Down to the Sea in Crypts: Container Shipping, Haunted Shores, and the Ends of the World in Contemporary Writing

As they undertake the globe-spanning work of trade and commodity distribution, container ships are often said to exist in the strangely hidden and largely inaccessible networks characteristic of capitalist modernity, literalising globalisation’s metaphors of seamless flow. But what is the effect when this flow is ruptured, and the container ship or the shipping container come to a sudden halt? This article analyses literary texts that reflect on moments when container ships become eerily immobile in coastal waters and when shipping containers make unexpected and unsettling landfall in ports and on beaches. Such sequences hinge on a gothic imaginary that locates the uncanny qualities of the shipping industry not in its haunting invisibility, but in the horrors that attend the too tangible, too material, too abundant presence of ships and their containers. The texts examined here see in the immobility of shipping a suggestive figure for two forms of apocalypse: the end of the world and the end of narrative possibility. Relatedly, the shipping container functions as a hyper-modern iteration of the gothic crypt, an ambivalent site of death and powerfully inscrutable, an object that will not yield the secrets it conveys. Authors under discussion in this article include Horatio Clare, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Emily St. John Mandel, and Lucy Wood.