THE NAUFRAGOCENE

Renaissance scholar Steve Mentz suggests that shipwreck narratives can be used to understand the historical break involved in the emergence of capitalist modernity as a global phenomenon or world-system with profound ecological ramifications:

The breaking of ship against land comes to play a key role in how modernity narrates its own breaks and discontinuities as components of a continuous process of reproduction, rebeginning and rediscovery. One of the alternative names Mentz suggests for the Anthropocene is the ‘Naufragocene’, the Age of Shipwrecks. But why should the shipwreck be given such prominence, and how did it change after the fifteenth century? The philosopher Hans Blumenberg compares ancient and modern figurations of shipwreck. In Hesiod, Lucretius and others, he writes, ‘there is a frivolous, if not blasphemous, moment inherent in all human seafaring, on a par with an offense against the invulnerability of the earth, the law of terra inviolata’. For the ancients, seafaring drives humanity to go beyond its natural needs, to transgress organic limits in a way that invites shipwreck as a moment of divine punishment. ‘In complete contrast to this,’ Blumenberg argues with reference to works by Voltaire and Fontenelle, ‘it will be one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price that must be paid in order to avoid that complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible.’ The myth of Fortuna, goddess of the turbulent seas, drives the adventurer into the risky domain of commerce and becomes, on the island of Robinson Crusoe and those who followed him, the spirit of the Puritan work ethic, the modern secular myth par excellence.

The desert island of the Robinson myth is a desert in the sense that it is the site both of a loss of the world and the production of various possible new ones.