Static versus Kinetic Images of Crisis

George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University

[From Chapter One, "Images, Situations, and Structures," Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present, Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 21-22. WWW version by Marisa Castagno, University of Turin, Italy, 1997.]

aving thus observed the way that the shipwreck metaphor or paradigm evolved from its diametrical opposite, the Christian vision of a journey to God, we can now examine a related situation of crisis that of mariners on a drifting hulk or castaways on a desert island. After Poe's narrator in "MS. Found in a Bottle" recovers from the state of shock and hopelessness that first afflicted him when the ocean crashed into his ship, he realizes that he and his companion, the old Swede, have been spared immediate death but will almost certainly have to endure a lingering one. The two men, in other words, remain trapped in a situation of peril and crisis but one different from that experienced in the moment of shipwreck:

The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay, well believing, that in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which should ensue. But this very Just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights . . . the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind . . . more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered.... We awaited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day- that day to me has not yet arrived -- to the Swede never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in pitchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us .... We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves as well as possible, to the stump of the mizzen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation.... In the meanwhile every moment threatened to be our last.... I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself.

In contrast to the situations of shipwreck, avalanche, or the other versions of crisis one encounters in George Stubbs's Lion Attacking a Horse (1770, Yale University Art Gallery) or Elie Delaunay's The Plague at Rome (1869, Louvre), this equally important paradigm is not particularly kinetic. Thus, whereas the shipwreck and analogous forms of the situation of crisis present the instant at which powerful forces first impinge upon the victim, this situation has an essentially different structure. The men on the drifting hulk, like those in the analogous situations of being trapped on a desert island, lost in a labyrinth, or shut in prison, are held in, contained, circumscribed by forces that block their aims and constrain free action.[The prison metaphor is discussed in Brombert, Victor. "The Happy Prison: A Recurring Romantic Metaphor" in David Thorburn and Geoffrey Hartman, Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1973) 62-79; Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century. ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1975) 64-8; Lorenz Eitner, "Cages, Prisons, and Captives in Eighteenth-Century Art". in Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities, Karl Kroeber and William Walling, eds. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978) 13-38.]This basically static situation obviously bears a less intense emotional charge than the situations of sudden crisis, such as shipwreck. This paradigm (or what Paul Ricoeur terms a "schema of existence") appears in a Christian or traditional form far less commonly than does that of the shipwreck, and its primary meaning seems to be as an image of primal isolation -- of isolation from both God and other human beings. Its relation to the Christian topos of the life journey, like that of the shipwreck, takes the form of diametrical opposition, but the chief emphasis falls, not upon the cataclysmic interruption of the voyage, but upon simple cessation of movement and consequent deprivation. Poe's application of this paradigm in "MS. Found in a Bottle" both traps the survivors on the floating hulk, thus threatening their lives, and also deprives them of freedom, food, and even light and a sense of time passing. The significance of the shipwreck and castaway paradigms, then, is that by transforming the Christian metaphor of the life-voyage, they provided a superbly appropriate analogy to the way many men and women experienced their world these past two centuries. The full explanation for this changed use of basic cultural paradigms during this period would require something very like a complete history of recent Western civilization. Although such a history clearly lies beyond the bounds of this study and the capabilities of its author, let me tempt the charge of rashness by suggesting a few of the more central factors that have called this imaginative landscape into being.

• Into the Moment of Crisis
• Equivalent Structures
• John Martin and the Religious Sublime
• Pompeii Destroyed
• Bulwer-Lytton Punishes Pompeii
• Images of Crisis and Interarts Criticism
• Images of Crisis as Cultural Code
• Pre-Modern Images of Crisis; or Shipwrecked in the Sight of God
• The Shipwreck Image and Situation as Paradigm
• Static versus Kinetic Images of Crisis
• Crises of Christianity and Images of Crisis
• Ambiguous Images and Crisis
• Shipwrecks Literary, Literal, and Opaque

Last modified 28 December 2004