From disaster, a modern vision is born
On July 2, 1816, the French frigate Medusa, bound for Senegal, struck a reef. The incompetent captain and his cronies commandeered the lifeboats, casting 148 passengers and crew adrift on a makeshift raft. Thirteen days later, only 15 remained alive to be rescued. They had resorted to murder and cannibalism. (The lifeboat passengers trekked over 200 miles through the Senegalese desert to safety, aided by the Moors they so feared.)
A survivor from the raft, Alexandre Corréard, wrote a horrific account that indicted the corrupt French Restoration government and quickly became an international bestseller. Corréard's exposé in turn inspired Théodore Géricault's masterpiece, "The Raft of the Medusa," which won first prize at the Salon of 1819.
In "The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century" (Atlantic Monthly, $25), an erudite history that is as thrilling as any sea adventure, Jonathan Miles blends the political, personal, and artistic elements of the Medusa episode to paint a captivating portrait of a volatile era.
Miles, also the author of "David Jones: The Maker Unmade," spoke from his home in Paris.
Q: Was it the shipwreck or the painting that first interested you?
A: It was the painting. I was looking at it in the Louvre - this was post 9/11 and before the Iraq invasion - and it struck me that the Medusa story had echoes for our time, with the West being steered towards disaster by leaders who don't understand what they are doing and, in the case of [President George W.] Bush, for very mixed motives. Then I read about Corréard, a marvelous, combative figure - also an irritating little twerp, but a very necessary one - who kept battering at the doors of the establishment. All of that hooked me into the story.
Q: The book opens with Géricault carrying a human head wrapped in muslin back to his Paris studio. Why did you choose that moment?
A: In the back of my mind I had the beginning of Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando," where she's slashing at the head of a Moor. So why not begin with Géricault getting these cadavers, dismembered body parts, chopped-off heads of criminals back from various hospitals in Paris? After all, one of the most interesting features of the story is how Géricault put himself on that raft by littering his studio with these stinking body fragments.
Q: But he cleaned up the image?
A: Géricault couldn't paint the figures as they were and be exhibited at the Salon. He had to compromise, but in so doing he produced something that's in a way more significant as a poetic metaphor. He presents this image of people striving for a speck on the horizon that probably isn't there. In romantic terms, of course, it is asking whether the whole Western tradition - religion, the lot - is a grasping for something that isn't there. It's a very modern painting in that sense, because it poses that question and catches those figures in a moment of perpetual longing. In the painting they're never rescued. The image quickly became iconic and was used countless times by political cartoonists, every time a government was in trouble, so it was a wise decision of his to transcend the story
Q: Can you think of an equivalent image in America or Britain?
A: It's difficult. [J.M.W.] Turner's "Slave Ship" probably, although it's more about the atmospheric world it inhabits. Probably in Britain it happened more in a literary way - Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Wreck of the Deutschland," something like that. In American terms, I think of artists who were marginalized, black artists who were painting the reality of Harlem in the interwar period. Certainly the social realists touched that nerve ending that Géricault did.
Q: Are there echoes in the story of Robert Scott's disastrous polar expedition?
A: I don't know enough about Scott to say. If he represents the best of British pluck, the French expedition was very much the opposite, which is why the Brits loved it so much. They thought, well, hell, we've just trashed these people at Waterloo and now look what they're up to, the good old British Navy would never let that happen. So while the painting wasn't such a hit in Paris, it was a huge success when it went to London but a bit less so when it went to Dublin.
Q: Where they turned it into a circus sideshow?
A: [Laughs.] That's right. One of the sad things was that I couldn't find much on how it was received in Dublin or anything further about Kearney, this wonderful Irish Lawrence of Arabia figure in the desert [who helped to rescue the survivors]. We wouldn't know anything of him today if it weren't for the wreck of the Medusa and the various accounts of the shipwrecked people he saved.
Q: Did anything in your research really surprise you?
A: I was struck by the fact that there's very little written about Restoration France and also by the lengths to which people will go to save themselves, through cowardice or expedient cannibalism. I was also initially surprised by Géricault's relationship with his aunt by marriage. Poor guy, he was obviously head over heels in love with her. He produced hundreds of erotic drawings inspired by his longing and, having gone into self-imposed exile, he returned to the arms of this wonderful woman, who then produced his child, whom he would never see. That's so important, I think: how an artist can take personal loss and through it understand a far greater misery.
Q: Even slavery, which Géricault later took as a subject?
A: Yes. It's just sad that Géricault didn't live to complete his painting of the slave auction, which would have been a much more brutal work than "The Raft of the Medusa."
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 