Abstract
Long before technology and prevailing military strategy allowed the invention of the modern submarine, the dream of a vehicle to traverse the mysterious underwater realm stirred the popular imagination. From the very start, this vision was inseparable from the submarine's potential as a weapon of war, capable of destroying enemy ships and conquering underwater territory. However, despite its usage as a military weapon in history and its presence as a fascinating leitmotif in (popular) culture, literature detailing the submarine as a complex multi-discursive construction is scarce. It is therefore encouraging that John Medhurst's Sub Culture manages to capture this ominous weapon's broad appeal and to succinctly narrate the history of the modern submarine and its shifting representations in culture.
In his study, Medhurst sets out ‘to construct a holistic portrait of the submarine in which geo-strategic politics, technology, science and culture interact’ (17). Composed of six chapters, each dealing with a different cultural-historical ‘afterlife’ of the submarine, the study juxtaposes a historical narrative of the roles and functions of the actual submarine with its manifold cultural translations. Medhurst distinguishes six ‘afterlives’: ‘the submarine as a weapon of war, a political instrument, a doomsday device, a vehicle for scientific exploration, a product of fantasy and imagination, and a context for sexism and homophobia’ (16-17).
Whereas submarines at first had been catastrophic prototypes that never resurfaced from their maiden voyages and had few military successes, they quickly developed into the German Navy's most lethal weapon during both World Wars. Although cases of submarines firing on enemy targets after 1945 are highly exceptional (for example, HMS Conqueror and PNS Hangor), the submarine has continued to be of political and strategic importance. Its mere presence in the ocean functioned as a deterrent in the (post-)Cold War's nuclear arms race and stands at the centre of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Discussing a myriad of submarine narratives, the first two chapters not only meticulously detail this technological, historical and political development, but also make the case that submarine fiction progressed parallel to this extraliterary context.
Although nuclear submarines carrying missiles capable of ‘destroy[ing] human civilization’ (91) have patrolled the world's oceans since the 1960s, they have never had to unleash nuclear Armageddon. However, as the third chapter makes clear, it has often come down to last-minute interventions to prevent world destruction. Sailing in a potential doomsday device has consequently been a major source of inspiration for submarine fiction to invent stories of strained tensions between officers on whom the world's survival depends. Moreover, submarine fiction has been particularly productive in thinking of dramatic scenarios about where the doctrine of mutual assured destruction could ultimately lead.
However, the submarine's history is not exclusively about death and destruction. Starting with a description of Jules Verne's seminal work, the fourth chapter tells the story of a vehicle that offered hitherto unimaginable possibilities of scientific exploration and its cultural reverberations. The fifth chapter goes a step further by leaving Earth's oceans and recounts narratives exploring fantastical worlds. In these narratives, the submarine can ‘transgress boundaries, both physical and spiritual’ (148), which is best exemplified by probably the most well-known submarine: The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
The final chapter focuses not on a specific ‘afterlife’, but on the submarine as a setting that is fraught with sexism and homophobia. Actual submarine service was long regarded as a military branch that could not allow the integration of gender equality. Fiction, Sub Culture states, ‘mirrors the general history of the last seventy years’ (171). In fact, it was not until the 2021 British television series Vigil ‘that the gender and sexual conventions of the genre were challenged' (186).
Undoubtedly, the study's greatest strength lies in the impressive corpus discussed. The reader is taken on a journey through submarine fiction, ranging from Verne's 1870 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the 2021 television series Vigil. The focus may be on films and novels, but Medhurst does justice to the genre's multimedial ubiquity by including references to video games, a play, submarine attractions in amusement parks and an art installation. Despite its breadth, the corpus chiefly contains British and American material, seldom broadening the perspective to other cultures. This limitation is surprising, given the author's remark that different cultures ‘have explored the genre in a manner that reflects the position of the submarine within their history and culture’ (15). Yet when Sub Culture discusses examples from Japanese culture, such as Arpeggio of Blue Steel, or the first Indian submarine movie, The Ghazi Attack, it does not expand on how these representations differ from the anglophone imagination.
Moreover, the literary-stylistic analysis of the narratives could be further expanded. Rather than unravelling the specifics of what at several points is called ‘an identifiable narrative genre’ (13), Medhurst's primary focus is on how submarine fiction reflects its historical context. In discussing Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, for example, he acknowledges the novel and film adaptation ‘as the foundation stone and template of a modern subgenre’ that ‘require critical examination’ (78). Similarly, the German novel Das Boot is heralded as the genre's ‘supreme work of art’ (189) and its film adaptation as ‘the gold standard of the submarine film’ (47). The subsequent discussions, however, primarily summarise the content and examine the authors’ backgrounds instead of the manner in which their narratives contributed to the literary-stylistic establishment of the genre.
Sub Culture's overall discussion would thus have benefitted from a literary-stylistic and visual-aesthetic analysis of its corpus to further sustain its compelling assessments of the submarine's historical - and continuing - importance. This cultural-critical dimension might have drawn inspiration from previous landmark studies on submarine fiction, which are, surprisingly, absent from Sub Culture's bibliography (for example, Michael L. Hadley's Count Not the Dead, Linda Maria Koldau's Mythos U-Boot and Duncan Redford's The Submarine). 1
In sum, Sub Culture offers a very readable introduction to the submarine's role and significance in military, scientific and (geo)political history, as well as a captivating synthesis of an impressive number of (anglophone) submarine narratives. However, the study loses focus and cogency in its attempt to connect submarine fiction with underlying literary-stylistic and visual-aesthetic characteristics and cultural discourses. While this book is highly recommended to anyone interested in maritime and military history, experts might consider reading it in addition to previous seminal studies on the specific aesthetic characteristics of submarine fiction. Nevertheless, the findings shed light on an otherwise commonly neglected topic and may open many ways to include submarine fiction in critical-cultural analyses of society.