The Counter-Oceanic Sea

Freud's concept of the 'oceanic feeling'—a sense of boundless plenitude at the edges of consciousness—extended an Enlightenment-era aesthetics that imagined the realm beyond civilization as feminine, fluid, and undifferentiated, and gave modernist poetry a theory of serenity beyond identity. European Romanticism and modernism assumed that becoming a subject required abandoning an original maternal fullness. Rivers Solomon's novel The Deep offers a counter-oedipal politics and aesthetics that affirms difference and intensity in the depths of history and the sea, moving life and difference beyond binaries of male/female and nature/culture.

Study at a glance

Abstract

When Freud described the “oceanic feeling” of intimated plenitude that haunted the boundaries of consciousness he both intensified a post-enlightenment aesthetics that imagined the beyond of civilization is female, fluid, and undifferentiated and gave modernist poetics a theory of an almost unthinkable serenity beyond the limits of identity. European Romanticism and modernism, for all their differences, operated largely with the assumption that being a subject required abandoning an original maternal plenitude. In The Deep, Rivers Solomon provides a counter-oedipal politics and aesthetics that affirms a difference and intensity in the depths of history and the sea, taking life and difference beyond the binaries of male/female and nature/culture.