the only threat. Wolf hunting and trapping are still legal in Vancouver Island, where each hunter is allowed to take three animals per year. Habitat destruction through logging remains a concern, although less so in the past, because timber extraction is being curtailed in some old-growth forests.”

Humans directly impact and force animals to relocate and limit their space due to our consumerism and expansion as a species as well. Yet the water has once again come to the rescue and has allowed this animal, that we didn’t traditionally think as marine or marine-adjacent, top thrive. The Coastal Wolves have, over time, adapted to their new environments and figured out how to adapt to our(humans) expansion, and the sea in contrast to my last example has offered a sort of refuge for them in an ever-changing world where wildlife and naturalization is an afterthought at most.

Conclusion

The Blue Humanities discussion with Dr. Leong, Mentz, and Pressman really inspired me to explore, to some extent, the aspect of water and its direct impact on literary narratives and our wildlife. I was really intrigued by many of Dr. Mentz’s statements, and I really just had these two brewing ideas that I thought would be neat to explore through a slight eco-critical lens. But my main takeaway was really how important and interwoven water is in our lives. I’ve said it many times but the word Dr. Mentz used really stuck with me- water as ‘omnipresent’. Which is incredibly true but something I never was truly conscious or aware of. Similar to the whole thesis of our BOOKS! class I’m really starting to think through a deconstructing point of view. Realizing that many of the notions that I had of certain things like books and wolves can be and totally are different. They aren’t just confined to the definitions taught to us and retained in our minds but can adapt, evolve, and take on a whole new form.

Week 4: “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal”

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In The Book (2018), Amaranth Borsuk foregrounds the networked production histories of book media. In an example from 1153, hair follicles on a parchment page evidence the remediation of a living being into book materials (52). I have been reflecting on Borsuk’s reproduction of this parchment page in comparison to Jonathan Senchyne’s warm instances of human “traces” through book media in The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2020), which I encountered in Dr. Pressman’s Literature’s Media course in Fall 2024. Senchyne’s traces manifest moments of human interconnection, creating an empathetic bond between readers throughout time and place that situates how a book object traversed its setting. In one example, the handprint of a reader marks time from 1657 (Senchyne 15). The organism which traces its memory in Borsuk’s parchment leaves the trace of a time marked more violently: unlike the human craftsperson, the animal/s lost its life in the parchment production process. How do we read media for traces not only of life, but of death?

If its materials influence the ways that we interact with and perceive a book, the book also influences the ways that we interact with and perceive its materials: that is, our understanding of trees is influenced by our interactions with paper, and our understanding of animals is influenced by our interactions with parchment and vellum. Borsuk notes that, in first millennium CE Egypt, the cyperus papyrus plant was exploited to near-extinction in papyrus production (14). Did a similar fate befall the animals whose hides were culled for use in parchment production? How did the economy of parchment shape human-animal relationships, contextualizing the role of animals in human trade and information production?

The parchment product mediates a power organization and economy of human-animal relationships in which animal bodies are exploited, alive or dead, and in which their passage from living to dead is directed by human actors. This leads me to question how life and death are configured in “media ecologies,” and how significant death is to media production. The reeds, the animals, and the trees which compose common book media interact with eventual readers as de-autonomized bodies – traces of once-life and the conditions which created their death. The plant or animal’s body is remediated from living to dead. This exploitation interrelates with the ecological violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and their social permutations.

Considering this, Borsuk’s chapter has raised new research questions for me. How were the bodies of animals used for parchment and vellum production symbolically and culturally encoded as products of information production, economy, and “the very nature of thought itself”? (44) How were human interactions with these animals shaped by the association of living organisms with product? Further, how were the lives and animal cultures of these creatures shaped by their exploitation in the vellum and parchment trades? Did botanical and zoological adaptations occur through these contexts? This would make good material for a study of nonhuman reader networks and media ecologies, which N. Katherine Hayles gestured towards in her presentation at SDSU last semester.

These questions relate to my capstone project-in-progress, which in part historicizes scientific galvanism through a disability studies framework. The galvanic slab is a site of networked interconnection between human, nonhuman animal, and technological bodies – much, I’m now realizing, like the parchment or vellum page. We know that the information in a book can be violent – and so, I need to emphasize, can be the production of the book. The medium might be fatal. I’m now thinking about anthrodermic bibliopegy (the custom of binding books in human skin) as it relates to spectacles of capital punishment, which also featured heavily in galvanism. Borsuk’s materiality study has made me more aware of the ecocritical, ethical, and thanatological implications of the human-animal-technology circuit in disseminating information and encoding meanings through trans-species interactions with book media. The dead reed, animal, or tree is a key model in contextualizing the material production of book objects. Who died to make this object? Who killed? How does the fact of death-production influence how we interact with and present the object? Now that I’m finding some footing, I want to get serious with media studies and explore these wider effects as I handle objects in Special Collections with more attuned sensitivities.