Ultramarine – Mariette Navarro

[Deep Vellum; 2025]

Tr. from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus

Like all tales of the sea, Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine is really a story about trade, and it is so in a threefold sense: (1) trade as commerce, the movement of goods across vast distances in a global marketplace; (2) trade as profession, here raised to the level of a calling; and (3) trade as bargain, as in the countless folktales of mariners pledging their souls to the devil in exchange for gold or safety in a storm. In this novel, the bargain is less a matter of the soul than of the body, of the sovereignty over one’s body that the sailor signs away in exchange not only for wages but for another, less tangible object—a certain slippery notion of freedom, the contours of which this essay will trace.

The plot of Ultramarine is strikingly simple, resembling a seaman’s yarn or one of the less Disney-friendly fairy tales out of the Brothers Grimm. Halfway between Brittany and the West Indies, a cargo ship captain renowned for her rigidity in command and steadiness at the helm decides, for the first time in her life, to break protocol. She stops the engines, turns off the radar signal, and permits her crew to take a swim in the calm waters of the Atlantic, several kilometers deep and hundreds of miles from shore. Twenty men go out in the lifeboat, and twenty-one come back. The addition is a blonde boy with glassy eyes who wanders the halls of the ship in a mute trance. Perhaps he is a stowaway, perhaps a collective delusion, or perhaps something stranger. As the captain investigates the boy’s origins, other bizarre events plague the voyage: an impenetrable fog bank envelopes the ship; the engines slow to a steady crawl despite showing no signs of damage; a rising panic sweeps through crew and officers alike, prompting unexpected disclosures and indiscretions.

Like Melville and Conrad before her, Navarro uses the enclosed, laboratory-like conditions of the ship at sea to stage an existential drama that aspires to universal significance. Such a setting for a first novel likely came naturally to the longtime playwright and dramaturg, who often works with milieus as minimal and intimate as her prose. “There are the living, the dead, and sailors,” she writes, and we get the sense that neither the profession nor the men who take it up have changed much since Odysseus returned from Troy. Navarro takes care to situate the novel historically, invoking climate change, EU immigration policy, Chinese manufacturing, and iPhone cameras. But for all that, she has not given us a finely-wrought realist milieu. There are no detailed descriptions of the work done onboard nor of the instruments employed, as one might find in Balzac or Zola. Instead, as in a tastefully minimalist blackbox theater, we get just enough set-dressing and costuming to locate ourselves in a place and time—a French cargo ship in the 2010s—though we could just as easily imagine the major beats of the plot proceeding aboard a sixteenth-century Spanish galleon, a nineteenth-century American whaling vessel, or an Ancient Greek trireme.

“There are the living, the dead, and sailors.” This phrase appears as a refrain and in variation several times throughout the novel, and any account of Ultramarine will turn on how one interprets it, on what it means to be a “sailor.” As the captain sees it, “sailor” is not so much a profession as a total mode of being-in-the-world, which she defines by its opposition to the other two options of (mere) life and (mere) death. In her estimation, there is little difference between the living and the dead when compared with sailors. Both of the former groups are “stuck on land,” “anchor[ed] down”; the living just wiggle their toes a bit more than the dead. The sailor by contrast is never at home but in a state of “perpetual departure,” even if he has never seen the sea or been more than a stone’s throw from the place he was born. This drive towards an “infinite horizon” means that “all attachment of course [is] impossible,” an essential solitude that dooms him to live among others but never with others. The sailor is a figure of subjectivity in and as flux, aspiring to the condition of the ever-changing sea.

This romantic ideal of the sailor’s life is figured most intensely when the men leave their ship behind (along with their clothes and their names) to swim in the open ocean. At first, they sidestroke in a ring around the lifeboat they’ve taken a safe distance from ship, each in turn losing his sense of time to an overwhelming “present,” and in that present achieving a deep identification of consciousness with his body. “They’ve left the sounds the earth and of the surface: they discover the music of their own blood, a drumming to point of jubilation, percussion that could lead them to a trance. Dark sound of held breaths, symphony of lightness.” The scene recalls that paradigmatic modernist image that first appeared in Matisse’s masterpiece La Danse, with its ring of five nudes clasping arms in a ritualistic celebration of fertility, a motif that would be repeated in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”: “Supple and turbulent, a ring of men / Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn…”

In Matisse, Stravinsky, and Stevens, the ring of dancers represents a lost, idealized form of organic collectivity from which the monad-man of modernity has been tragically severed. Navarro’s swim, by contrast, is a radically private and privatizing experience, such that each swimmer is returned not to pre-modern community, but instead to the nurturing isolation of the womb, becoming even more indifferent to the presence and fate of his companions than he already was: “As they slid in, each man took up his own space, recreated his own circle… They talk and sing without listening to one another. They drift further and further apart.” In the initial moments of pleasure, they retreat into private fantasies and memories, “to each his secret image of his freedom.” And when the terror of the miles of water beneath their feet strikes, each man faces it alone. Even as they suffer the same terror in the same place, they do not experience it together in any but the most superficial sense; the third person plural indicates only bodily adjacency. When the captain, who alone has remained aboard the ship, asks herself, “Does a shipwreck give rise to new forms of solidarity?”, the answer implied by this little drama unfolding beneath her is a resigned “no”—though she may not be ready to see this. Among true sailors, at least, there may be practical cooperation towards a finite goal, but no authentic collectivity, nothing that lasts.

The word “freedom” appears only once in Ultramarine, in the passage quoted above. Still, I want to propose that the interrogation of a certain notion of freedom—freedom as the refusal of attachment, as the embrace of ontological homelessness and perpetual departure, a radically negative freedom “purchased” at the expense of all particular commitments besides its own commitment to non-commitment—is the primary concern of the novel. It is precisely at the moment when the sailors realize their properly sailorly freedom in its purest form that a mysterious Other emerges in their midst, like the virgin birth of their onanistic orgy. The blonde boy, the twenty-first man of the crew, is disturbing because of how much he resembles the rest: one more anonymous, private man among a group of anonymous, private men, noticed only because he was the odd-one-out in a headcount after the group returned to the lifeboat. This boy takes the constitutive negativity of the sailor to its logical extreme: he has no name, carries no papers, answers to no authority, comes and goes as he pleases, and will not enter into any relation of mutual recognition with anyone. By a dialectical twist, the sailor-as-existential-hero finds his doppelgänger in this hollowed-out figure of what Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” the subject stripped of all social content.

The first half of the novel—leading up to the moment in which the captain confronts this stranger, who is both her double and her ideal realized, with a mix of fear and unavowable identification—is extraordinary. The prose is rhythmic and nearly seamless, effortlessly blending abstract speculations with sensuous description, giving flesh to concepts while channeling a whole mythic tradition. The translation is handled deftly by the art critic Eve Hill-Agnus, whose own work contains the same blend of high-conceptuality and deep physicality. If Ultramarine’s first half achieves its aesthetic near-perfection at the expense of historical specificity, the second half (paradoxically, the half in which the sailors seem to depart from normal time and space and enter a supernatural plane) struggles to absorb history back into the manifest content of the work.

When sudden fog obscures the horizon in blank placelessness, and the engines slow to a crawl for no apparent reason, resisting all intervention, the sailors released from their usual labor have a moment to turn inwards and reflect upon the life they have chosen for themselves. In a representative scene, the first mate passes his eyes over a navigation map and tells us what he sees:

A route along which dozens of merchant ships cross paths each day. A route for exchanging metal boxes between the two sides of the Atlantic and creating needs among those who won’t have the means to satisfy them. A route like a net. Do other sailors ask themselves, as he does, the same questions almost daily: how do we get out? How do we not get trapped? How do we keep making a living from the sea and from these journeys without selling or buying anything?

The sailor’s dream of freedom, he realizes, is not only impoverished on its own terms; it has also been co-opted by capital as a kind of libidinal bribe, a fantasy that brings men out to sea promising escape but only trapping them more deeply in the very networks from which they flee. He is in the most literal sense Marx’s “Träger,” or “bearer,” of value, carrying these indistinguishable steel containers full of commodities around the globe in pursuit of another’s profit. Ripped from their context, there is something of an adolescent radicalism to such passages, the clarity of the nineteen-year-old coming off the late shift at a shitty job and understanding, really understanding, perhaps for the first time, that by participating in the wage system he is helping to reproduce to the structures that dominate him, and so on. Still, such moments and such questions are a necessary point of departure, the beginning of the long road to class consciousness, and should not be dismissed out of hand.

One does not expect this crew to turn pirate and sail off into the sunset. Ultramarine is just not that kind of book, and Navarro’s cargo ship is not Eisenstein’s Potemkin. But once the above questions emerge, they exert a pressure upon the narrative machine that must find a release valve. As soon as the matter of the class struggle is raised with a degree of historical specificity—the formation and deformation of subjects in globalized neoliberal capitalism, the role that a certain sub-class of subjects must be made to play in order to uphold that regime of accumulation—the text obscures the social relation behind its doppelgänger: the sexual relation, which takes up its familiar ideological role of resolving aesthetically (and always imperfectly) what are properly political-economic contradictions.

On the edge of a breakdown and dealing with stress that has tightened her muscles like rubber bands, the captain requests a massage from her chief mate, who is also the medical officer. This encounter turns into sex and then into emotional outburst; she sheds a flood of tears and he offers a stoic shoulder to cry on. Shortly after, the engines recover and the fog lifts. The surface reading of this scene is, of course, that the supernatural “stuckness” of the boat (which, Navarro is clear, was a “real” event within the course of the narrative and not a subjective illusion of the captain’s) is somehow connected to the captain’s repression of her emotions, which are themselves connected to the recent death of her beloved father. The mate’s vulgar Marxism is thus neatly displaced by the novel’s vulgar Freudianism, and Navarro quickly wraps things up with a landing in the Caribbean and the captain’s decision to take some time off. It is not coincidental that she takes this vacation on La Désirade, the same island “paradise” where Columbus first landed. If the gender politics seem bad here, the colonial and class politics don’t look much better.

The more generous reading, perhaps, is that this is yet another exploration by Navarro of the many ideological traps that capital lays to keep its bearers in line. She has written a narrative of nascent class-consciousness dying on the vine, as has surely happened countless times to countless sailors on such voyages. Perhaps the degree of our dissatisfaction with these final pages, the clear artificiality of this conservative resolution to a deeply felt human problem, in short the obvious and frankly embarrassing failure of traditional novelistic strategies to provide of ideological closure in this particular case, is itself a measure of the work’s success at a level beyond the merely aesthetic. The novel must end, the narrative tension must be released like that of the captain’s muscles, but that release can only be a temporary finger-in-the-dam as flood waters gather force.

Jon Repetti is a writer and critic living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LARB, Review31, Critical Quarterly, and elsewhere.