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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Climate change, Covid-19 and other stories… the Titanic Metaphor as a parable to depict modern shipwreck

Résumé

With his 1997 all-time eponymous blockbuster, James Cameron pulled the wreck of Titanic out of oblivion. By elevating ancient news into a modern myth (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957), he made it truly in unsinkable. Few may ignore the name of the infamous ship, be it for its tragic fate or the sappy romance Cameron attached to it. Even those who have somehow not seen the movie are familiar with the names of Rose and Jack, performed by actors who have since become equally iconic. This presentation will first establish the fact that the Titanic narrative has become shared knowledge: it has been made history, as a fluctuant combination of true and invented events. This hybrid texture makes it an elastic outline that can be reapplied metaphorically in a variety of contexts, or, to borrow Turner’s terminology, a working parable (The Literary Mind, 1996) to provide understanding for unprecedented situations. In fact, Cameron had greater ambition for his film than being just a successful (sentimental) historical drama. In an interview for National Geographic dated 2012 Cameron argues: Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well, where have we heard that one before? (…) You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be climate change. We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn. In other words, his adaptation was always meant to be allegorical in essence. And this might be the reason for its unabating resonance ever since. As the modern world is daunted by the prospect of collective shipwreck- ecological, economic, pandemic, nuclear, or all of the above- the Titanic metaphor resurfaces as a multimodal, polysemous vehicle to depict humanity’s vulnerability in the face of icebergs ahead. Since 2020, analogies between disorganised societies and sinking ships have become commonplace. Online corpora such as the COCA and the Coronavirus Corpus are replete with references to metaphorical shipwrecks, and most specifically to the Titanic disaster: “I feel like the Titanic, and we have hit the iceberg, and we're trying to make decisions of what time we should have the band play"; “For all practical purposes, the world's economy is a ship called Titanic and its iceberg bears the name Corona”. Cartoons found in the media are equally eloquent, some of them with icebergs shaped like the Coronavirus, while others emphasise the parallel between Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis and the shortage of lifeboats. In fact, the Titanic metaphor has been used for over a decade to depict political hubris in the context of Brexit or the Trump presidency, and has served as an SOS campaign to warn against climate change. This paper will present and examine several instances of the Titanic metaphor printed in anglophone media between 2012 and 2024, with a focus on the metaphorical entailments that are being hidden or highlighted in each case (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Based on a selection of occurrences retrieved from reference corpora of English, and as part of a wider reflection on water metaphors, we will argue that the Titanic as a shipwreck metaphor exhibits canonical target domains attached to WATER (Crépin, 2021, 2023) such as FEAR and DANGER, as well as specific features such as CLASS, HUBRIS or MORAL DILEMMA. The study of Titanic metaphors will also serve as a case in point to investigate the element of fascination that is at the heart- not only of the ocean- but of the metaphorical process more broadly, as we as individuals are more likely to retell the stories we are drawn to, and which are apt to teach us something about ourselves.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-04542039 , version 1 (11-04-2024)

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Paternité

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  • HAL Id : hal-04542039 , version 1

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Denis Jamet, Caroline Crépin. Climate change, Covid-19 and other stories… the Titanic Metaphor as a parable to depict modern shipwreck. Waterphors 2024, Denis Jamet; Caroline Crépin; Bérengère Lafiandra, Apr 2024, Lyon, France. ⟨hal-04542039⟩
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