Flood stories have a long and diverse history: Noah, Gilgamesh, Atlantis, Viracocha, Khun Borom,
and so on.
Paul Gustave Doré, French Illustrator, "The Deluge," circa 1870Although flood stories are usually associated with mythology and ancient texts, they were also popular during the early years of the twentieth century, and particularly in science fiction. In “
The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909–19,” Nick Yablon, a professor of American Studies at University of Iowa, argues that turn-of-the-century flood fantasies can be read as “representations of the actual flow of capital across the urban landscape.” He cites repetitive references to “the oceanic” in sci-fi from the period as “one of the principal modes for registering the immensity and intensity of development and demolition.”
Yablon identifies a series of Progressive Era stories in which New York is destroyed graphically by flood. One of the most interesting of these stories is Thomas Vivian and Grena Bennett’s “The Tilting Island,” published in 1909. In this short story, the sheer weight of urban construction, all amassed on one end of Manhattan, creates a fault line in the island that essentially causes it to “tilt.” In the end, the entire downtown portion of Manhattan gradually sinks into the ocean.
I find Yablon’s treatment of what he calls “the association between the periodic overflowing of oceans and the periodic overflowing of capital” really fascinating. Although he doesn’t extend his analysis beyond the early twentieth century, the connections he makes between the liquidity of capital and a persistent cultural fascination with flood fantasies can, I think, be applied to our own era. I’m thinking particularly about global warming and the fears it has elicited about massive, widespread coastal flooding due to a global rise in sea level.
Google Earth image projecting impact on San Francisco of 100 meter rise in global sea level, 2007Attempts to understand flood stories generally straddle three perspectives. The first embraces a literal reading of flood stories: God flooded the planet in the past, and he/she/it will likely do it again. This take is scoffed at by the non-religious, but it is by far the most popular understanding of flood stories in the world today.
A second, more scientific, approach looks for evidence in the natural environment to explain flood stories. Adherents of this approach present a series of environmental hypotheses: rapid melting of glaciers associated with the retreat of ice ages, massive tsunamis caused by enormous volcanic eruptions, general global disorder spawned by the impact of a comet or meteor, etc. that may account for the presence of floods in so many ancient texts and oral traditions. Like the first set of flood "analysts," those who take this tack tend to believe in the actuality of flooding, though my favorite scientific approach is one of the few that does not. This take argues that flood myths were created by ancient people who found seashells and other fossils or oceanic materials where they shouldn't be (on the tops of mountains, in fields located miles away from large or flowing bodies of water). Lacking a modern understanding of plate tectonics, these people came up with the most plausible explanation available: a huge flood, epic enough to wash seashells onto mountain tops.
The third approach is more literary, or perhaps psychological. In this reading, cultures reaching a certain level of extravagance become plagued by guilt. They indulge in fantasies of retribution and atonement, a yearning for justice in dreams of deluge. The flood from this angle both punishes and cleanses, and while its source is external, the cause is the culture's own transgressions against nature, themselves, and each other.
This last perspective on the flood seems to me to resonate most with Yablon's reading and our own historical moment. While I am "convinced" of the "existence" of global warming, I do not think the question of why Americans and other Westerners are so fascinated by the phenomenon (and, one might argue persuasively, desirous of it) has been adequately addressed. Beneath the (rather thin to my eye) language of environmental sustainability and social responsibility that circulates these days, I detect a much darker sentiment. There is a sense, perhaps even amongst prosperous green-product peddlers, that something about modern life has gone terribly wrong, so wrong that no attempt to amend the system from within stands a chance of doing any good. Enter the flood, of our own making, external to us, epic in scale, vengeful in spirit, cleansing, deadly, and overall just.
Extending Yablon's notion of the liquidity of capital, I like the idea that the flood might not be divine in origin, or even natural, but could instead be capital itself, overflowing. Capital, the great external force, the method of our destruction rather than the source of our sins?
