In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

170 ARRAYS
by touching the sea bottom can the unreal world of the ocean liner
acquire an existentially stable ground: "Below me, the Kuril Trench. No
fear of running aground tonight: the sea is nine kilometers deep" (29).
Any movement along this vertical axis is lethal. Writing a feature on
deep-sea fishing, the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch is moved to metaphysical
reflection upon seeing a shark that has been brought to the surface
in the nets of a trawler: "We slit the animal open. Its liver filled the largest
bucket. In its stomach was a jumble of flounder, cod, sole, and fish from
distant places, some half-digested and some completely intact. A mass of
eggs, the largest ones the size of chicken eggs, the smallest ones barely
visible, filled the ovaries. In two bags lay unborn young, around fourteen
days before their birth. Had we come here to prevent them from living?"
(Kisch, 12). This question concerning the rights and obligations of man
as master over a fully explored-and fully exploited-planet is crucial
for a culture that is struggling to integrate its vanishing horizon of
transcendence with the sphere of immanence. If there is no God, one of
the many questions to be renegotiated is the extent to which humankind
can allow itself to dominate nature.
The depths of the ocean connote death and eternity, and thus offer a
contrast to the rapid flow of time in everyday life, with which ships can
no longer keep up. It may be this link that makes the American painter
Edward Hopper use deep-sea trawlers as a central motif in his pictures
(Levin, 176ff.). [see Immanence = Transcendence (Death)] And the association
is central to Traven's Totenschiff In the concluding scene of the
novel, Jack Gales and his companion Stanislaw are adrift in the ocean
clinging to the last remaining plank of their freighter, whose owners have
scuttled it to collect the insurance. When Stanislaw drowns himself, the
exhausted, hallucinating Gales sees this "voyage into the depths" as a
voyage into eternity, and thus as a voyage toward the redemption which
they cannot find on the surface of the earth:
He jumped. He did it. He jumped. There was no riverbank. There was
no port. There was no ship. No shore. Only the sea. Only the waves
rolling from horizon to horizon ... He made a few splashing strokes
in no particular direction. Then he raised his arms. He went down. In
deep silence. I looked at the hole through which he had slipped away.
I could see the hole for a long time. I saw it as if from a great distance
... He'd signed on for a long voyage. For a very great voyage. I