Inserting the Manfish: Hybridity in Underwater Memoir Illustrations

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century, humans began to go underwater with extraordinary new freedom. Although life writing, art and film had conveyed underwater life before, the development of underwater photography created exciting possibilities for visualization in texts. In underwater life writing, photographs play an important co-constituting role. The “life” represented is double: that of the underwater human, and the life of the sea and its inhabitants. I look at Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World (1953), a classic of underwater memoirs, and other memoirs by his close associates, to explore how the images create visual narrative which is also a narrative about visualities.

The genre of underwater literature is extensive, and within it, life writing features substantially. Its long and large history is not well known, though Natascha Adamowsky has done much to establish its engagement with a paradigm of wonder up to what one might call the modern era, which she ends in 1943, though it continues into the twenty-first century. Historian Helen M. Rozwadowski explores much of the twentieth century cultural history of underwater, and Margaret Cohen admirably investigates its visual manifestation in film (see Works Cited). My interest here is both literary and photographic: specifically, how diver memoirs organise illustration, and what sorts of hybridity are created in how they relate text and image. The subject, and the history of underwater image-making, is much greater than I can engage with here; from a very large corpus, I discuss some instances which typify fine-grain implications arising from visual content which is more than mere illustration of text. Images help construct, relay and mediate new relationships between humans and the ocean; they also create new tensions in verbal description. Close readings of these reveal how underwater life writing draws attention to multimediality, and how close reading itself is a way to engage productively with the poetics of hybridity.

The invention of scuba, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and its popularization after World War II, certainly catalysed diving with its ease of use and movement, and it also created a new literature in which divers wrote about their experiences. “Books about the aqualung are now a standard product: they include chapters about early diving experiences, spearing fish, salvaging ancient wrecks, and the like, and are illustrated with photographs of undersea life, fishes on the end of a spear, old wrecks and other divers, some of them in color,” as one slightly jaded reviewer put it (Hedgepeth 57). Early scuba diving in the Mediterranean picked up from prior practices of freediving (holding your breath, rather than drawing on an external air supply) and its close association with underwater hunting. As populations of large fish dwindled rapidly, many divers were converted from killing fish to observing them, so that a camera was more desirable than a speargun. “Upwards of forty types of submersible camera cases were on the market” for this cohort of naturalists; “[u]nderwater photography burst out in colour in the popular magazines of the 1950s” (Dugan, Man Explores the Sea, 178):

At the bottom of the waters, where the faculty of speech vanishes, and back on the surface, where the soberest expressions of admiration are still suspected of stemming from prejudice and proselytism, it is practically an obligation to have, as an unimpeachable and irrefutable witness, the tracing of the lineaments of an incredible universe, the contribution of the impartial eye of the camera, corroborating a human vision that is suspected of partiality, error, or exaggeration. (Doukan 251–52)

Gilbert Doukan’s fulsome explanation conventionally instates photography as an objective medium, but that was not quite a universal view. Philippe Diolé, another diver-writer and one more suspicious of photography, thought corroboration of human vision was not the key to its potency. “Submarine photography has had, from the very beginning, a poetic value.” He praised the films and still photographs of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Tailliez for being “faithful records of the marine world,” but also because “they contain images full of what one might call the residue of dreams. They can convey to an audience completely ignorant of sea life its whole range of poetic feeling” (Diolé 140). Underwater photography’s appeal to both empiricism and poetry is a hybridity in itself which has continued to inform it as a medium.

Scuba made Jacques-Yves Cousteau a figurehead for exploration of the seas via his films, television programmes and books, and a name known around the world as the first of the “menfish,” an association still promulgated.¹ It should not be forgotten, though it often is, that before Cousteau there was Hans Hass, whose books, synonymous with adventure, were also hybridizing image and text very successfully through photography and film. Hass, who dived with an oxygen rebreather (not scuba, which uses compressed air), knew that visual images were an essential means of conveying underwater life: his book Diving to Adventure (1952) is subtitled “Harpoon and Camera under the Sea.”² Although Hass, like Cousteau, was devoted to film and photography, they were both also committed writers. Cousteau is the better known populariser of the underwater world; Hass was really the pioneer. As he said in his film Menschen unter Haien (Men and Sharks) of his first dive with breathing apparatus, in July 1942 off Greece, “I had become an amphibious being and could travel along with the fish!” (my emphasis; Jung 15). Amphibious hybridity more explicitly surrounded Cousteau, described in print in 1948 as “The First of the Menfish” by journalist (and later collaborator) James Dugan:

[A] new species of large mammalian fish have been observed in the last few years one eyed monsters shaped and colored like nude human beings with green rubber tail fins, gills of metal, and tubular scales on their backs. They are called Cousteau Divers. They swim around sportively at hundred-foot depths, examining sunken ships, taking photographs, and harpooning big fish. (Dugan, “Menfish” 16)

The colloquial term “frogman”—the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) identifies first use in 1945, in an article in The Times—was often associated with British Navy divers; French authors disliked it. They much preferred “manfish” or “menfish” (neither of which is in the OED) to make the same point: manfish hybridity infuses underwater texts.

This intrinsic hybridity of scuba diving is important to remember as a surround for hybridity of text and image, which I explore next in relation to paratexts in The Silent World that describe images. Some generic fixing points first. Underwater accounts from the 1950s, and there are many of them, are genre-fluid. In some ways they follow on from adventure narratives and illustrated expedition accounts. They are also unequivocally life writing: writers describe their various diving adventures and activities. The auto/biographical subject in underwater literature is however two-fold: the human who writes autobiographically and the ocean biographically written about in terms of its physical conditions, its life forms and its meanings for humans, many described and pictured in new ways. There is also a distinction to be made, theoretically, between the autobiographical author and the diver whose activity is different from writing—although some divers took slates underwater and made notes (still a practice, especially among scientist-divers) as well as taking photographs or filming. I want only here to stress that multifunctionality which hybridizes identity, but may also split generically—for instance, when a diver-author writes about image-making. Diver, photographer, film-maker, author flow into composite identities underwater, which affects how we construct the auto/biographical subject.

Many underwater memoirs were commercial literary texts aiming for a growing readership newly including nonwriting divers as well as nondivers, and published to raise funds for the authors’ next underwater endeavours. Representation of underwater life was in a new phase in the 1950s. It was not a new thing—the American naturalist William Beebe, for instance, had published successful books in the 1920s and 1930s, usually classed as popular science for a non-specialist audience, about what he found underwater (a zoologist by profession, he became a helmet and bathysphere diver).³ He included images in his books, and was read admiringly by some of the French memoirists. They also evoked a long history of underwater photography, reaching back to Louis Boutan, who spent the 1890s devising underwater cameras and lighting: “he invented everything … focusing, the external shutter release, the compensating bag or ‘breathing apparatus,’ the small stabilizing casks, the flash” (Doukan 254). It was, though, the generation of Hass, Cousteau and their diving contemporaries who made photographs significant as a medium arguably equal to prose in representing underwater, and they made the process of photography an explicit part of their narratives.

The textual placing of photographs—quantity, size and position—is shaped by and ultimately determined by the publisher, since images add to the cost of production and affect its market category. For many underwater memoirs, photographs explicitly added value and appeal and were explicitly noticed by reviewers. The authors usually chose images, and possibly had choice in positioning them. It is almost impossible to recuperate documentation of any such process, and much as one might invoke Barthes on the death of the author to justify diminishing authorial agency, so one might invoke the death of editors to justify interpretation of inserts and images in terms of what a reader makes of them. Despite all these Barthesian corpses, life writing paradigms are available to readers, and commonly understood—for instance, the author photo, a tradition simply updated from early modern practices of frontispiece portraits. Arnaud Schmitt has observed that “photography is bound to bring something more to autobiography’s ‘referential effort’” (Schmitt, Photographer 3). In underwater literature, that “something more” is complex. Photography inserts the menfish as subjects who are also visual objects in biography’s referential effort to show life in the sea.

1 Cousteau: Imaging The Silent World

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s now classic book Le Monde du Silence (1953), was translated into English as The Silent World (1953; the film from the book Le Monde du Silence was released in 1956.) It had a long subtitle: “A story of undersea discovery and adventure, by the first men to swim at record depths with the freedom of fish.” Although officially co-written with Frédéric Dumas, the book features Dumas as protagonist and friend rather than author: it is Cousteau’s story, in his voice, though its narrative includes how he, Dumas and Tailliez became the three Underwater Musketeers, a formidable trio. Despite the stress on men free as fish, the frontispiece (Fig. 1) is surprising: it is not simply an author photo, but a photo of Cousteau, his wife and two sons underwater. Given Cousteau’s liking for masculine intimates, this family image is unexpected. His wife Simone, said by Cousteau to be happiest out of camera range, is rarely visible in photographs documenting expeditions, though she was crucial to their success and often on board throughout. The caption is “The author and his family go down for their usual Sunday afternoon under-water excursion near their home at Sanary-sur-Mer.” It plays knowingly with surprise by describing the image in terms of bourgeois respectability merely transposed to a new element. There is an echo of French traditions of country walking, epitomised by Balzac, who wrote a treatise on gait, and Maupassant, who features many walks in his fiction.⁴ There is no indication of who took the photograph, either in caption or in illustration list. It is a strange photograph in other ways, despite the familiarity of a family grouping: mask shadows mean you can see no facial expression; the boys seem not to be looking at the camera; linked hands establish connectivity, but with the practical purpose of steadying the two boys, whose balance is less assured. In other words, it defies some of the conventions of a family photo and repositions others. The figures’ vertical position is odd too—for scuba diving, you want to be horizontal in the water, not vertical. But it can be explained through an older literary tradition—allusion making another kind of hybridity—in which helmet divers, or scaphanders, go for a stroll on the sea bed, an enterprise memorably depicted in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870). Do you remember the frontispiece when you arrive at the end? If so, the photo also acquires meaning from the end of the book, where Cousteau argues that because there are too many people and too few resources for them on earth, humans need to go underwater in order to survive and thrive as a species. So the family group photograph looks back to helmet diving and forward to underwater settlements, a space-time hybridity.

Fig. 1

Frontispiece to Cousteau’s The Silent World (1953)

The photographs in The Silent World are pioneering not just a subject, but a new technical capacity to represent underwater life. The “List of Illustrations” flags up this distinction. After the entry for Frontispiece comes this paragraph: “The photographs listed below will be found in four groups. Forty-eight pages are in black and white and sixteen pages in full colour. The handheld work in Ektachrome is the first ever made in significant depths, using artificial light and scientific colour correction.” Developed by Kodak in 1946, Ektachrome had the advantage of being much easier for photographers to develop themselves; it was also a fast film. Cousteau signals the modernity of the medium and control of the development process, reinforcing his pioneering command of diving and photography simultaneously.⁵ In command of many things besides underwater visuality, it is through underwater visuality that Cousteau’s claim to command is imaged.

One striking feature of the descriptions in the List of Illustrations is how many are present tense. Frédéric Dumas, listed on the title page as an author “with” Cousteau, appears in several as “Dumas swims”—on wrecks, with fish, towards a shark. The text explains that Cousteau liked to use Dumas as a model so as to give scale; without that knowledge, you might be forgiven for thinking Cousteau simply liked to show Dumas. The body’s human scale paradoxically asserts enlargement of the human world through its masculine presentism underwater. The List of Illustrations is full of such condensing work. Its concise descriptions are much shorter than many of the captions to those photographs when they appear in the book. The first photo, unsurprisingly, is of Cousteau. More surprisingly, Cousteau and his camera get equal billing in the short listing (as I’ll refer to the descriptions in the List of Illustrations) and expanded in the caption. The listing says: “Captain Cousteau swims under the sea with his pressurized camera.” The caption expands into biography which instates, condenses and particularises all at once. It begins:

Captain Cousteau swims under the sea with his pressurised Rolliflex camera making colour flash photographs as shown in the colour section. The pictures which follow record man’s most intimate and comprehensive adventure inside the sea. Captain Cousteau provides a running commentary on some outstanding moments in the five thousand dives which the authors and members of the Undersea Research Group have made in fifteen years.

That’s the first half of the caption, with two reminders of Cousteau’s naval rank. The second half sorts out origins and accreditation of the images arising, mostly from Cousteau’s films, some by other photographers. Where a picture is uncredited, it was taken by Cousteau, Dumas or Tailliez, members of the Undersea Research Group. Intimacy and comprehensiveness pertain to both photography and diving, and bind them together, enmeshing different scales of emotional space, like combining a close-up and a panorama.

There’s a knottiness to this caption which warrants further investigation. “The word deictic is the most appropriate way of describing the logic that underpins informational connections between an image and its caption,” proposes Arnaud Schmitt in his discussion of captions:

The most obvious function of captions is “the anchorage function”—quickly connecting words and text, providing the most basic contextualizing information for the photograph, and then, if the main text is supposed to do so and the reader is inclined to follow suit, letting the rest of the text establish further connections between the words and the image. A caption allows an immediate integration of the two media, which is quite useful in a hybrid environment. On the other hand, it creates an intermediary level, a text that is not fully a text, providing easily accessible information that can also be regarded as delaying a deeper form of connection between the two media. Put differently, captions, especially openly explanatory ones…make it easy for the reader to link words and images but delay more enriching bonds. (Schmitt, “Capturing as Suturing” 16, 21)

Rather than delay, The Silent World’s first caption offers immediately enriching bonds, in several forms. One is to establish the hybridity of “swims … making photographs … record … commentary,” so that diving and photography seem coterminous, and with a natural sequentiality which joins them with text. Those hybridities create another, a complex one: the pictures seem to have primacy as the reader is signposted to the colour section, and the pictures record man’s undersea adventure. Yet the pictures themselves can’t do all the explanatory work: hence Cousteau’s “running commentary” is needed. Is that commentary the captions, the text or both? We also swing away here from autobiography: Cousteau’s commentary is on dives made by a group. It includes him but it includes others too. In underwater literature, sorting out the credits for particular images is often done in a specific separate section before the preliminary pages or in a credit section at the end, rarely in a long first caption that mimics the positions of the commanding diver and his close friends, close enough to form an inner group of named individuals. The long caption’s work of accreditation describes a hierarchy of intimates within a brotherhood: it isn’t obviously meaningful on a first reading, but it has an important emotional logic.

By what logic are “outstanding moments” separated from a record of five thousand dives? A loose logic appears in the organization of the clusters of photographs interspersed through the text. The first cluster or insert broadly illustrates diving history, though also Frédéric Dumas larking about. World War II is one backdrop: a torpedo and a contact mine are evidence of wartime underwater, with no further explanation given—or needed, since the war was a fresh memory for readers too. The second insert, “in full colour,” features marine life forms including sponges, gorgonians, corals, needlefish, scorpionfish and shark, and Dumas interfering as usual with some of them. Diver enterprises dominate the third insert which features caves, canyons, rescues, archaeological finds and sharks. This is a puzzling combination at first, but explained by a common factor of audacity and thrill which was central to the early promotion of scuba. “To abandon one’s everyday, normal environment and to descend thirty to sixty feet into the seas is not to travel very far, but it is an experience so charged with the feeling of leaving the familiar world behind us that it can be compared to the most remote expeditions” (Doukan 251). Sharks were at that point a simple synonym for danger and the unpredictable. Scenic features and marble columns constitute kinds of cultural encounter especially mediated in travel writing. As John Culbert puts it succinctly, “Travel writing is perpetually aimed at the experience of difference” (Culbert 345). Difference here is difference from on land, but also difference between the sorts of diving undertaken—locations, depths, extra equipment, hazards, attractions. The photographs of classical objects exhumed from underwater had a distinct context for divers, one Cousteau was pioneering—marine archaeology, just beginning to be established in the 1950s. Marine archaeology gave diving cultural respectability through the discovery, recuperation and rehabilitation of antiquities; that purposiveness also added a marine dimension to new historical understandings of the Mediterranean. Philippe Diolé, who co-authored with Cousteau and was a close associate of the Undersea Research Group, focused on marine archaeology as incontrovertible proof of the value of diving and the ways diving could establish material, mythic and spiritual connections between ancients and moderns. Frédéric Dumas too expanded the theme in his own single-authored memoir.⁶

Smaller but also supposedly dangerous creatures feature in the fourth insert—octopus, rays, groupers; man too appears as a dangerous creature, spearing fish and lobster. That satisfied the constituency of divers who still wanted to hunt, or who upheld an ethos of man the hunter. The last half dozen photographs in this section introduce an elegiac note: they depict a diver who died, a plane which crashed, the pilot’s body being raised. This was work that diver-writers handled tenderly, not least because they sometimes knew the person. War deaths relate to tragic diving accidents through the obvious waste of life: in war literature, the airman is often metonymic for the doomed. Philippe Diolé wrote a whole novel about the difficulties of freeing a war-drowned body.⁷ The very last image is “Dumas on the sea floor with a movie camera,” as if to remind you of the debt that still photography should owe to moving pictures, and the whole hybrid nexus of underwater texts, visual and written.

The photo-inserts, then, are framed by paratext; the List of Illustrations establishes themes through selection and grouping, and leaves the weight of explication to the captions—captions which are unusually lengthy. The paratexts introduce a story about photography—although some images are taken from movies, an important influence, the moving pictures are turned into stilled images, as if they were photographs. The photos published come from a much larger story—five thousand dives—originating from a group that sounds quite grand, the authors and members of the Undersea Research Group, who could also be described as Cousteau and his close associates. The war, audacity, marine life and mortality have narrative, but they are as much concept as story, transposed to underwater.

Different editions of The Silent World have different configurations of the photographs. The Reprint Society, for instance, published a pocket-sized edition in 1954 by arrangement with Hamish Hamilton, Cousteau’s English publisher. It keeps the insert arrangement, with fewer photographs but the same elaborating captions. The Cousteau family photograph is not a frontispiece, but the first image in the first insert; there are five (rather than four) inserts; 32 pages (sic) are black and white, with 12 in colour. The colour plates are at the centre—the heart—of the book, whereas in the Hamilton edition, they come after page 64, about two-fifths of the way through the book’s 148 pages. How significant are these differences? Is the different placing of images important to the way hybridity shapes the narrative? And what critical language best suits hybridity here? “The photographic frame is one that always allows for seepage” say Hughes and Noble, summarising the case for intertextuality (Hughes and Noble 6). What counts as a frame here, especially if framing text is physically distanced from the photograph to which it applies? The seepage of narrative into images and images into narrative is a given of phototextuality, but phototextual narrative is also hybrid in the sense that it connects autobiography to cultural stories. As Hughes and Noble observe, phototextual practice “is necessarily implicated with narratives of gender, sexuality, and racial and ethnic identities” (ibid). Personal historicity, as in auto/biography, engages with social tropes, though not all may be narrative. For instance, many underwater memoirs of this era show a diver on their dustjackets: this was a new construct, with variables which point to plotlines of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity—yet which braids those into a figure then thought to be potentially universalising—the diver.

Margaret Cohen has situated The Silent World in relation to a visual history of both film and photography—another intertextuality, or intervisuality. She says: “in the new cultural configurations enabling the public to view the undersea, photography and film played an outsized role, given the authority of these media as documentations of reality in the twentieth century” (Cohen, “Underwater Imagination” 51). She adds, “In depths never before glimpsed, let alone exhibited, where audiences had no reference points, the appeal to a preexisting imaginative repertoire was helpful in easing spectators into this strange new world” (ibid 54). It was, but there is also, I suggest, a new imaginative repertoire—hence the unusually lengthy captions, able to guide readers (as distinct from film audiences). Cohen emphasises the difficulties of underwater image-making common to both film and photography. These include the need for special waterproofed cameras; artificial lighting; the absence of orientating conventions such as the linear perspective and stable horizon embedded in Western art since the Renaissance. Cousteau’s captions draw attention particularly to how red light disappears with depth, so that colours are bluer or dark. Artificial light—typically a flash—restores that part of the spectrum. As Cousteau explains: “People who describe the enchanting riot of colour in tropical reef fairylands are talking about the environment down to perhaps twenty-five feet. [8m] Below that, even in sun-flooded tropical shallows, one can only see about half the real colour values. The sea is a bluing agent” (Silent World 140). Chapter 14, the last, starting on page 138 and titled “Where Blood Flows Green,” discusses image-making in detail, including some of the context for photographs that have been shown quite a bit earlier in the reading experience, so to revisit the images you have to track back. Cousteau describes a definitive moment:

Didi [i.e. Dumas] trained his reflector on the reef wall one hundred and sixty feet down [c. 50 m]. He snapped the light on. What an explosion! The beam exposed a dazzling harlequinade of colour dominated by sensational reds and oranges, as opulent as a Matisse. The living hues of the twilight world appeared for the first time since the creation of the world. We swam round hastily, feasting our eyes. The fish themselves could never have seen this before. Why were these rich colours placed where they could not be seen? Why were these colours of the deep the reds that were first to be filtered out in the top layers? What are the colours further down, where no light has ever penetrated? It set us off on a technical drive to make colour photography in a blue zone which begins roughly one hundred and fifty feet down. (Silent World 141)

One of the photos presents such a moment. The caption says: “An instant ago this niche in the Mediterranean under Sanary was the black of millennial time. Jacques Ertaud [a film director and friend of Cousteau] held the flash reflector, and when it flared was blinded momentarily and said, ‘I think it was red.’ Algae and sponges grow in the vault.”

One kind of hybridity here is two kinds of time: millennial time, which is dark, and art time, which is modern, like Matisse (a previous photo is compared to a Bonnard.) In the text and the caption we have a person, although puzzlingly they are different people: Dumas in the text, Ertaud in the caption, a discrepancy not explained. Both text and caption stress disturbance to vision and revelation. The instantaneity of light—Let there be light, biblically—is both blinding and revelatory: dazzling (in the text), blinded (in the caption); “feasting our eyes” in the text, but revealed in the image itself. Where Ertaud can’t see and thinks he saw red, we do see the profusion of reds, and thereby return to the present tense: algae and sponges grow in the vault. Revelation in the caption (which you read first) is closed down into identification of organisms. Revelation in the text (which you read later) leads to philosophical questions and a whole new creative direction, which is explained over four pages. In this account, Cousteau stresses how experimental it all was: “Nobody knew what combination of colour film and flash bulb would give true rendering. Submarine colour photographs had no existing laws; we had to find them out for ourselves” (Silent World 144). In the Ertaud photo, the camera is close to the boulders, but you could mistake the scale: the close-up shows a huge concept, another kind of hybridity, akin to microscopy’s revelation of something small containing extensive life.⁸

The Silent World uses photography for its conventional mimetic value—this is how it was—yet photographs of encounters become moments of marine experience which are symptomatic, potentially repeatable, even with moving subjects like fish. Linda Haggerty-Rugg has argued that photography “is not only about imbricated time or the construction of self-image […]. It is about place, disappeared places, and it allows those places to coexist with the places we inhabit now” (Haverty Rugg 238). Underwater memoirs offer a theoretical twist: these are disappeared places in the autobiographical sense (Cousteau’s memories), but they are also places appearing photographically for the first time, both in situ for the autobiographical diver-writer and for readers in relation to the biography of the sea. So the usual luggage of the past for photography is repacked into a carry-on of multimediality. Photography, film and text all work to make places appear, and to align their appearing to divers with their appearance to readers. Historicity can conflate words, photographs and film to a shared multimediality; it can also pause to explore the differences between images and words in representing the underwater world.

2 Tailliez: An Image in Two Forms

Hybridity is not always about connecting image and text: it can disconnect too. Cousteau’s close friend Philippe Tailliez published a memoir Plongées sans Cables in 1954, translated the same year with the English title To Hidden Depths. Its inclusion of photographs is flagged up on the cover. In a metaphor-heavy preface of six short paragraphs, five of which are single sentences, Tailliez connects restrictions on man, a Gulliver pegged to the soil, with ships’ mooring cables, as metaphysical entanglements. “Today divers have torn the cables away from the diving suit and the bathyscaphe, and have launched the dazzled human into the virgin density of the sea.” Like Cousteau’s dramatic, masculinist style, this prose positions scuba’s innovation as liberation. After a short fervent letter from Cousteau praising Tailliez and a Contents page, we have “Photographs.” This does not call itself a List and it shares some features with The Silent World. One is that the photographs are not numbered but located, for instance, “between pages 88 and 89.” Another is that “Photographs” favours the present tense, either in direct verbs—“Dumas captures a mérou”—or in present participles—“Propelling an octopus.” The entries for colour plates of marine life have no verbs, simply being “Moray eel,” “Lobster in a sunken ship,” “Damsel-fish in a field of gorgonians.” Human objects have verbs indicating something happening to them—“The smallest Roman anchor known, salvaged off Toulon”—and vessels are also placed verbally in relation to fields of action—the bathyscaphe F.N.R.S. 3 is “returning” or “ready.” “Gorgonians” (the caption in full) just are. Fish and other mobile marine life forms also just are, despite both the moray eel and the (very blurry!) lobster being shown in actively defensive positions—the moray agape, the lobster with antennae spread. It is humans who do things underwater, not marine life.

The memoir’s cover uses one of the photographs which wraps round the spine to the back, where it meets Cousteau’s short letter to Tailliez again. This photograph (Fig. 2) has three odd things about it. First, despite the presence of a fully silver-suited human, the caption describes it as a picture of the URG’s floodlights: “Flood light equipment of the Undersea Study and Research Group. Photograph taken without artificial light.” The second odd thing is that this photograph is one of eight colour plates, of which the other seven are all marine life subjects (eel, lobster, rockfish, sea-squirt, gorgonians with sponges and seaweed, gorgonians and damselfish). The third odd thing is that the photograph appears in two forms, in the text (a double-page spread) as an emphatic instance of natural light, but on the cover as an image clearly retouched, because the diver has a visible face and the colour tones are much lighter, which suggests artificial addition of light. That could have been done underwater—one shot with flash, one without, or on a different exposure. The cover diver’s eyes seem to look sideways and upwards, matching the apparent source of the extra light. But the face appears to have inked lines, surely post-production highlighting. So in subject, positioning and editing, the photograph has two forms; the differences between them seem show resistance to hybridity, in that post-production effects are not reconcilable with a claim to naturalism.

Fig. 2

Front cover, To Hidden Depths: a bowline on a bight?

Tailliez’s book is an autobiography—the beginning features his childhood, to which the end symbolically circles back—and also a professional memoir. The author’s name on the cover is not only his name but also his official position: To Hidden Depths is “By Captain Philippe Tailliez, Commander of the Undersea Research Group of the French Navy.” Like Cousteau’s accreditation as Captain (he was second-in-command to Tailliez), this formal title associates the diver-writer with scientific and military diving. That institutional inflection sits alongside the individuality usually presumed by autobiography. You assume the suited figure with floodlights on the cover is him, or I assumed it was, but on closer inspection the face looks drawn on and artificially lit, given how masks usually shade the wearer’s face. Normally all this would de-authenticate autobiography, but here it enforces a symbolic identity, the manfish. In other words, it doesn’t matter if Tailliez, someone else or an invented face is on the cover, because the subject going To Hidden Depths is generic. Ironically, diving without cables for humans is not incompatible with diving using lights that have cables, though no specificities of floodlights are discussed in the text. A photograph described in a caption as being of underwater lights is repurposed on the cover to manifest underwater illumination, and in both human and technological forms: we see the floodlights and the diver, and we see that the diver sees light. He has not the strongest of male gazes, but he grasps a floodlight. In its totality it almost matches his body length, a powerful symbol.

The discrepancies between the photograph in the text and its form on the cover raise some doubts about the metaphor of suturing. Is that term implying more skill, more clinical hygiene, more at stake (through evoking a bodily wound) than simple stitching? Tailliez’s cover image seems to lack any kind of suture, to either an accredited photographer, to an explanatory paratext or to the text. Suturing has been justified as a metaphor because of how it implies the incarnate body of the photographer, the invisible body taking the photograph (Schmitt, Photographer 11) which incites remembrance of that deictic presentness relevant to autobiography. Possibly the looping inherent in suturing is applicable, in terms of a gaze looping back, and the neatly looped cable in the cover image is a fine symbol of how visual technologies enable divers—and readers—to link to a better-seen underwater world. But in this case any autobiographical presentness of the image-taker is secondary to the biographical futurism of the floodlight-aided diver. It might be more helpful to suggest an alternative equivalent to suturing for biography—here of humans in the ocean, and the ocean as a newly visualizable place—perhaps in terms of nautical knots: the sheet bend, the clove hitch, the reef knot, the bowline all allow for looping and fixing. They allow too for human agency, holding power (variously), and undoing. One might then describe the untouched photograph in Tailliez’s text as having a simpler biographically inflected knot, like a clove hitch, and the cover image version as a bowline on a bight knot. If knot-tying skills are too remote from academia to import as metaphor, one might at least think about knots as a form of temporary, adjustable, variable connectors between different things that we do already recognise in the idiom of knotty problems.

Close reading may paradoxically block out theoretical readings, yet precision about forms defines what we think we are looking at, even in underwater life writing. A photograph—or other visuals like maps or diagrams—can appear in places of different significances, including front covers, back covers, jacket flaps, endpapers, frontispieces, inserts, insets and so on. With that power to wander between placings, images may find “anchorage points,” or attachment by knots, in captions and Lists of Illustrations, but those may have quite different textual resonances. The subtleties of those different affordances can seem miniscule in relation to what else a book can do, especially to a literary scholar, but particularly in a genre where hybridity of text and image is so important for establishing underwater life writing, they contribute to what I would like to call, combining Diolé and Dukan’s terms, hybridity as corroborating poetics.