"There shall be no more sea"

I think the approach to Dred as a whole is going to concentrate on two things: the space of the swamp as an interstitial place caught between land and sea, and Dred as a figure where both past and present insurrectionist figures. Stowe ties Dred to the marshy areas of the south, the coast and the sea in this really amazing moment towards the end of the novel when Clayton finally speaks to Dred.

"The Lord bade me go from the habitations of men, and to seek out the desolate places of the sea, and dwell in the wreck of a ship that was forsaken for a sign of desolation unto this people. So, I went and dwelt there, and the Lord called me Amraphal, because hidden things of judgment were made known to me. And the Lord showed unto me that even as a ship which is forsaken of the waters wherein all flesh have died so shall it be with the nation of the oppressor...Every day is full of labor, but the labor goeth back again into the seas. So that travail of all generations hath gone back, till the desire of all nations shall come, and He shall come with burning and with judgment, and with great shakings; but in the end thereof shall be peace. Wherefore, it is written that in the new heavens and the new earth there shall be no more sea."

Places like the hulk of the ship, the Everglades, and the shore provide the spiritual surrounds for one "destitute of the light of philosophy." In the quote above Dred cites the shipwreck both in terms of the past and the present, the past being the legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade-- the "a sign of desolation unto this people"--, and the present, probably both the dependence of the US economy on transatlantic trade of cotton, and the prevalence of Ship of State metaphors within debates between abolitionists and pro-slavery groups. The ship, an emblem of the initial site of bondage, is now the nation on the course for wreckage.

"There shall be no more sea," is taken from Revelation 21.1, but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Stowe also uses the sea to talk about slavery's persistent hold on the South. The empty hulks of the ships are specters of the past and warnings about the future. The shore and the swamp are transitory spaces where the boundaries between land and water are blurred and changeable. On the one hand there's the threat of being mired down and stuck. On the the other hand, the swamps are places of refuge. Dred, in being tied to those places also brings past and present together, in the invocations of Vesey, Turner, and the fainter echo of Brown, and the references to Toussaint( I need to look at Southerne's Oroonoko again to see if there are is anything useful there in Oroonoko's language).

Of course finding moments like these always reminds me of the overwhelming problem of this dissertation which is how to define a maritime imaginary. When I was first telling people about this project, several people immediately asked about Lacan's Imaginary. I've been resisting using Lacan because, for one, it's Lacan, and for another, I'm suspicious of letting a single theoretical application lead my work. I tend to work best when I'm working mostly from the primary material. But I've noticed some of my major keywords--fragmentation, subjectivity. and, to a certain extent, my concept of negative doppelgangers--are taking bits and pieces from Lacan. Today, I detoured into some introductory reading on the basics of the Mirror Stage thinking it might clarify things. I have a feeling I'll end up doing what I usually do. "I take my concept from Lacan's Imaginary in part by using X, Y, and Z. Where I depart is...."

Tomorrow I might start with a few close reading exercises using Lacan and see where it goes.

Dred cont'd

Eureka quote of the day: 

There is always something awful in the voice of the multitude. It would seem that if the breath that a crowd breathed out together, in moments of enthusiasm, carried with it a portion of the dread and mystery of their own immortal natures. The whole area before the pulpit, and in the distant aisles of the forest, became one vast surging sea of sound, as negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slave-hunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen, alike joined in the pulses of that mighty song. A flood of electrical excitement seemed to rise with it, as, with a voice of many waters the rude chant went on...(Stowe 322-323)

I really like this idea of the collective voice of the people transforming into a sea, the dark side of democracy being this enthusiasm potentially capsizing the ship of state a la Heimert. The potential of connections between these disparate groups is undermined by this enthusiasm. The shared experience eradicates differences but not in the way that would open them up veiwing commonalities. Instead all we have is this "rude chant," this blind surrender to their noise and no knowledge that their noise is just noise. 

This also highlights a problem I keep running into with this project in that sometimes the maritime imaginary is about sailor and slave narratives, sometimes it's about the space of the ship, and sometimes it's about the sea and I either need to deal with each part distinctly or push the others aside and concentrate on one. 

The more I read the more I'm thinking that this chapter should focus mainly on Dred and talk about "The Heroic Slave" and Blake less centrally which doesn't make total sense considering that Dred is the one work that doesn't deal directly with insurrection at sea. However it is a good way to test my theory that texts aren't about transatlantic slave trade nevertheless contain within them an awareness of the Middle Passage. I first thought about doing this with Uncle Tom's Cabin and talking about Tom's trip down the Mississippi as operating as an inland Middle Passage. And with Dred the constant movement of slaves, the awareness of always being in danger of sold away speak to the way in which that inter-state slave trade is forever connected to the Middle Passage. 

Of course this might all change when I'm gathering notes for Blake and "The Heroic Slave." Hopefully I'll settle on something soon.