Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time by Barbara Leckie (review)

Abstract

shares many of the same primary novelists as Kerr’s. Further, for a project so interested in narrative aesthetics and the push and pull between the literal and the figurative, it was surprising to find much classic narratology on metaphorics and literary structure (Culler, de Man, and Spivak, for instance) absent, aside from a brief glance at Paul Ricoeur. The result of this under-theorization is a vertiginous feeling that All at Sea, while deeply invested in adducing historical and critical context to its primary texts, omits important critical histories and theoretical models relevant to its intervention and discursive framework. Perhaps more troubling is the lack of a citational practice that incorporates the varied bodies of criticism on race and empire into the project’s discursive mainstream. All at Sea does discuss race and empire as represented subject matters in the novels under discussion, especially in the book’s excellent second chapter on Marryat, which will become a touchstone for scholars who work on the author. Further, in the last chapter’s analyses of The Voyage Out and The Waves, Kerr convincingly demonstrates that Woolf’s feminism depended on a masculinist imperial fantasy projected across the sea. The rest of the book engages with empire and postcolonial studies unevenly, and sometimes only at the level of thematization—a constraint not imposed on Kerr’s focus on oceanic aesthetics. Kerr’s ambitious literary-historical claim cited previously—where he seeks to complicate the status of “marine metaphor” and nautical aesthetics (8)—appears after a not-inaccurate but oddly incomplete treatment of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: “Sharpe’s project is in part to trace the ways in which marine metaphors both witness and conceal anti-Blackness” (7). The discontinuity between All at Sea’s deployment of figuration and Sharpe’s work encapsulates both the shortcomings of this use of “marine metaphor” and the ways that a more thoroughgoing engagement with Black studies and Caribbean studies could have added conceptual nuance to the monograph’s key ideas. The Spillers passage I began with, for instance, theorizes “figurative darkness” in a maritime context. The voluminous scholarship on the Zong massacre (not present in All at Sea)— including Sharpe’s own treatment of this historically relevant maritime event—and the long, rich history of Caribbean studies are full of theoretical and historical approaches to narrating the unnarratable and representing the indeterminate. When All at Sea is taken as a whole project, it is a disorienting experience to read a book on the novel and the sea where scholarship on empire and race are not constitutive parts of the core intervention, and where other key figures are omitted. However, scholars with interest in the maritime associations of the major authors treated here will find All at Sea a useful resource, especially given the thorough archival work done to situate the book’s analyses of the novels under discussion.