By Peter Mann
“Life in itself is always a shipwreck,” wrote the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1932, as Europe grew eager to jettison liberal democracy. But Ortega was not simply a pessimist. “To shipwreck,” he explained, “is not to drown. Man, sucked into the abyss, flails his arms to stay afloat.” In other words, shipwreck is a given, but it’s the flailing that counts—the choices we make, the lives we create, the stories we tell to keep the waters from closing in.
Literature, like life, is all about the art of the flail. Ever since Odysseus washed up storm-tossed on Calypso’s island, the truth of shipwreck and the struggle to keep from drowning have been at the foundation of storytelling. But the drama of Odysseus’s struggle to get home to Ithaca is not just a matter of slipping past sea monsters and slaying suitors. It’s about whether he can remain intact as himself—to salvage his sense of who he is and reclaim what all those years of war and wandering have imperiled.
For my money, there is no greater mystery or thrill in fiction than this flailing above the abyss: to find ourselves in open water, our plans and dreams capsized, and somehow fashion a life raft. All the dead bodies, double agents, and femme fatales are mere embellishments.
My new novel World Pacific is about a boy’s adventure writer named Dicky Halifax, who in 1939 disappears at sea while trying to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Though shipwrecked, he does not drown. But even once on dry land he must, like Odysseus, face the continual threat of shipwreck as he attempts to make it home intact. And so, too, must the émigré painter and British spy hunter who are sucked into Halifax’s vortex back in San Francisco.
In that spirit, here are five great, albeit wildly different, novels that explore the theme of existential shipwreck and the drama of staying afloat. They range from picaresque farce to dystopian pastoral, some with actual shipwrecks, others with nary a whiff of sea air. But all feature a lot of flailing.
The Sotweed Factor by John Barth (1960)
This is the greatest comic historical novel ever written. Barth takes the historical seed of a minor early American poet who in 1706 wrote a satirical poem about the then backwater colony of Maryland, and grows it into a sprawling picaresque and bildungsroman, about the misadventures of one Ebenezer Cooke, self-proclaimed virgin and self-appointed poet laureate. We join the poet, along with his spineless servant Bertrand and enigmatic tutor Henry Burlingame, as he travels to the American colony to reclaim his father’s estate and earn his place in the literary pantheon. Naturally, all manner of intrigue and perversion intervenes to throw our hero’s plans overboard and disabuse him of his criminal innocence—literal shipwreck, piracy, buggery, bestiality, Papist skullduggery, Indian uprisings, and the love of a pox-ridden prostitute, to name just a few. Add to this the McGuffin of a secret historical diary by John Smith relating how he once harnessed the tumescent properties of eggplant to woo Pocahantas and you have the makings of a masterpiece.
Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890)
What if Dostoevsky’s Underground Man wound up down and out in turn-of-the-century Oslo (then called Kristiania), a bit too malnourished to philosophize but attuned to every fresh assault on his nerves and dignity? Hamsun takes us into the addled mind of a writer living on the streets, using the damp cemetery headstones as his writing desk, penning grandiose polemics on Kant while barely scraping together enough kroner to feed himself (if only he had a little more charisma he could make my list of charming, workshy anti-heroes). Long before Hamsun became a vile quisling and Nazi enthusiast (he once gave Goebbels his Nobel Prize as a keepsake), he was a cutting-edge modernist, developing a prose of immediacy and anxious subjectivity. And here it works to convey the desperation, the endless thrashing to keep one’s head above the surface in a cold city and with a tormented brain. Curiously, the deus ex machina comes in the form of a ship.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (1963)
Our unnamed narrator is visiting a friend at a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps when a mysterious wall suddenly appears, cutting her off from all humanity and rendering her the last woman standing. All she has for company are her friend’s dog, a pregnant cow, and a couple cats. They become her life raft as the work of caring for these other beings opens a profound dimension of existence that the modern world of men all but extinguished. I realize this might sound hokey, like an eco-feminist Robinson Crusoe-meets-Dr. Doolittle, but I assure you it’s the opposite. This spare, post-apocalyptic novel somehow manages to raise profound questions about work, gender, and our relation to the nonhuman world while being nail-bitingly suspenseful. Also, if you aren’t moved to tears by the dog named Lynx, you have a heart of wood.
Transit by Anna Seghers (1944)
Set in the refugee-choked port of Marseille in late 1940, when all those who had fled fascism in Germany and Spain must now, as the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators take control of France, find a way out across the ocean. Our narrator, a young man whose “youth was vanishing in concentration camps and on highways, in bleak hotel rooms with the most unloved of girls,” tries to remain aloof to his shipwreck, sipping rosé while those around him panic. Gradually, he becomes so entangled in others’ flailing that he can’t tell whether he’s rescuing them or condemning them to drown. Seghers, who herself fled Germany then France, brilliantly conveys the dread and boredom, punctuated by moments of terror, as one navigates the tortuous bureaucratic maze of securing the right combination of visas, in the right order, to catch a boat out to any alien land that will accept them—provided it’s not torpedoed en route. “Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary. We had no idea whether this situation would last till tomorrow, another couple of weeks, years, or our entire lives.” A harrowing echo from the past that should send shivers of recognition.
In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina (2009)
Similar themes of war and exile here, only this is a novel about the Spanish Civil War and is a work of historical fiction, which always sounds like a stupid qualification, as if great fiction weren’t often historical in its focus (War and Peace? Blood Meridian? The Singapore Grip? Come on.) What I mean is that Muñoz Molina, unlike Seghers, is writing his story at some seventy years’ remove from the events portrayed. But it is to my knowledge, with the possible exception of Javier Cercas’s slim but brilliant Soldiers of Salamis, the best novel about the Spanish Civil War. It captures the shipwreck of an entire nation, and with it the millions of lives shattered and set adrift. In a sweeping, richly textured story of an architect fleeing Madrid for New York, recalling the fragments of his life in Spain leading up to the war, Muñoz Molina gives the reader not only a sense of how a society tears itself apart and the acute dispossession experienced by those who live through it, but how that sense of shipwreck persists even once you’ve reached the other shore.
Peter Mann is the author of The Torqued Man, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022. His new novel World Pacific comes out August 19th. Visit petermannbooks.com to learn more.
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