Underwater Optics as Symbolic Form

Technologies enable new modes of perception, which transform the imagination and inspire the arts. A vivid example of this process is the transvaluation of the underwater environment in the Western imaginary. For millennia, there were only very rudimentary technologies to observe this realm of our planet that is inhospitable to human physiology for longer than a breath of air.1 Humans understood it through the little they could glean from the surface via mariners’ sounding lines and what was fished up or washed up on shore. To descend into the depths was to drown, and the undersea world was hence imagined as a horrifying abyss, with occasional glimpses of fabulous riches. One famous example of this fantasy is Clarence’s sea nightmare of “the slimy bottom of the deep” in William Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks; /Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;/Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,/ Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,/ All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea.”2 During the nineteenth century, however, science and technology started to penetrate the obscurity beneath the water’s surface in the most technologically advanced nations, notably France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As Helen Rozwadowski has detailed in Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, the factors catalyzing this penetration were complex.3 They involved developments in biology, geology, engineering, communications, warfare, and the culture of the spectacle. Once human perception, action, and curiosity were immersed in the depths, the underwater imagination blossomed as well. Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869–1870) is a milestone marking the imaginative transformation of the depths from an obscure abyss to a holistic, diverse environment. Compare, for example, the sea bottom in Richard III to Captain Nemo and Profes-