Countertextualities of the sea : reading the Mediterranean

Abstract

The positing of a direct link between sea and text seems, at first glance, counterintuitive. The sea may very well be the subject of innumerable texts, literary or otherwise, but to claim that it might itself be textual, even if counter-textual in some way, feels somewhat odd. The sea has been described as both ‘noninscriptive’ and ‘nonsignifying’ (Jue 2020: 31; Steinberg and Peters 2015: 249; Pezzani 2014: 156)–incapable of preserving any mark on its fluid surface or holding any single true meaning. If rock served as the first textual substrate for the human–the first canvas, first parchment, first palimpsest– and will, according to recent figurations of the Anthropocene, be the last to bear its mark, then the sea supposedly knows nothing of such histories. The sea appears to dissolve, dissipate, and dispel; it does not preserve or record. Viewed from afar, its smooth uninterrupted surface could be mistaken for a solid substrate, but, in the end, it is the sea’s fluidity that always seems to win out, rushing in to smooth itself over and erase any visible mark or trace of a disturbance. [extract]