The Environmental Whale Sublime in Doreen Cunningham’s "Soundings" and Rebecca Giggs’s "Fathoms"

Abstract

This paper explores the environmental whale sublime as shaped through the representations of whales and narratives of whale encounters in Doreen Cunningham’s Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales and Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms: The World in the Whale from two perspectives: feminine sensibility and nonhuman spatio-temporalities. It illustrates how conceiving the sublimity of whales within a relational and ecological framework can help transcend the subject/object duality in the traditional sublime. These works exemplify contemporary whale writings that articulate the environmental whale sublime through the writers’ nuanced feminine perspectives and epistemological inquiries, drawing attention to cetaceans’ ecological roles within the web of life rather than reinforcing their cultural elevation. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is considered the seminal work establishing classical conceptions of the whale sublime, reflecting how sublimity was shaped by the socio-economic conditions of nineteenth-century capitalist modernity. Such representations can be critically examined through a gender lens that recognizes the masculine and dualistic hierarchies in human-nature relationships, implicit in the subject/object binary that underpinned classical sublime discourses. Despite advancements in whale knowledge during Melville’s era, his understanding was limited by the epistemological frameworks of his time. By drawing on David Nye’s notion of the environmental sublime, which emphasizes “patient immersion” and the significance of symbiosis as understood from the spatial and temporal experiences of nonhuman beings, this paper argues for a re-examination of the whale sublime. This investigation highlights non-confrontational, immersive, and entangled human-nature relationships as depicted in Cunningham’s and Giggs’s works. The primary texts present two comparable yet distinct contemporary cetacean narratives that offer an ecological and relational understanding of nature’s otherness and sublime experiences with whales, particularly through the authors’ encounters with these animals and their portrayals of whale-fall ecologies and cetacean parasitology.