the gulf stream

Winslow Homer The Gulf Stream (1899)

I'm beginning this blog again, more than a year after its predecessor - immanent critique - fell far short of immanence with its measly four entries. Graduate school intervened like a hurricane and sent its author out to sea, but there's no need to narcissisitically reader-response my subjective experience into Homer's narratively-rich painting (although the writhing sharks serve well to symbolize several aspects of grad school).

I knew of this piece before stumbling across it recently. Lo and behold, it has taken on a whole slew of new significations in the context of my dissertation, which will explore the representation of so-called natural disasters. In regard to those portrayed in this painting, Homer said, "The boat and sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They have been blown out to sea by a hurricane...the unfortunate man who now is so dazed and parboiled, will be rescued and returned to his friends and home, and ever after live happily."

Perhaps Homer's ironic tone is in response to the offended sensibilities of a bourgeois class who only wishes to look at the world through rose-colored lenses. On the other side of this coin exist the disaffected, those dark but well-secured dopplegangers who read the painting romantically as symbolic of man's utter aloneness in the universe. Not that I disagree with the latter sentiment; more to the point, I wonder what exactly are we looking at when we see this dazed and parboiled man?

Peter Wood answers with the kind of questions I'm interested to ask in my dissertation. His book Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream considers the historical context of the painting, the world of the Black Atlantic. Seen in the socioeconomic context of slavery and colonialism, the post-storm seascape takes on significant political connotations. Although the hurricane seems to be subsiding, its residual effects, as symbolized by the choppy water, the water spout on the horizon, and the broken vessel, suggest that the tumultuous weather of the past remains with us today. Wood directs our oft ahistorical gaze to the "sugarcane stalks protruding from the boat's hold," the dialectical image that connects the signifier of the shirtless black man to the referent of plantation slavery - "capitalism with its clothes off." With gaze historically redirected, Homer's painting oscillates with ambivalence. Assuming that the "unfortunate" man is an ex-slave, is freedom for a former bondsman akin to being left to fend for oneself in a modern world more savage than ever thanks to the unfulfilled hope of Reconstruction, the failed attempt to create a new symbolic order after the Haitian Revolution, and our leaders' inability to envision proper reparation?

Many have commented on the look of defiance on the face of the paintings sole human figure. In spite of the condition he finds himself in, the unfortunate man stoically squints in the opposite direction of his ship's course. He is caught between a rock and hard place, literally. White water rushes over a coral reef behind him, and the swarm of sharks circle below. And, of course, the possibility of rescue as depicted by the barely visible ship on the horizon, offers little in the way of optimism that this story will end the way Winslow jokingly said it would.

The story, undeniably, is the story of modernity - the nightmare of imperialism and the dream of enlightenment. Paul Gilroy argues that to comprehend modernity and the double-consciousness it indelibly produces, we have to think beyond ethnicity and nationality to the diasporic space that ushered in the modern world. To capture this space, "the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation [he calls] the black Atlantic," Gilroy presents the image of the ship (4). He writes:

[Ships] refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation. As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory. It provides a different sense of where modernity might itself be thought to begin in the constitutive relationships with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious sense of western civilization. (17)

We like to believe we have severed ties with the past, but its tempests continue to torment us.