Reviewed by David
Clarke
The Atlantic
liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 with the loss
of more than 1,500 people, has achieved a remarkable status in western culture.
It has become a persistent moral metaphor, serving to illustrate everything
from the hubris of humanity (as in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the
Twain’), to the failings of the class system (as in Roy Baker’s still harrowing
1958 film A Night to Remember) and the dangers of a misplaced confidence
in progress (as in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s poem sequence The Sinking of
the Titanic of 1978). In the Second World War, the story even served
Joseph Goebbels as a symbol of the evils of British capitalism, the theme of a
1943 film drama he commissioned on the disaster (see The Titanic in Myth
and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture for more on
this). Slavoj Žižek has aptly described the Titanic as a symptom of
modern culture in the psychoanalytic sense, a ‘knot of meanings’ occupying a
space in our collective imagination that somehow pre-existed the actual
disaster itself: as
Žižek points out, one popular novel from 1898 had already described the
sinking of a ship called Titan in uncannily similar circumstances.
It is this
‘knot of meanings’ that The Debris Field sets
out to explore. Here the Titanic is described as a ‘double ship’,
ghosted by its own myth. The pamphlet results from a multimedia project to mark
the centenary of the Titanic that poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel
Dixon and Chris McCabe developed in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Wake-Walker
and composer Oli Barrett. The complete film is scheduled for release on DVD,
but the publication of the pamphlet stakes a claim for the words to have an
independent existence beyond the original project.
[…]
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