Experiencing Aquatic Spaces

Kluwick, Ursula; Richter, Virginia (21 September 2021). Experiencing Aquatic Spaces (Unpublished). In: ESSE/Literary Studies after the Spatial Turn. Lyon (Zoom). 2.9.2021.

One of the most innovative recent interventions in spatial studies has been the shift towards aquatic spaces advocated in the Blue Humanities. Moving from territory to water demands a radical rethinking of space, and a new methodological approach. As programmatic articles (Blum, “Prospect”; Steinberg, “Of Other Seas”) insist, the ocean is not simply a metaphor (of connection, flux, infinity and so on), but an arena of social interaction as well as a fluid, voluminous body that partly eludes human experience, and hence social constructivism. The ocean is also more than a surface – as which it is experienced from ships, from the shore and via satellites – but has depth, force and a three-dimensional materiality (Steinberg and Peters, “Wet Ontologies”; Alaimo, “Violet-Black”). Recent studies emphasise the ocean’s dynamics and agency, and its quality as a socio-natural assemblage in which human labour, incommensurable objects and elemental forces are closely enmeshed (Yaeger). Conversely, rather than positing a detached human subject, these studies assert the corporeal experience of the ocean in various practices such as swimming and surfing, as well as the animality of the human body immersed in water and its continuity with the nonhuman world (Neimanis), its trans-corporeality (Alaimo). In our paper, we want to show how this new epistemology challenges the traditional binary divides between nature and culture, body and mind, humans and other biota. We also claim that our understanding of matter, space, but also culture, identity and subjectivity changes if these foundational concepts are no longer paradigmatically based on land but on the wet, fluid sea. This ‘aquatic turn’ within spatial studies enables reassessments of literary texts, as we will show in our readings of two watery classics: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Michael Ondaatje’s Cat’s Table (2011). Both novels depict their protagonists’ changing sense of self through their corporeal interactions with water, and engage with the sea as a material force that shapes human lives, as well as a three-dimensional body that is entered and in whose depths human bodies are transformed.

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