The Deep
A Companion
Summary
This companion explores the myths and legends of merfolk and sea monsters to navigate our transcultural pasts and environmental presents and explain our endless fascination with the sea. More than any other time in human history, our relationship to the oceans and the creatures of the Deep has come into focus, not just as an environment to be explored, exploited and, more recently, poisoned, but as source of both our deepest anxieties and possible futures. In 31 original essays by experts in their respective fields, the Deep is brought to life, from representations of mythological sea creatures to present-day visions of the blue environment. As our place in the world and our effects upon it become increasingly contentious, The Deep offers ways in which we might re-experience and realign ourselves to the watery world that covers the majority of the earth’s surface and become part of a shared, more ecological, future.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction (Marko Teodorski and Simon Bacon)
- Image Intervention I: Myths of the Sea and the Sky (Derek Newman-Stille)
- Part I Mythical Imaginings
- Leviathan, Mythical Creature (600 BC–present) – Biblical Myth (Brandon R. Grafius)
- The Matsya Avatar (300 AD–present) – Indian Myth (Debaditya Mukhopadhyay)
- Scales (Shahad Ameen, 2019) – Middle Eastern Myth (Manal Shalaby)
- The Great Horned Serpent (c. 1450–present) – Iroquois Myth (Amylou Ahava)
- Rusalki (Witold Pruszkowski, 1877) – Slavic Myth (Marko Teodorski)
- Tropic of the Sea (Satoshi Kon, 2013) – Modern Japanese Myth (Leila Anani)
- Part II Femininities and The Deep
- Duyung (Abdul Razak Mohaideen, 2008) – Aquatic Femininity (Philip Hayward)
- The Legend of Kópakonan (1891) – Punishing the Monstrous Feminine (Laura Sedgwick)
- The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837) – Feminine Magics (Daisy Butcher)
- #Posidaeja (Efa, 2021) – Reclaiming the Feminine (Martine Mussies)
- Underwater (William Eubank, 2020) – Feminine Self in the Male Psyche (Phil Fitzsimmons)
- Part III Masculinities and The Deep
- Aquaman Volume 1: The Trench (Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis and Joe Prado, 2011–2012) – Changing Masculinities (Carl Wilson)
- The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) – Contested Masculinities (Gerard Gibson)
- The Shadow Over Innsmouth (H. P. Lovecraft, 1936) – Recontextualising the Past (Brigid Cherry)
- Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) – Queer Affect (Kodi Maier)
- Image Intervention II: Untitled (Gemma Files)
- Part IV Identities and Difference
- Into the Drowning Deep (Mira Grant, 2017) – Mimicking Femininity (Agnieszka Kotwasińska)
- The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen, 1837) – Agency and the Feminine Body (Astrid Crosland)
- “The Mermaid” (Hanna Cormick, 2018) – Environmental Disability and Aquatic Climate Crises (Alison Sperling)
- Song of the Sea (Tomm Moore, 2014) – Disentangling Difference (Alison Patterson)
- Possession (1981) to My Octopus Teacher (2020) – Beyond Human Desire (Jon Hackett)
- Part V Human Incursions and Environmental Responses
- The Daedalus and the Great Sea Serpent (1848) – Oceanic Epistemologies (Jimmy Packham)
- The Lure [Córki dancingu] (Agnieszka Smoczyńska, 2015) – The Eco-other as Spectacle (Lauren A. Mitchell)
- The Meg (Jon Turtletaub, 2018) – Environmental Exploitation (Matt Melia)
- Into the Drowning Deep (Mira Grant, 2017) – Neo-colonialism and the Liminal (Jennifer K. Cox)
- Crawl (Alexandre Aja, 2019) – Ecological Decolonisation (Catherine Pugh)
- Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001) – Ecological Exchanges (Tom Ue)
- Image Intervention III: Becoming Merfolk (Gemma Files)
- Part VI Ecological Entanglements and Environmental Futures
- Abe Sapien (1994–present) – Ecofascism and the New World (Tom Shapira)
- Moana (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2016) – The Healing Ocean (Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.)
- Ocean Poems (David Malouf, 1976–1991) – Becoming Ocean, Becoming Self (Ruth Barratt-Peacock)
- Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) – Transgressive Reproduction (Octavia Cade)
- Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, 2014) – Envirofuturism (Justin Wigard)
- Bibliography
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Series index
Acknowledgements
To begin we would like to say a huge well done to all the contributors to the book for actually getting their essays completed under such difficult conditions that the world has thrown at us over the past few years; it has been quite a journey since the idea for the book took shape and mermaids became merfolk, and they were joined by sea monsters and so much more. We would also like to thank Laurel at Peter Lang for all her help and patience during the production and completion of this book.
Marko: I would like to thank my colleague and co-editor Simon Bacon for his patience, perseverance and truly extraordinary intellectual and work stamina needed for this collection of essays to ever see the light of day.
Simon: Many thanks to my co-editor Marko who has been incredibly easy to work with through the entire process. I also want to thank the most important person in everything I do, my amazing wife Kasia, for her unending help, patience and support and without whom none of this would get done or be worth doing. Also, our two ever-growing monsters Seba and Majki who always manage to provide some light relief and distraction no matter how stressful things get. And last but by no means least the constant support (and sernik Magdy) of Mam I Tata Bronk.
Marko Teodorski and Simon Bacon
Introduction
In an age of accelerating climate change, rising sea levels and continents of garbage clogging the oceans, it is hardly surprising that creatures of The Deep are everywhere in twenty-first-century popular culture. From creature features like Sharknado (Ferrante, 2013) to underwater kingdoms and beings such as Aquaman (Wan, 2018), sea monsters and sea-people appear in fantasy series, horror films, children’s cartoons and in the blanket ubiquity of Disney marketing for franchises such as The Little Mermaid. This is of course without mentioning the burgeoning industry of cosplay and costuming and the growing relevance of such figures in eco- and environmental messaging. Creatures and people from the sea are historically almost as old as humanity itself and, arguably, sea monsters and sea-folk are more globally popular and feature in more disparate cultural heritages than any other monster, including vampires.
In fact, this collection was born of the liminality of merfolk and their existence between worlds; human/non-human, land/sea, air/water. This makes them like “us” yet not “us” so they become points of anxiety and inquiry both in our relationship to the environment (Bacchilega and Brown 2019: xi–xii), and the nature of what it is to be human. What sea creatures, water-folk, and maybe more-so mermaids, also do is speak to sexuality and gender, both in terms of providing a queer non-human space of “possibility and radical imagination” (Sabrina Imler qtd in Braidwood 2023). But also the sexualising of the body of the Other reflecting from patriarchal cultures and their relationship to the wider environment: the exploitation of sea-brides having a direct correlation to abuses of Mother Nature. Consequently, merfolk and sea-people will feature strongly in this collection, though their connection to less explicit forms of anthropomorphism (such as water creatures and entities given human motivations and emotions) will be shown to example a similar mixing of the human and non-human – the meeting of species and “becoming” together – in relation to our environmental and sexualised relationship to The Deep.
This timely Companion will show just how widespread the belief in monstrous entities from The Deep is as well as putting them in historical and cultural context; it will highlight not only their ongoing importance both in terms of how we negotiate our own evolving sense of self in the twenty-first century but how we can reimagine our place alongside and entangled with other species and gain new insight to our fractured and broken relationship to the environment on which our future existence depends.
Environment, Context and Beginnings
The ocean covers 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface and is the habitat of 230,000 known species, though as much of it is still unexplored, the total number of species has been estimated to go up to 2,000,000. Often considered the origin of life on our planet it has equally been seen as the home of sea monsters, sea-folk and beings from beyond our world – sometimes quite literally (see The Abyss (Cameron, 1989) and Underwater (Eubank, 2020)). Almost every culture around the globe treasures a story about a legendary, possibly godly or lethal, creature from The Deep. Maritime cultures generally prefer their monsters far away from the shore, but others find them in the depths of their rivers and lakes. The idea of The Deep is as culturally specific as it is transcultural so that while ships of the Scandinavian countries have been terrorised by the colossal squid Kraken, the inland countries dreamed about river nymphs, rusalki and lake or lagoon monsters that in equal measure enticed and seduced as much as they terrorised and tantalised.
It seems that the monster’s size follows the size of its habitat, so it is natural that marine monsters come in sizes that mortal man can hardly cope with, if at all. For ancient cultures that imagined the Ocean as the vast Beyond, as the fluid matter that encircled the known, or possible, world, creatures of The Deep were also the creatures of dimensions utterly divested from their mortal existence. One of the most common motives in maritime cultures is, thus, that of Chaoskampf, depicting a battle of a hero deity with a chaos monster, often in the shape of a serpent or dragon. The Sumerian Sea serpent Lotan dies at the hands of the storm god Hadad-Ba’al; Leviathan is slain by Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible; primordial Babylonian goddess of the salt sea Tiamat perishes in the battle with Marduk; Zeus kills Typhon; Thor battles the World Serpent Jörmungandr; Indra kills the Hindu monster Vrtra; Slavic peoples to this day celebrate St George and his battle with the Dragon – originally a lake serpent. In all the examples, sea monsters signify the primordial chaos as the ultimate challenge to the world order. They are not only embodiments of culturally specific narratives and values but also of the transcultural struggle of men with unyielding, unknown and unpredictable cosmic forces of nature, life and death.
Sea creatures have plagued the Western imagination since its presumed classical roots (and before), but in the Middle Ages their role as signifiers of the unknowable became part of a historical and colonial narrative. On navigation maps, unexplored places of the ocean were populated with images of their horrific bodies (like 1539 Carta Marina, for instance), followed by signs “here be monsters.” Numerous sightings and encounters embedded them deeply into the cultural imaginarium, the pool of images and metaphors for the expression of the terror of the unknown deep, so much that today we seem incapable of imagining The Deep without them.
However, there is a group of underwater beings whose relationship to humans is different from the rest of the dwellers of The Deep. While sea serpents, giant squids and dragons are godly, theogonic and metaphysical, sea-folk tend to be of a size more easily understood by mortals. Merfolk – sirens, mermaids, mermen, rusalki, nymphs, selkies, tritons – are creatures that also inhabit the outer rim of identity, of the social and of the acceptable, but possess an extraordinary ability to change. So, sirens and mermaids – merfolk or sea-folk in general – changed radically through the history of the West, as well as throughout the world. In the pre-classical and classical times, sirens were omniscient bird-women, daughters of the dark branches of the Greek theogonic tree; they lured men by dulcet voices and let them perish at the edges of their rocky island. In the Middle Ages, they acquired tails, began feeding on men’s souls and merged with mermaids, to this day confusing readers as to the difference between the two. More so, they disturbingly blurred the differences between human and non-human: they were dangerous as they disturbed the rigid categorisation of the world where mankind stood distinct and at its pinnacle while simultaneously offering a glimpse of otherness that lived beyond the rules and restrictions of society. Water-folk, whether in rivers, lakes or the ocean, have understandably captured the imagination of nearby communities and even entire nations as they acted as a bridge between humanity and the creatures of The Deep, as well as something of a gauge of our relationship to the watery environment they come from and our level of dependence upon it.
Imagining Merfolk
Examining their history in its entirety is beyond possible, considering that merfolk span the whole history of humankind, defying the natural borders created by oceans, mountains, rivers and continents. There are no imaginary and mythical creatures more familiar to people in all corners of the world, in almost every known historical era (see Austern and Naroditskaya 2006); the Syrian goddess Atergatis was known as a “fish-goddess,” and the Babylonian Ea or Oanness was represented as part man and part fish (Waugh 1960). Merfolk, in their local versions, roam the Andes as well as Russian lakes; ningyo (human fish) are known in Japan, fishtailed Mami Wata spirits are worshipped throughout the South America and African diaspora, while mermaids are spotted combing their hair and beckoning to sailors in both northern and southern seas. And in most accounts, their beauty and voices are pervasive, the ecstasy they offer is unending: existentially unbearable and historically indestructible. And as if this geographical and historical omnipresence were not enough, merfolk assumed another unsurpassable feature: a staggering ability to change. Ancient, feathered enchantresses or medieval fishtailed whores, merfolk never cease to morph, mutate, to transcend their impossible corporeal existence, merging into one another.
The nineteenth century played a crucial part in the merfolk’s contemporary omnipresence. The “mermaid craze” began with P. T. Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid 1822 hoax (a whole little industry of these grotesquely appealing products existed in Japan, supplying the British market) (see Carrington 1957; Cook 2005), but it was Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid that immortalised them in the Western imagination. Although its versions had existed in Central and East European literature and opera (see the Rusalki chapter of this collection), only with the 1872 English translation the Anglophone audience was introduced to the loving, compassionate being we are familiar with today, a complete opposite to its species three millennia-long history. And after its twentieth-century Disneyfication, sirens and mermaids are literally everywhere. People dress up as merfolk for the iconic Coney Island Mermaid Parade (Coney Island 2022; Hayward and Milner 2018); in major European and American cities at every corner there is a Starbucks coffee shop with its two-tail mermaid shining bright.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the mermaid (merman, merfolk) as a creature and as an idea, has become a profession, immersed deeply into the fabric of consumption and capitalist desire (see Sax 2000). There is a plethora of “professional mermaids,” (Melisa 2022) mostly underwater performers and custom fishtail designers creating an industry where large amounts of money can be made (some Eric Ducharme’s custom-designed tails cost $2,759 and his customer list includes celebrities, like Lady Gaga; Tungol 2013). Similarly, professional mermaids and merman are promoted as icons of beauty, voluptuousness, sexuality and allure, their image and their bodies selling the products they advertise or rallying people around an environmental cause. Their monstrosity is erased: little girls want to be mermaids. They advertise designer shoes despite the fact that they do not have legs; their bodies are turned human, appropriated as signs referring to consumption. In the 2020s being a mermaid is a valid career choice.
However numerous in contemporary culture, merfolk are only a fragment of the (post)modern audience’s infatuation with aquatic monsters. From cinema, through comics and literature, to everyday commodities (such as the mentioned coffee mugs), water remained the inexhaustible pool of fantasies for the modern consumer. The superhero Aquaman alone spans eighty years of comics, animation and feature films, culminating in the 2018 Warner Bros’ blockbuster and its much-awaited sequel (slated for 2023), and Abe Sapien (the “amphibious man”) spawned from the Hellboy franchise in the 1990s and since starring in a comic of his own. Less contemporary manifestations equally caught the imagination of the times that created them, such as Gill-man, who was extremely popular in the 1950s, so much so that Creature of the Black Lagoon required two sequels, and numerous cameo appearances (including an episode of The Munsters (Burns, 1964–6), the motion picture The Monster Squad (Dekker 1987)) – more recently his daughter Lagoona Blue features in the hugely popular children’s series Monster High (2010–17).
Details
- Pages
- XII, 348
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781800792586
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781800792593
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781800792609
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781800792579
- DOI
- 10.3726/b18081
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (August)
- Keywords
- the ocean sea monsters environment environmental studies blue humanities
- Published
- Oxford, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, 2023. XII, 348 pp., 46 fig. col., 12 fig. b/w.
