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Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Oil, Water, World, Wax, Mind: Jean Rolin’s Ormuz

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Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-8874106
Publisher site
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Abstract

This essay considers the unworldly setting of Jean Rolin’s novel Ormuz (2013), composed around the attempt by a shadowy character named Wax to swim across the Strait of Hormuz. This twenty-one-nautical-mile-wide stretch of sea separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, through which is shipped 35 percent of the world’s petroleum, is a waterway of the utmost geopolitical importance, its harbors built not for dreamy swimmers but for giant oil tankers and the elaborate maritime-military infrastructure assuring their passage. Such a setting would seem to stand as a bleak other to the novel as genre. Yet if one thinks of the history of the novel as inseparable from that of carbon capitalism (as Amitav Ghosh has argued), such a claim is reversed—this site where powerful strategic interests drive the flow of oil, capital, and power is the place of the continual making and unmaking, by night and day, of the world order, and thereby of the modern novel. The essay reflects on what Wax’s weird wager—as an emblem for a remarkable narrative wager—may owe to such intertexts as Google, Descartes’s Meditations, and Jules Verne’s Tour du monde, and argues for reading Ormuz as an ecological novel for our times.

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jun 1, 2021

References

  • Status of Oil Pollution in the Arabian Gulf and Shatt Al-Arab Estuary: A Review
    Al-Saad, H. T. Salman, N. A. Subramanian, V.
  • Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours—notes de lecture
    Chesnaux, Jean Raymond, François
  • Glissements de terrain: Les enquêtes post-militantes de Jean Rolin
    Colon, Églantine James, Alison Viart, Dominique
  • Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel
    Ghosh, Amitav
  • How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World’s Electricity
    Jones, Nicola
  • Oil and Being; or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger
    Pendakis, Andrew Carlson, Adam Szeman, Imre Wilson, Sheena
  • Missing
    Ravindranathan, Thangam
  • Descartes’ Wax: Discovering the Nature of Mind
    Wagner, Stephen L.
  • Marc Augé, Jean Rolin, and the Mapping of (Non-)Place in Modern France
    Welch, Edward
  • How to Read for Oil
    Wenzel, Jennifer
  • Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing: Hybrid Assessment Combining Process and Economic Input-Output Methods
    Williams, Eric
  • Oil Spills.” In “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” by Patricia Yaeger with contributions by Laurie Shannon, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, and Imre Szeman
    Ziser, Michael
  • Status of Oil Pollution in the Arabian Gulf and Shatt Al-Arab Estuary: A Review
    Al-Saad, H. T. Salman, N. A. Subramanian, V.
  • Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours—notes de lecture
    Chesnaux, Jean Raymond, François
  • Glissements de terrain: Les enquêtes post-militantes de Jean Rolin
    Colon, Églantine James, Alison Viart, Dominique
  • Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel
    Ghosh, Amitav
  • How to Stop Data Centres from Gobbling Up the World’s Electricity
    Jones, Nicola
  • Oil and Being; or, How to Run a Pipeline through Heidegger
    Pendakis, Andrew Carlson, Adam Szeman, Imre Wilson, Sheena
  • Missing
    Ravindranathan, Thangam
  • Descartes’ Wax: Discovering the Nature of Mind
    Wagner, Stephen L.
  • Marc Augé, Jean Rolin, and the Mapping of (Non-)Place in Modern France
    Welch, Edward
  • How to Read for Oil
    Wenzel, Jennifer
  • Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing: Hybrid Assessment Combining Process and Economic Input-Output Methods
    Williams, Eric
  • Oil Spills.” In “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” by Patricia Yaeger with contributions by Laurie Shannon, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, and Imre Szeman
    Ziser, Michael