MARGARET COHEN

Denotation in AlienEnvironments: The UnderwaterJe Ne Sais Quoi

H U M A N O B S E R V A T I O N O F T H E A Q U A T I C environmentreceived a dramatic boost with the development in England of the closed-helmet diving suit, designed by the German engineer Augustus Siebe, in the1830s.1 Siebe’s invention was in wide use by the middle of the nineteenthcentury, part of a history of dive innovation, which in the 1940s would yieldthe basis of modern SCUBA, the aqualung, still the preferred equipment fordiving today. As divers immersed themselves in the new underwater frontier,they observed life and conditions that differed dramatically from conditionson land. The underwater environment proved so unusual that the peoplewho first sought to convey its features found themselves at a loss for words.

Philippe Tailliez was the first captain of the French navy’s pathbreakingteam for underwater research founded in 1945 (Groupe d’Etudes et deRecherches Sous-marines, known as GERS), which, among its activities,tested the aqualung co-invented by its most famous member, Jacques-YvesCousteau. When Tailliez was asked by a fellow diver in the orbit of GERS,Philippe Diole, to describe ‘‘how things looked at . . . a depth of 30 to 45fathoms [about 180–290 feet],’’ then at the limit of accessibility, Tailliezresponded with ‘‘a doubtful expression: ‘It’s not possible. You can’t describeit.’’’2 Diole recounts, however, that Tailliez then ‘‘changed his mind and hisface brightened: ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘have you a Rimbaud?’’’ Diole ‘‘went at once toget him the book,’’ whereupon Tailliez read ‘‘The Drunken Boat,’’ ‘‘under hisbreath’’ and ‘‘marked some lines with his nail.’’ In these lines Arthur Rimbaudwrites of bathing in ‘‘le poeme / de la mer infuse d’astres et lactescent . . . /

abstract While documentary is generally thought to value clarity and denotation, this articleexamines nonfiction documentary forms where more poetic practices have served asa communicative, if not denotative, tool. Accounts of the first extended underwater observation bypioneering divers like William Beebe, Hans Hass, Philippe Tailliez, and Philippe Diole used literaryallusions and fanciful rhetoric to express the implausible conditions of this alien environment, ina practice that reached its height before the flowering of underwater color and documentary cinemain the mid-1950s. Representations 125. Winter 2014 © The Regents of the University of California.ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 103–26. All rights reserved. Direct requests forpermission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2014.125.6.103. 103

Baisers montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteur . . . / Et l’eveil jaune et bleudes phosphores chanteurs.’’3 ‘‘Each of these images,’’ Diole observes, ‘‘radiatedby strange lights, enabled . . . [Tailliez] to evoke a distant world.’’4

I start with this anecdote of a dive explorer citing Rimbaud because itshows that the distinction between denotative and figurative language canbe as unstable in a documentary as it is in a literary text. Along with deno-tation, documentary norms across the twentieth century into the presentinclude clarity, precision, and the presentation of objective details cordonedoff from excessive emotional expression—all at the antipodes of the hallu-cinatory images of ‘‘The Drunken Boat.’’ Tailliez was not the only pioneer-ing diver to use fantastic images to translate the underwater environmentinto words. Such passages recurred throughout a corpus of nonfictionbooks from the 1920s to the 1950s, by authors who might be called the firstdive naturalists: the first to document this new planetary frontier basedon extended observation at depth. These writers dove with a variety ofmotives: marine biology, adventure, military interests, and engineering.They included the scientist and co-inventor of the bathysphere, WilliamBeebe; the Austrian innovator in dive photography, Hans Hass; and severaldivers associated with the French navy’s GERS, which also pioneered under-water photography along with SCUBA, including Diole and Tailliez, as wellas Cousteau together with Frederic Dumas. The narratives of the first divenaturalists are works of popular science, combining descriptive reportingand episodes of danger in the style of adventure tales. Yet at moments thesetechniques of narration give way to passages using literary figures of speechand allusions like Tailliez’s citation of Rimbaud.

This article argues that such imaginative moments are more than mereornament and have a communicative, if not denotative, relation to thespecific features of the environment when they appear. Writers drew onliterary fantasy to communicate aspects of undersea geology, biology, andphenomenology that defied physical conditions on land. Emphasizing theparticularities of the undersea world at issue in documentarians’ literarytechniques, my case study contributes to the burgeoning field of the marineand maritime humanities, which has more frequently attended to transportacross the ocean’s surface than to the human history of its depths.5 Thestudy also aims to expand the environmental purview of materialist literaryand cultural studies more generally, showing the impact on documentaryprotocols of an extreme planetary frontier in the early years of its explora-tion before technologies had been developed to reveal extensive vistas ofthe natural ocean environment in film, the reigning documentary mediumof the time.

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From the 1860s until the 1920s, people plumbed the depths with prac-tical aims, such as marine engineering, salvage, and warfare. Their activitiesyielded some of the first Western narratives about experience underwaterbased on empirical observation. In these early accounts of work beneath thesea, the marine environment was of little interest in and of itself, as diversreported primarily on their procedures and represented the environment asa dangerous obstacle to be negotiated with caution and overcome. The engi-neer Sir Robert Davis, a prominent figure in commercial diving in the firsthalf of the twentieth century, provides a historical overview of the practicalnarratives written by British divers in Deep Diving and Submarine Operations,A Manual for Deep Sea Divers and Compressed Air Workers. Even the extraordinarytales in the section on ‘‘Divers’ Yarns and Adventures,’’ were practical incontent and style.6 Divers recounted what they did, how they did it, dangersand problems, disasters and solutions. Their narratives thus followed thepatterns of a long-standing tradition of writing about work at sea, which Ihave described in The Novel and the Sea, where the details of the environmentwere transmitted through the problem-solving pattern of adventure fiction.7

During the second half of the nineteenth century, working divers’ prac-tical descriptions of the underwater realm contrasted with another kind ofunderwater documentation, a different technology for a glimpse of theunderwater world, even if the glimpse was quite circumscribed. This tech-nology was the modern aquarium, offering viewers the chance to contem-plate aquatic creatures alive in their element, for both scientific study andpopular pleasure. The first modern public aquarium, dating to 1853,opened in London’s Regent’s Park zoo, engineered by the naturalist PhilipHenry Gosse. Tellingly, Gosse entitled his how-to book on aquarium-keeping published in 1854, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of theDeep Sea (by ‘‘deep,’’ Gosse meant beneath the water’s surface; the depth ofthe ‘‘deep’’ would sink, as new technologies enabled people to push percep-tion further below the surface).8 In The Aquarium, Gosse included ornamen-tal descriptions praising the enchanting beauty of aquatic creatures amidstengineering details and naturalist information. When Gosse discussedprawns, for example, as ‘‘particularly pleasing inhabitants of the Aquarium,’’he provided information on different species, how to collect and identifythem, as well as their habitats and habits, such as how prawns clean them-selves and feed.9 Yet amidst these documentary details, Gosse used figura-tive, fantastic comparisons, writing for example, that ‘‘their bodies are sopellucid that a lady who was this moment looking at the Tank comparedthem to ghosts, and their smooth gliding movements aid the similitude.’’10

A similar mixture of practical, naturalist, and imaginative descriptionwould thread through entire books, when people went from the containedspace of the aquarium to moving about in the undersea environment.

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Extended eyewitness accounts attentive to the natural features of this envi-ronment appeared in the early twentieth century. One of the first andcertainly the most famous entire books devoted to dive naturalism was Wil-liam Beebe’s Beneath Tropic Seas (1928). Beebe undertook the divesdescribed in this book while on an expedition for the New York ZoologicalSociety’s Department of Tropical Research in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A workwith information for professionals and piquant anecdotes for amateurs,Beneath Tropic Seas captivated audiences when it appeared. By 1932, five yearsafter its initial publication, it had gone through seven printings: four in1928, one in 1929, one in 1930, and one in 1932.

In the course of Beebe’s dives off of Haiti, he observed a range ofdifferent kinds of aquatic environments, which became the subjects of chap-ters, such as the littoral, the shallow depths, the underwater world at thirtyfeet down, a coral reef, and the water at night. Throughout the chapters, heinterspersed practical details on how to dive and naturalist details about thesubmarine habitat with imagistic language and allusions to fantasy worksand genres. Here are a few examples of such rhetoric, which I will callfantasy description, in the chapter about life on an undersea coral reef,‘‘No-Man’s Land Five Fathoms Down.’’ To capture the remarkable appear-ance of the reef made of ‘‘living animals,’’ Beebe amalgamated a range ofcomparisons to terrestrial landscapes—‘‘pebbles, boulders, cliffs, fields ofheather, beds of ragweed and phlox, single plants in full bloom of chry-santhemums and forget-me-nots,’’—and also likened this alien vista to an‘‘imaginary . . . or prehistoric landscape.’’11 He drew on avant-garde art aswell, writing in the next sentence, ‘‘No change need be made in the mostweird, most ultramodern of ballets, if the architecture and designs of under-sea were copied closely; the only criticism being that of gross exaggera-tion.’’12 Avant-garde art melded with a drug trip in another expression ofthe strange life forms on the reef: ‘‘If one asks for modernist or futuristicdesigns, no opium dream can compare with a batfish or an angry octo-pus.’’13 Gothic suspense framed the narrative of one such creature, whenit appeared as ‘‘an absolutely new thing . . . something in which my years ofstudy of ocean forms of life helped me not at all.’’14 The ‘‘thing’’ appeared,‘‘floating in mid-water, oval in shape, surrounded by a band of waving fin,while hanging down in front were two strange appendages.’’15 Beebe creptafter this ‘‘apparition,’’ this ‘‘phantom,’’ this ‘‘monster,’’ ‘‘gained on it, andsaw two large eyes. Then it shifted its backward progress, swerving abouta branch of coral and, from the side, my monster became the foreshortenedbody of a great squid.’’16 While the enigma proved to be natural, the fan-tastic atmosphere persisted, although it took a more whimsical turn. Whenthe squid swam off, Beebe described it as gradually fading away, ‘‘no whitunlike Alice’s cat.’’17

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Such fantasy description contrasts with Beebe’s narrative practices topsidein Beneath Tropic Seas. On land and water’s surface, Beebe used conventionsfamiliar from centuries of travel writing, which, while they drew on literature,had nothing fantastic about them. He described the beauties of the tropics,amidst naturalist details and orientalizing cliches about native people andcustoms, such as voodoo.18 Beebe also gave practical information on handlingschooners, as well as on diving procedures. The notable exceptions to thesedescriptive practices topside are in the chapter on hummingbirds. There heused ‘‘super-superlatives’’ in ‘‘amazement at [the] vitality’’ of this bird that‘‘makes a ‘bit of flying rainbow’ a scientific truism.’’19 Beebe’s use of imagi-native language to capture the hummingbird’s ‘‘unthinkable’’ vitality is con-sistent with his use of fantasy description to communicate his unprecedentedobservations at depth.20

‘‘You had planned to tell the others all about it, but you suddenly findyourself wordless. You exclaim something bromidic which sounds likeMarvellous! Great! Wonderful! then relapse futilely into silence.’’21 ThusBeebe began his book, commenting on the failure of language amidst thecoral reefs off Haiti. ‘‘It’s not possible. You can’t describe it,’’ Tailliez firstdeclared when asked to describe a deep dive off Marseilles. When Diolerecounted his first experience diving ‘‘in a little cove near Toulon,’’ hesimilarly exclaimed, ‘‘How inadequate are all these words with which we tryto clothe a world beyond our reach.’’22 Such exclamations, accompanied byfantasy description, recall a type of rhetoric in arguably the most famousdocumentary corpus by the first European observers of radically alien envir-onments: overseas voyage narratives about navigations around the globe. InPreserving the Self in the South Seas, Jonathan Lamb identifies passages wheretravelers tried and failed to put into words the unexpected conditions,landscape, and people they encountered, supplementing this failure withfigures from semantic fields of enchantment. Lamb relates these passages tothe early modern rhetorical figure of the je ne sais quoi, a figure that occurswhen the writer or speaker expresses an intense emotional response thatchallenges the limits of descriptive language.

While the je ne sais quoi had hitherto not been linked to geographicalcontext, Lamb identifies it with a global geography at the limits of Europeanexperience.23 In Lamb’s words, descriptions in a number of the first over-seas travel accounts ‘‘are delivered as an extended and uncontrolled ‘je nesais quoi.’ They tell of paradises, monsters, outrageous sufferings, mira-cles.’’24 Lamb’s insight that the je ne sais quoi appears when observers reachthe limits of their prior knowledge of the world explains why navy divers,naturalists, and engineers would turn to fantasy images and allusions toexpress a new planetary frontier. When early modern travelers took the jene sais quoi to the limits of European geography, they drew on semantic

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fields of their time for experiences that defied reason, notably religion,romance, and mythology. The first dive naturalists’ fantasy descriptions area version of the je ne sais quoi updated to their own secular era. Instead ofmiracles and monsters, Tailliez and Beebe reference Rimbaud and LewisCarroll, gothic and fantastic narrative, opium dreams and modernist art.

In tracing the use of the je ne sais quoi in overseas voyage narratives, Lambstresses its function for early modern travel writers’ publics. The je ne sais quoiacknowledged readers’ skepticism, as the voyager was recounting ‘‘things thatshare no concession to consensual standards of probability,’’ and offered inresponse a portrayal of his or her own dramatic experience.25 Lamb’s obser-vations apply to early dive naturalists’ narratives, which plumb an environ-ment beyond the reach of all but a few fellow divers. Lamb also observes thatthe je ne sais quoi had a function for its author, giving shape to ‘‘the scarcelyexpressible intensity of sensation experienced by the single voyager . . . in thepresence of things utterly new and unparalleled.’’26 Beebe implicitly gavesuch an explanation for fantasy description in his factual appendix A toBeneath Tropic Seas, which, however, ended with comments on the ‘‘fairylikeunreality’’ of ‘‘hours and days spent at the bottom of the sea.’’27 The depths,he declared, are ‘‘an Alice’s Wonderland, where our terrestrial experiencesand terms are set at naught.’’28 Although Beebe characterized the underseaworld as setting reference to zero, the response exemplified in his writingcontrasts starkly with the ‘‘colorless writing’’ Roland Barthes identified as‘‘writing degree zero’’ in an essay from 1953.29 For Beebe, setting terrestrialexperiences and terms at naught prompted the need to improvise figurative,imaginative equivalents for a reality where colorless description came upshort.

That the aquatic perturbation of terrestrial expectations prompts fan-tasy description is already apparent in the early example from Gosse. Thenaturalist features occasioning Gosse’s ghostly similes were the prawn’sproperties revealed by the new technology of the aquarium: the way it glidedthrough the liquid atmosphere and its crystalline translucency.30 Once peo-ple descended into the depths, new knowledge about aquatic habitats andtheir denizens increased exponentially, as did observations of their extraor-dinary features defying terrestrial expectations. Thus, the coral reef lookslike nothing on earth and transgresses the division between animal andmineral, since the reef is alive. The squid looms up mysteriously foreshor-tened and gradually fades away, due to the extremely reduced visibilityunderwater. This reduced visibility occurs because water molecules areeight hundred times denser than air. The sun lights the liquid atmosphereof our planet as well, but is quickly absorbed by dense water molecules: evenin distilled water, the field of view is at most three hundred feet. While diving,Diole wrote, ‘‘visibility is not more than 15 or 20 yards, and sometimes much

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less.’’31 Unlike artificially distilled water, water in aquatic environments isfilled with particles, which further block the available light. In addition, refrac-tion on the water’s surface can limit the amount of light that penetrates thedepths. In Beebe’s imagistic language, ‘‘The very medium of water preventsany garishness, its pastel perspective compels the most exquisite harmony oftints. Filtered through its softness, the harshest, most gaudy parrotfish resolvesinto the delicacy of an old Chinese print, an age-mellowed tapestry.’’32

Recognizing that divers’ fantasy description contends with implausibleenvironmental conditions, we can foreground one context of the globalgeographies that prompted the early modern je ne sais quoi implied in Pre-serving the Self in the South Seas beyond the encounter with new landscapesand peoples. This context is an extreme environment, one that offeredunprecedented physical and perceptual experiences, surface equivalentsof the difficulty seeing through water. In new, unpublished research, Lambis excavating specifically how diseases endemic to work in the extremeenvironments of the global maritime frontier lent a fantastic cast to thetextual and visual records of their exploration. These diseases included, forexample, scurvy, which not only destroyed the body but also induced statesof melancholy and mania as well.

Because fantasy description expresses information, however figuratively,its images are not completely unrelated to their points of reference. WhenBeebe used gothic allusions to capture the appearance of bizarre creaturesin the underwater haze, for example, he echoed the literary logic of gothicconventions, where visual obscurity is the prelude to altered perception ofsome supernatural entity, whether genuinely otherworldly or a projection ofthe perceiver’s fantasy. Tailliez similarly embedded physical informationabout the experience of diving at great depth in his citation of Rimbaud.Tailliez made the information more apparent when he recounted the anec-dote in his own dive narrative, To Hidden Depths, published in 1954, threeyears after Diole’s The Undersea Adventure. Diole noted that Rimbaud’s poeticimagery was ‘‘radiated by strange lights, [which] enabled . . . [Tailliez] toevoke a distant world.’’33 In To Hidden Depths, Tailliez gave a biological iden-tity to some of these strange lights, describing bioluminescent creaturesvisible amidst the darkness at great depth. These creatures were deep sea‘‘fungosities [which] softly irradiated the gloom . . . when one moved closeenough to touch them with one’s goggles.’’34 Their bioluminescence reso-nates with the ‘‘phosphorus singers, a blue and gold alarm,’’ imagined byRimbaud in ‘‘The Drunken Boat.’’35 Tailliez also compared the colors ofdeep underwater conditions to those ‘‘man knows on dry land in the con-templation of . . . a Disney cartoon.’’36 Tailliez did not specify the cartoon,but glowing forms flit about a blue/indigo sky in the dancing fairy sequenceof Fantasia (1940).

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From Walt Disney to Arthur Rimbaud, from references to the gothic andthe fantastic to Chinese painting: no single author, genre, or semantic fieldencompassed an alien environment where previous experiences and termswere set at naught. Rather, early dive naturalists used imaginative bricolage.Diole’s The Undersea Adventure is the most philosophical and historicallyinformed among the early books of dive naturalism. In this work, Dioleexplicitly suggested the poverty of existing descriptive language to capturethe underwater frontier, and that poetry (understood in the broadest senseas imaginative and creative linguistic fabrication) could supplement lexicallack. In a chapter whose English translation is ‘‘The Poetry of the Sea’’(‘‘Sensibilite sous-marine,’’ in the original), Diole proposed that diversexploring the undersea environment in the twentieth century faced the samechallenges that ‘‘the earth’s surface set us some 10,000 years ago. When thefirst divers tried to answer the questions of the tribe, they had no words attheir disposal. They did not know what to say. And Philippe Tailliez had toenlist Rimbaud.’’37 Literary expression, for Diole, was ‘‘the least misleadinglanguage in which to conjure up conditions that are barely recognizable andwhich the mind cannot grasp.’’38 The reason that ‘‘only poetry can do justiceto human experiment and exploration’’ is because ‘‘a writer has to snatchfragments of information from the unknown and make them coherent.’’39

He predicted that ‘‘writers and poets . . . [would be] as important to its [theundersea’s] unraveling as biologists and geologists.’’40 However, Diolelamented that there were currently no poets who were divers and, hence,no single literary author was able to give a sense of this unprecedentedenvironment. Rather, divers needed to improvise images, drawing on theliterature they had to hand. Diole’s own storehouse of writers includedLautreamont, Jean Moreas, Guillaume Apollinaire, Colette, Jacques Prevert,and Paul Valery.

Early dive naturalists used imaginative bricolage throughout their writ-ings, inflected by each of their own fantasy repertoires and by reading eachother’s works as well. Along with Beebe’s, the narratives of Austrian dive-photography innovator Hans Hass were influential. In Diving To Adventure(1947), Hass recounted his earliest days of free diving during the 1930s,which took him from the French Riviera to the tropical waters off Curacao.The ‘‘coral forest’’ was for Hass, as for Beebe, an aspect of the underwaterenvironment that ‘‘did not in the least recall . . . things . . . you see on land.’’41

Particularly intriguing was the contrast between the reef’s frozen aspect andthe fact that it was alive—between the silence of the environment and thevibrant life the reef harbored. In Hass’s description, the reef appeared ‘‘stiff,motionless, and like a lunar landscape.’’ From science fiction Hass shifted tofairy tale and likened the coral forest to an ‘‘enchanted grove.’’ In this grove,‘‘fish large and small whisked hither and thither’’ ‘‘in some blissful waltz,’’

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‘‘some of them so dainty and colorful that they reminded you more ofbutterflies than of water creatures.’’ ‘‘Some of them appeared for onlya moment, then vanished. . . . Of others I never saw anything but the eyes,dancing like will-o’-the-wisps in the darkness of the wood.’’ And yet, ‘‘overthe whole bright bustle, there spread a mysterious, unearthly, Sleeping-Beauty silence.’’42

Hass used a more hallucinatory tone when he described ‘‘an enigmaticshape’’ that he could not identify and that further defied terrestrial cate-gories by existing at the edge of solid and liquid, substance and nothingness.The shape was ‘‘a large gelatinous body floating just below the surface. It wasa good five feet long and eighteen inches thick, in the shape of a spiraledcylinder. The formation was so transparent that you could see it only againstthe light. There was not the slightest sign of any organ. I tried to touch itwith my fingers, but the finger passed through almost without resistance.’’43

Hass called the creature a ‘‘living being—and what else could it be?—thathad no more reality than the teleplasm of a spirit materialization.’’44 Fromparapsychology, Hass shifted to a romantic meditation on existence whenhe continued, ‘‘Had it really lived? Was it dead now? What did life and deathmean in this case—or in any other?’’45

The imaginative bricolage found throughout fantasy description contains,often without differentiation, information on the alien environment and theexperience of the diver processing it. A vivid example of the conflation ofphenomena and phenomenology is the episode of deep diving as told in ToHidden Depths. Tailliez followed his citation from ‘‘The Drunken Boat’’ expres-sing the strange world he experienced diving at great depth, by calling itsauthor, ‘‘Rimbaud, the damned, the technician of the disorder of the senses[‘‘dereglement de tous les sens,’’ is the phrase from Rimbaud].’’46 As Tailliezdescribed his experience on a deep reef off Marseilles called Les Empereursor Les Imperiaux, he characterized deep diving as a version of Rimbaud’spoetic explorations. Deep diving induced a disorder of ‘‘sens,’’ in that word’smultiple meanings: sensory perception, cognition, and orientation.

At the depth of Les Empereurs, thirty to forty fathoms down, the diver’scognition and sensory control were impaired. Tailliez and his fellow mem-bers of GERS were the first to explain nitrogen narcosis, which resultedfrom the effect of pressure at great depth on the inert nitrogen mixed withoxygen in the diver’s air tank. Cousteau is credited with coining the phrase‘‘l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs,’’ which sets in by one hundred forty feet,depending on the physiology of the individual diver. Cousteau’s phrase isgenerally translated as ‘‘rapture of the deep,’’ although a more literal trans-lation would be ‘‘the intoxication of great depths.’’ Nitrogen narcosis couldbe fatal—Maurice Fargues, Tailliez and Cousteau’s fellow member of GERS,lost his life to it at a depth of at least three hundred ninety-seven feet.

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Tailliez’s dive to Les Empereurs ended when he conceived an ‘‘idea worthyof a deep sea drunkard,’’ singing ‘‘a doughty Marseillaise’’ through hismouthpiece, until his dive partner, Cousteau, seized him by the waist andpulled him back to the surface.

The loss of orientation, another meaning of ‘‘dereglement de tous lessens,’’ was a related consequence of such intoxication. Indeed, Tailliez quoteda line from A Season in Hell, where Rimbaud described accustoming himself to‘‘pure hallucination. I clearly saw . . . coaches on the roads of the sky . . . adrawing room at the bottom of a lake.’’ Even in much shallower waters, diversnoted that they easily become lost, floating in the murky atmosphere, lackingcues from terrestrial gravity, and without the reference point of the horizonon land. At shallower depths, as well, they noted powerful emotions thatdisturbed their habitual perception and cognition, and, thus, diving couldbe considered an embodied, technologically mediated version of Rimbaud’spoetic adventure. Such emotions, which they described with fantasy rhetoric,could occur as soon as the diver descended beneath what Diole called ‘‘a steelwave’’: ‘‘Between the air and the water a steel wave quivers. What people callthe surface is also a ceiling: a looking-glass above, watered silk below.’’47 Topass to this other side of the looking glass was terrifying. Beebe described thefeeling of first sinking down as a ‘‘realization of a nightmare dream whichends safely.’’48 Guy Gilpatric is credited as the first to use swim goggles fordiving, which he started to do while hunting underwater in the Mediterra-nean during the 1930s. In The Compleat Goggler (1938), Gilpatric’s preferredfantasy techniques were humor and anthropormophism—a memorable sec-tion, for example, recounts hunting a wily grouper that Gilpatric baptized‘‘Merou the Bonehead.’’ But Gilpatric dropped his humorous tone when hewrote of this first moment of submersion: ‘‘It wasn’t at all like flying in a planewhen you are conscious of being born by something tangible; there wasa nightmare quality to this sensation as in a dream of falling, and in thatinstant, I knew how Icarus felt when his wings melted off.’’49

Once having passed into the liquid world, divers accessed the surrealpleasures of the underwater seascape. The pleasures started with locomo-tion. ‘‘Behind the looking-glass [where] the sky is made of water,’’ Diolewrote, ‘‘the world is sweetness,’’ and ‘‘an aerial softness’’ transports the diver‘‘where he wills.’’50 Realistic description fell short of its intensity, and Diolealso quoted ‘‘a line from a poem in Valery’s Charmes: ‘‘Heureux vos corpsfondus, eaux planes et profondes!’’51 Submerged in the depths, Diole wrote,he became one of Valery’s ‘‘corps fondus,’’ melted bodies, ‘‘the lively butidealized image of myself,’’ moving ‘‘in a landscape of dazzling reflec-tions.’’52 Diole turned to Valery’s ‘‘Le Cimetiere marin’’ (‘‘The Graveyardby the Sea’’) to evoke the dream-like atmosphere: ‘‘We rove around likedivers in coloured shadows laden with watered skies.’’53 In some passages

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from the writings of the first dive naturalists, undersea experience wellabove the threshold for nitrogen narcosis provided a druglike pleasure. Inthe chapter ‘‘No-Man’s-Land Five Fathoms Down,’’ Beebe described sittingon ‘‘a cushion of soft growth upon a coral stool’’ and letting his

eye drown itself in the color all about. My attention kept going back again and againto a great font of a sponge. It was not especially striking in size nor of perfectsymmetry, nor of unusual brilliance—a greyish violet as I remember, but it wassatisfying,—a characteristic indefinite but very real, if only we will relax before thingsabout us and let unimportantness fade away.54

Not all emotions in this strange environment were pleasantly beguil-ing. Gazing down into the depths with no ground could feel overwhelm-ing, almost annihilating, like the sublime. When Beebe described ‘‘thevanishing point of distance beneath the water,’’ he marveled at ‘‘the mys-teries of the unknown deeps . . . the illusion, too subtle for color, of sub-marine visual infinity . . . not to be whelmed by man-made brushes norimprisoned on any terrestrial dimension.’’55 Romantic terror at the abysshaunted Hass as well, whom, Diole recounted, ‘‘at a moment of great pain’’‘‘recited Schiller’s Diver to himself, over and over again.’’56 Schiller’s ‘‘TheDiver’’ narrates the tragic confrontation of a heroic youth with the depths,which he first successfully sounds before they destroy him. For Diole, theplunge into the bottomless abyss of his ‘‘liquid sky’’ let him ‘‘understand atlast this fulfillment in insecurity’’ described by the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery.57

Amidst their many observations about the bizarre and alluring phenom-enology of underwater existence, these writers conveyed something ineffablycompelling about an environment that was at once unearthly and part of ourplanet. Fantasy description of this emotion emphasized the human capacityfor fantasy itself as fostered by the world beneath the sea. In concluding thefirst chapter of Beneath Tropic Seas, Beebe wrote, ‘‘Don’t die without havingborrowed, stolen, purchased or made a helmet of sorts, to glimpse for your-self this new world,’’ where you will find an ‘‘unsuspected realm of gorgeouslife and color existing with us today on the self-same planet Earth,’’ that no‘‘books, aquaria [or] glass-bottomed boats’’ can adequately convey.58 ForHass, the undersea environment was a primeval landscape from a time beforethe disenchantment of the world. A caption accompanying one of his stills ofan underwater coral forest in Diving to Adventure reads, ‘‘Landscapes whosealien magic had never been profaned by man’’ (fig. 1).59 Tailliez intimatedthis ineffable quality of underwater experience in an allusion to Baudelaire’spoem, ‘‘Correspondances.’’ In the anecdote about Les Empereurs, he men-tioned his sensitivity to ‘‘the mysterious correspondences, the profound unityof their vibrations’’ in the underwater environment.60 As throughout fantasy

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description, the figure relates to its referent. In ‘‘Correspondances,’’ Baude-laire portrays nature as a temple with ‘‘living pillars’’ that ‘‘sing the transportof the mind and the senses.’’61 Underwater formations are at once mineraland animal, living pillars; their environment has the potential to transport thediver’s mind and sense and even, in the case of nitrogen narcosis, to singa siren song, perhaps the same song as the one sung by Rimbaud’s phospho-rus singers. Tailliez, returning from this intoxication to Enlightenment rea-son, proposed that at depth there are ‘‘unknown laws governing our senses’’that perhaps one day will be unraveled by ‘‘physiologists and neurologists.’’62

In contrasting his current emotional impressions with the hope of futurerational explanation, Tailliez bears witness to the rudimentary access of sci-ence to the undersea environment at the time. Marine biologists and ocean-ographers had a keen interest in the depths, but the authors of the narrativesdiscussed in this article were opening the way for such observation, givingprecious information on the environment and its challenges while also devel-oping SCUBA, photography, and other techniques important for marinescientists to install themselves in the field. When Bruno Latour describes theprocess by which science moves from the field to the laboratory, his exampleis an interdisciplinary team of soil scientists in a forest in Brazil. Watching

figure 1. Hans Hass,‘‘Landscapes whose alien magic

had never been profaned byman.’’ Photograph. Image no. 58in Hans Hass, Diving to Adventure,trans. Barrows Mussey (New York,1951), facing p. 185. © Hans Hass

Archive, Hans-Hass-Institut furSubmarine Forschung und

Tauchtechnik.

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their work, Latour writes that he was following the ‘‘trail of a relatively poorand weak discipline that will, before my eyes, take its first steps.’’63 He doesnot, however, acknowledge the extent to which the Amazonian forest isalready mapped and available to objective recording techniques. Pioneeringdive naturalists, by contrast, were documenting not in the field, but in thewild. Their heterogeneous narratives mixing adventure, observation, andfantasy show that the prescientific state of the underwater environmentextended to its linguistic expression. In such narratives, information wastransmitted in too unstable a fashion to anchor the multistep process oftransfer from the field to the laboratory, which occurs in discourse as wellas with physical specimens, in a process Latour calls ‘‘circulating reference.’’64

One obvious drawback to fantasy description, in particular, is that itworks through connotation. As a result, both the information it containsand its veracity can be hard to decipher. Indeed, fantasy description couldeasily spin away from any connotative connection to the physical world andtestify simply to the author’s underwater credentials. The inventor of under-water cinema, J. E. Williamson, wrote a book about his remarkable careerentitled Twenty Years Under the Sea (1936). The book is full of rich practicaldetail, as well as some lively narratives of Williamson’s adventures whileshooting the first underwater films. But when it came to observations aboutthe environment itself, Williamson invited his readers on a voyage, but littlemore. Williamson was stringing together commonplaces when he wrote,‘‘Come with me under the sea. . . . We arrive in a place of enchantment nearthe outer fringe of the West Indies. Columbus, feeling blindly for land, mayhave steered over these very waters. The fairyland of the aquatic world awaitsus below.’’65 Williamson cited commonplaces when he wrote of underwaterbiology as well. Thus his gothic rhetoric for the octopus: ‘‘They are every-thing that is horrible. Dead eyes. The eyes of a corpse through which thedemon peers forth, unearthly, expressionless, yet filled with such bestialmalignancy that one’s very soul seems to shrink beneath their gaze, andcold perspiration beads the brow.’’66

Cousteau and his co-author Frederic Dumas observed the octopus in itsnative element, and had little patience for traditional representations of‘‘the villains of undersea myth,’’ to quote from their book, The Silent World(1953), published simultaneously in French and English.67 Approachingthe octopus with hesitation due to its description by Victor Hugo in Toilersof the Sea, they discovered that in fact it was a timid animal. Hugo hadportrayed death by octopus as being ‘‘drunk alive,’’ but, as Cousteau andDumas dryly observed, ‘‘After meeting a few octopi, we concluded that it wasmore likely that to be ‘drunk alive’ referred to the condition of the novelistwhen he penned the passage, than to the situation of a human meeting anoctopus.’’68 Throughout The Silent World, Cousteau and Dumas took the

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 115

stance of demystifiers, and pushed back against fantasy description. Suchresistance testifies to the pervasiveness of the practice and makes explicit theinformation that it encodes—or rather, for Cousteau and Dumas, conceals.They are yet more emphatic in the French version of the text. Coming upona shipwreck, for example, they observed ‘‘in front of us a sort of shrubtrimmed by some fanciful gardener.’’ Shifting gears, they then declared,‘‘When the ghosts have been named, the enchantment dissipates [le charmecesse].’’69 It could not be put more clearly that fantasy description wasa supplement for lexical lack.

Even Cousteau and Dumas, however, at times encountered underwaterconditions that prompted aesthetic comparisons beyond realistic descrip-tion. One such condition was the quality of underwater color. In theEnglish edition of their book, they wrote in the caption to a color photoof a reef at 22 fathoms: ‘‘The colors are as loose and rich as the palette ofPierre Bonnard.’’70 This comparison is brief compared to the fantasydescription of underwater color in the writings of other early dive natural-ists trying to put its specificity into words. This specificity starts with thecolor spectrum underwater. As Diole explained, the sun’s rays ‘‘areabsorbed but not uniformly. The red disappears after the first few yards.The yellow, the blue, and the green are wiped out one by one.’’71 But divenaturalists agreed that despite the reduced spectrum, there existed a vastvariety of colors under the sea. In Diole’s vivid image: ‘‘A glass-maker ofgenius has fused all the shades in the world into a stained window of onecolour. And he has done it so faithfully, with such care over the subtlestshades, that it is possible to find red ingredients in its deep blue and todetect yellow in its cavernous green.’’72 Beebe was explicit that he could notmatch perception of color underwater to terrestrial reference: ‘‘Striving tofix and identify remembered hues of a coral grove, I lose faith in my memorywhen, in my color book, I find them listed as Russian blue or onion-skinpink.’’73 Beebe’s inability to denote underwater hues objectively is anotherexample of how these first dive naturalists were working in a prescientificenvironment. While Latour’s soil scientists could identify the many grades ofsoil color with a tool called the pedocomparator, Beebe could only imaginethat one day he might ‘‘carry a color book in my helmet’’ and ‘‘enumerate anexact color code.’’74

Beebe wrote, ‘‘We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, ade-quately to describe the colors of under sea.’’75 In his view, ‘‘this spirit ofastonishing happenings, of exquisite magic, of ineffable, colorful mystery isthe theme of this watery world.’’76 The ‘‘ineffable, colorful mystery’’ of theunderwater environment extended from the phenomenology of color tothe rapid color changes of many underwater organisms, whether it wasBeebe’s squid ‘‘scarleting and palliding’’ with ‘‘the magic of sea things’’ or

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the startling metamorphosis of a fish he described on the coral reef.77 Thisfish, unidentified, appeared in ‘‘brilliant shining blue with three broad,vertical bands of brown.’’ Swimming slowly into its ‘‘fairy cavern,’’ a fewminutes later ‘‘the identical fish emerges clad in brilliant yellow, thicklycovered with black polka-dots.’’78

Beebe had only words to portray the dramatic metamorphoses in color-ation in Beneath Tropic Seas. Beebe included in the book both black andwhite photographs and black and white stills taken from films, such as theseascape at three fathoms by Floyd Crosby (fig. 2). He published the bookseven years before the invention of modern color film in 1935, however, andapproximately twenty-two years before the application of strobe technologyunderwater, which permitted color filming in the environment’s low-lightconditions.79 In the case of underwater color, that is to say, Beebe’s exten-sive fantasy descriptions supplement for technological as well as lexical lack.Their vivid figures might be considered a kind of underwater color film‘‘before the apparatus,’’ to reprise a concept developed by Vanessa Schwartzin her ‘‘Cinematic Spectatorship Before the Apparatus.’’80

figure 2. Floyd Crosby, ‘‘Coral Reef, Three Fathoms Down, Showing Corals andGorgonias, Enlargement of cinema film.’’ Image in William Beebe’sBeneath Tropic Seas (New York, 1928), facing page 45.

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 117

Besides using literary language, Beebe supplemented the absence ofcolor cinema with paintings. As frontispiece to Beneath Tropic Seas, Beebeincluded a color reproduction of a painting by Walter Howlison ‘‘Zarh’’Pritchard. Beebe called Pritchard the only artist to have ‘‘brought to canvas,evanescence of hue, tenuousness of tint eminently satisfying to the memoryof the stroller among coral reefs. This is probably because he paints underwater, seated among his subjects. No aquarium tank can ever show the pastelfilm of aquatic perspective. No glass-bottomed boat ever conveys the mysteryand beauty of this underworld of color’’ (fig. 3).81 Zarh Prichard was the firstpainter to compose based on observations en pleine mer. Pritchard startedhelmet diving in the early twentieth century in the waters off Tahiti, wherehe made sketches for his paintings with oil crayons and brushes on oil-soaked animal skin, which he would then complete on land. In the 1910sand ’20s, Pritchard’s works were internationally acclaimed as the first win-dows on the underwater frontier, and they were acquired by leading scien-tific institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, the Musee

figure 3. Zahr Pritchard,‘‘No-Man’s-Land Five Fathoms

Down, Painted by Zarh Pritchardmany feet beneath the water on

a coral reef in the Lagoon ofMaraa, Tahiti.’’ Frontispiece to

Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas. (Colorversion of this image available at

http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2014.125.6.103.)

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Oceanographique of Monaco, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.Although doubt was subsequently cast on whether Pritchard in fact reallyobserved the scenes he painted, some of his works contain details onlyapparent in the underwater environment. In a 1910 painting of a schoolof damselfish located off of Moorea, Pritchard depicted, for example, howthe fish swim into the surge, which is sweeping the anemones on the reef inthe other direction (fig. 4).82

Whether or not Beebe had input into the design of the dust jacket of the1928 edition of Beneath Tropic Seas, it too made up for the absence of colorphotography with art. The cover illustration, by Else Bostlemann, depictsfish amidst gorgonias with a palette true to color at five fathoms (fig. 5).Bostelmann was a naturalist painter whose work appeared in National Geo-graphic and brochures of the American Museum of Natural History, amongother venues. Although Beebe did not mention Bostelmann in Beneath

figure 4. Zarh Pritchard, School of Damselfish, 1910. Oil on animal skin. Courtesy ofthe Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 119

Tropic Seas, she subsequently drafted color images to illustrate his accountsof his descent in the bathysphere during the 1930s to a depth that was thenunrepresentable even with black and white photography.

Hass published the first underwater photographs taken with moderncolor film in Fotojagd am Meeresgrund, which appeared in wartime Germanyin 1942. Hass took his photos in shallow depths, since there was not yeta practical flash technique. In Diving to Adventure (1947), Hass remarkedthat ‘‘under-water photography’’ held the potential to be an extremely valu-able tool for documentation; ‘‘The only pity is that color film is not exemptfrom the light-absorptive effect of water.’’83 Beyond the need for flash, Hassindicated the value of capturing the metamorphosis of sea life, a need bestfulfilled by cinema, although he did not make this point. Hass criticized‘‘color illustrations of tropical fish that you see presented with loving care inscientific works’’ as ‘‘largely wrong or else unnatural.’’ The reason was thata fish’s coloration shifted rapidly, affected by ‘‘the momentary mood of thefish, hungry or satisfied, tired or scared. Probably,’’ Hass speculated, ‘‘fishhave no such things as ‘normal’ coloration,’’ which is more like what wethink of as ‘‘facial expressions and mannerisms.’’

figure 5. Else Bostelmann,front cover dust jacket for Beebe,Beneath Tropic Seas. (Color versionof this image available at http://

dx.doi.org/10.1525/rep.2014.125.6.103.)

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Did the rich language of fantasy description compensate for other aspectsof the underwater experience that early dive naturalists could not documentwith existing technologies of underwater photographic reproduction, notablyfilm? I have been arguing that they used fantasy description to registerunprecedented, inconceivable aspects of the underwater frontier. It is alsotrue, however, that photography and film were the dominant documentarymedia of the time. Yet in the 1920s through 1940s, the photographic medium,both still and moving, black and white or color, could not show anything likethe range of environments that written narratives could describe. While therewere underwater short documentaries, notably in the 1940s by Hass andCousteau, among others, there were technological limitations to scenes acces-sible to undersea cinema, even when shot in black and white, due the limitsof human mobility and optics, notably, the extremely low-light conditionsunderwater. These limitations were solved by a number of different technol-ogies invented across the 1940s both for diving and for underwater filming.84

Although this history is too intricate to detail here, the broad picture is thatinventions, including good underwater flash technology, lenses adapted tounderwater optics, a means of transporting camera and equipment, as well asthe aqualung, all came together around 1950 to expand radically the envir-onments documentable in underwater photography and film.

The naturalist books I have been citing from the late 1940s through theearly 1950s belong to the same moment of intense innovation that yieldedthese new cinematic documentaries. Indeed, a number of their authorsobserved the underwater environment in the course of pioneering under-water cinematic documentary, which lagged behind their books by just a fewyears. The first full-length underwater color film, Folco Quilici’s Sesto con-tinenti, was shown in 1954 at the Venice Film Festival. The Silent World, madeby Cousteau together with a twenty-three year old Louis Malle, just out offilm school, premiered in 1956. The film received prizes both at the CannesFilm Festival and at the US Academy Awards. Television, although only blackand white at the time, was another technology for the diffusion of under-water documentary into the homes of a general public. In 1956, the BBCproduced a series on Hans and Lotte Hass entitled Diving to Adventure, whichwould be shown across the world.85

The authors of dive narratives considered in this article looked forwardto film’s enhancement of divers’ ability communicate their observationsfrom beneath the surface of the sea, even when they recognized that itwould render their narratives obsolete. In 1951 Diole observed, ‘‘Photogra-phy is also a language. Today it is the only universal language; it has estab-lished an authority no form of expression has ever known.’’ ‘‘Not evenbooks,’’ wrote Diole, ‘‘have had the suggestive power of the cinema,’’ as heprophesied that one day ‘‘the cinema will perhaps be the sole means of

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 121

expressing the [marine] sensibility.’’86 That day came soon. After 1956,underwater documentation for a general public occurred increasingly infilmic media and dwindled in print, a trend that has continued to the present.

Writing in 1951, Diole imagined that undersea films would retaina poetic quality, which he viewed as inherent in the aquatic environment.He wrote, ‘‘The cinematic vision of the sea-depths, more accurate still,thanks to colour photography . . . will one day, perhaps, constitute the lastfairyland allowed to those still able to dream.’’87 That this fairyland coulditself disappear was not an eventuality he was equipped to consider. Today,when it is estimated that 20 percent of the world’s coral reefs have beendestroyed, and 35 percent more are threatened by human impacts rangingfrom coastal development to climate change, these early dive naturalists’fantasy descriptions of ‘‘landscapes whose alien magic had never been pro-faned by man,’’ resonate poignantly as a caution.88

N o t e s

I could not have written this article without the expertise and generosity ofPeter Brueggeman, recently retired as curator of the Scripps Institution ofOceanography’s Special Collections and Archive, and coordinator of the UCSan Diego Life, Health, Marine & Earth Sciences Collections, who patientlyguided me through documents on dive history, dive narratives, and the devel-opment of underwater photography and film. For information on the history ofunderwater photography, I also thank Eric Hanauer, dive photographer andauthor of numerous publications on dive history (see http://www.ehanauer.com/Publications.html). Errors in this history are mine.

1. A succinct survey of the development of diving technology is Robert F. Marx,The History of Underwater Exploration (New York, 1978). Tim Ecott’s Neutral Buoy-ancy (New York, 2001) is a more detailed, lively anecdotal history.

2. Philippe Diole, The Undersea Adventure, trans. Alan Ross (London, 1953), 134.The book was first published in French as L’Aventure sous-marine in 1951.

3. Ibid., 134–35. These lines of Rimbaud are quoted in French in the Englishtranslation of Diole’s 1951 The Undersea Adventure. A literal translation is: ‘‘thepoem of the sea / steeped in stars and lactescent . . . / Kisses climbing to the sea’seyes slowly . . . / and the yellow and blue awakening of phosphorescent singers.’’

4. Ibid., 235.5. Steven Mentz calls this field ‘‘blue cultural studies,’’ in ‘‘Toward a Blue Cultural

Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,’’ inLiterature Compass 6, no. 5 (September 2009): 997–1013. For a recent overview ofthe field from the perspective of literary studies, see the section on ‘‘OceanicStudies,’’ edited by Patricia Yaeger, in PMLA 125, no. 3 (May 2010): 657–736.

6. See Sir Robert Davis, ‘‘Divers’ Yarns and Adventures,’’ in Deep Diving and Subma-rine Operations: A Manual for Deep Sea Divers and Compressed Air Workers (London,1951), part 2, 335–535.

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7. See Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton, 2010). A brief earlynarrative that uses fantasy to express the underwater environment is by ananonymous tourist who was allowed by professional divers to descend beneaththe surface of the Thames. Most of his account described the technical detailsof the dive in the informational, practical style of his professional peers.However, when the tourist dwelt on the underwater atmosphere itself, hecharacterized the depths as a phantasmagorical environment. Under theThames, he noted ‘‘a pale, doubtful twilight, which . . . very much resembledthe London atmosphere in a November fog,’’ where ‘‘I fancied I saw livingforms floating about’’; quoted by Marx, History of Underwater Exploration, 61. Ithank Cannon Schmitt for another early example of underwater tourism, byRobert Louis Stevenson, published in his 1888 ‘‘The Education of an Engi-neer.’’ Stevenson writes of having persuaded workers on a marine breakwaterin the Bay of Wick to let him descend in a diving suit. Like the 1859 under-water tourist, Stevenson used imaginative expression to describe his experi-ence at depth. He perceived ‘‘a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but veryrestful and delicious,’’ and experienced ‘‘a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy inmy surroundings.’’ As Stevenson climbed back up the ladder through thewater’s surface, joy turned to ecstasy: ‘‘Of a sudden, my ascending head passedinto the trough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy,almost of sanguine light—the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heavenabove a vault of crimson’’; Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘‘The Education of anEngineer,’’ Scribner’s, November 1888, 636–41 (636). I describe similar momentsin accounts of the underwater environment penned by career naval officers,scientists, engineers, and adventurers in what follows.

8. Bernd Brunner gives a succinct history of this technology in The Ocean at Home(New York, 2005).

9. Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea(1854; reprint, London, 1856), 164.

10. Ibid., 164.11. William Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas (New York, 1928), 41.12. Ibid., 41.13. Ibid., 36.14. Ibid., 47.15. Ibid.16. Ibid. Cannon Schmitt points out that the creature in Beebe’s description

sounds very much like a cuttlefish, although I will follow Beebe’s terminologyto avoid confusion. On his blog, the philosopher Peter Godfrey Smith hasfootage of a cuttlefish changing color as Beebe describes (‘‘scarleting and pal-liding’’). Smith notes that from certain angles a cuttlefish looks like a squid; TheGiant Cuttlefish: Evolution, Minds, Bodies, and the Sea, ‘‘Metamorphoses,’’ postedJune 1, 2013, http://giantcuttlefish.com.

17. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 47–48.18. An example of literary description topside is Beebe’s account of sunrise, which

is lush but not fantastic: ‘‘At six o’clock in the morning the valleys and creststurn to solid gold, and at six in the evening the shadows of the deepest gorgescreep out and possess the whole island. From this moment the sky is ablaze withstarlight such as only the tropics know’’; ibid., 14–15.

19. Ibid., 166, 171.20. Ibid., 183.21. Ibid., 6.

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 123

22. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 17, 23.23. For an overview of the early modern je ne sais quoi see Richard Scholar’s The Je-

Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford,2005). One context for the je ne sais quoi mentioned by Scholar that is thought-provoking for underwater fantasy description involves the potential of thesciences to unveil the secrets of nature.

24. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas (Chicago, 2001), 23.25. Ibid., 23.26. Ibid.27. This explanation applies to Beebe’s hummingbird too, a creature similarly

defying terrestrial plausibility, although in the air rather than the water.28. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 204.29. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1967), 64.

The text was originally published in French in 1953.30. Brunner makes a similar point when he notes the use of what he calls a language

of ‘‘mystery’’ by Gosse, attributing it to a vision of the submarine world as ‘‘abundle of mysterious categories and metamorphoses that take place accordingto still unknown laws’’; Brunner, The Ocean at Home, 46.

31. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 22.32. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 36.33. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 235.34. Philippe Tailliez, ‘‘Hidden Depths’’ [excerpted from Tailliez’s book To Hidden

Depths], quoted in The Mammoth Book of the Deep, ed. Jon Lewis (New York, 2007),213. The book was originally published in French under the title Plongees sanscable in 1954, and its English translation appeared in the same year.

35. Tailliez, ‘‘Hidden Depths,’’ quoted in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 213.36. The lines from ‘‘The Drunken Boat’’ referenced by Tailliez differ somewhat

from those cited in the anecdote as told by Diole. In Tailliez’s account, the linesare ‘‘I dreamed the green night of extravagant snows / Kiss of the ocean,unhurried, climbing the eyes; Stirred seas, ineffable humours whirled away;And phosphorus singers, a blue and gold alarm’’; Tailliez, ‘‘Hidden Depths,’’in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 214. The Rimbaud translation is by BenBelitt, Four Poems by Rimbaud: The Problem of Translation (London, 1948).

37. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 136. Diole cites Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s com-ments in Etudes de la Nature as a precedent for his own observation about theundersea environment: ‘‘The art of describing nature is so new that even theterms for it are not invented’’ (137).

38. Ibid., 136.39. Ibid., 137.40. Ibid., 136.41. All quotes in this paragraph are from Hans Hass, Diving to Adventure, The Dare-

devil Story of Hunters Under the Sea, trans. Barrows Mussey (New York, 1951), 130.Originally published in German: Hans Hass, Drei Jager auf dem Meeresgrund(Zurich, 1947).

42. All these quotes come from passages in Hass, Diving to Adventure, 130.43. Ibid., 159.44. Ibid.45. Ibid.46. Tailliez, from ‘‘Hidden Depths,’’ quoted in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 214.

Subsequent citations in this paragraph and the next from Tailliez are on 214 aswell.

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47. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 14.48. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 40.49. Guy Gilpatric, ‘‘Goggle Fishing’’[excerpted from Gilpatric’s book The Compleat

Goggler], quoted in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 18.50. The quotations in the first two sentences of this paragraph are from Diole, The

Undersea Adventure, 14.51. Ibid., 17. I have corrected the typo in the American edition, which reproduces

the first word of the Valery line as ‘‘Heureuse,’’ instead of ‘‘Heureux.’’ A literaltranslation is ‘‘Happy you melted bodies, flat and deep waters!’’

52. Ibid., 17.53. Ibid., 140.54. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 42.55. Ibid., 39.56. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 134.57. Ibid., 133.58. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 6.59. Hass, Diving to Adventure, 185.60. Tailliez, ‘‘Hidden Depths,’’ quoted in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 214.61. Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘Correspondances,’’ in The Flowers of Evil (New York, 2008),

18. I have translated literally from the French text; James McGowan, the trans-lator’s, version is found on page 19.

62. Tailliez, ‘‘Hidden Depths,’’ in Lewis, Mammoth Book of the Deep, 214.63. Bruno Latour, ‘‘Circulating Reference,’’ in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of

Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 30.64. Ibid., 24.65. J. E. Williamson, Twenty Years Under the Sea (New York, 1936), 79.66. Ibid., 102.67. See Bernard Violet, Cousteau, une biographie (Paris, 1993), 129.68. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Frederic Dumas, The Silent World (New York, 1953),

209. They went on to recount an anecdote from Gilpatric, who ‘‘once saw anoctopus let loose in a library. It raced up and down the stacks, hurling books onthe floor, possibly a belated revenge on authors’’ (210).

69. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Frederic Dumas, Le Monde du silence (Paris, 1955), 78.70. Cousteau and Dumas, Silent World, 166.71. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 22.72. Ibid.73. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 38.74. Ibid., 39.75. Ibid., 36.76. Ibid., 37.77. Ibid., 48.78. Ibid., 37.79. There was one antecedent. According to Marx, ‘‘In 1923, in the Florida Keys, W. H.

Longley took the first underwater color photographs, and four years later he tookthe first artificially lighted color photographs, some of which were published in theNational Geographic the next year’’; Marx, History of Underwater Exploration, 166. TheNational Geographic website gives 1926 as the date for these first artificially illumi-nated photos. See http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photos/milestones-underwater-photography/. To obtain these photos, Longley,working with National Geographic photographer Charles Martin, used pounds ofdangerous magnesium explosive above the surface to illuminate the depths.

Denotation in Alien Environments: The Underwater Je Ne Sais Quoi 125

80. Vanessa Schwartz, ‘‘Cinematic Spectatorship Before the Apparatus: The PublicTaste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris,’’ in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley, 1995), 297–319.

81. Beebe, Beneath Tropic Seas, 38. For a succinct biography of Zarh Pritchard, seeElizabeth N. Shor, ‘‘Zarh H. Pritchard,’’ Science & Engineering Collection, UCSan Diego Library, http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist/Shor-Pritchard.pdf.

82. I thank Professor Paul Dayton of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography forexplaining the environmental details in the Pritchard painting, as well as PeterBrueggeman, who also noted that Pritchard’s portrayal of the damselfishentwined with the anemones is unrealistic, as damselfish are not imperviousto the anemone’s sting.

83. Hass, Diving to Adventure; the citations in this paragraph are on pages 238–39.84. Cousteau started to collaborate with Harold Edgerton at MIT on strobe lighting

for underwater cameras. Information on Cousteau and Edgerton’s collabora-tion is available at MIT’s The Edgerton Digital Collections (EDC) Project,‘‘Harold ‘Doc’ Edgerton, Underwater Exploration: 1953–1986,’’ http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/docs-life/underwater-exploration. Another innova-tor in underwater lenses and lighting, Dimitri Rebikoff, also shot underwatercolor shorts in the early 1950s. Marx gives some of these developments in Historyof Underwater Exploration, 168–69. The timeline by J. Floor Anthoni on thewebsite Seafriends.org under ‘‘History’’ offers one of the more reliable over-views of some major developments in underwater photography, http://www.seafriends.org.nz/phgraph/.

85. On the popularization of skin diving and the rise of popular film and TV aboutthe undersea environment, see Ecott, Neutral Buoyancy.

86. Diole, The Undersea Adventure, 147.87. Ibid., 147.88. Hass, Diving to Adventure, 185. Figures from a 2008 study of the GCRMN (Global

Coral Reef Monitoring Network). Cited by the Moorea Coral Reef Long TermEcological Research site, http://mcr.lternet.edu/.

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