Feedback Sheet
GUID: 2149150M
Academic Session: 2022-2023
Semester: Spring 2023
Programme: English Literature
Course: ENGLIT 4128 Fantasies of Energy
Essay Title (if applicable): Midterm Close Read
Other assessment:*
indicate presentation, literature review, short work or another other form
First Marker: RW
Comments:
Brilliant. Great work indeed. Excellent close analysis, clearly laid out within three insightful
categories of analysis. A harvesting of evidence from across the text, marshalled to your claims, that
move beyond the thematic and into the level of formal analysis. Good sparing use of secondary
criticism. Well written. Just great!
Second Marker: HI
Comments:
Wow – this was a really impressive assignment. There is a carefulness here where you really approach
the texts (both literary and critical) on their own terms, thinking about them at the formal and
substantive level. I found the sections where you explored the metatextual references somewhat less
compelling, but this is a minor critique of a fantastic paper. Well done.
Penalty Y/N:
AGREED MARK: A3
*Use Letter Grade only
The following close reading examines Fritz Leiber’s 1964 ecohorror, “The Black
Gondolier,” with a particular focus on repetition, anthropomorphism of the non-human, and
intertextuality as metaphor. Examination of these three points reveals a crisis of representation
provoked by oil’s status as a ‘hyperobject’ existing across space and time on a massively
dispersed scale in relation to humans (Morton 2013: 1). Amitav Ghosh notes that writing about
oil has a tendency to ‘trip fiction into incoherence,’ I argue that the root of this incoherence as it
appears in “The Black Gondolier” is ultimately due to oil’s non-human nature being
unintelligible from a human perspective, leading Leiber to anthropomorphise oil in order to make
sense of its unhuman attributes (Ghosh 1992: 30).
Leiber’s short story opens with the image of ‘a broken down trailer beside an oil well on
the bank of a canal in Venice near the café La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks
from St. Mark’s Plaza’ (Leiber 1964: 1). A page later, the reader is informed that locals ‘don’t
call the plaza St. Mark’s’ because ‘the Venice isn’t Venice, Italy, but Venice, USA’ (Leiber
1964: 2). Invoking Europe’s Venice, a city famously sinking into its surrounding waters, before
revealing the story’s actual setting serves to acknowledge the fragility and futility of human
attempts to master the non-human while also eliciting an anxiety of submersion which permeates
the text. Variations of the words ‘submerge,’ ‘drown,’ and ‘engulf’ are frequently repeated
throughout the text (Leiber 1964: 9, 11, 13, 14, 17). In contrast to the sea which threatens to
engulf the original Venice, it is the ‘sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles’ that has here ‘reached
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out a pseudopod… and swallowed Venice up’ (Leiber 1964: 2). Los Angeles, with its
‘speedway,’ endless miles of ‘highway,’ and suburban ‘subdivision’ neighbourhoods, represents
the material realisation of American petroculture (Leiber 1964: 2, 8, 9, 14). This reading is
bolstered by the narrator’s assertion that the Black Gondola, subject of a ballad in which ‘the
Black Gondola’ll… get… you… yet,’ is symbolic of ‘our modern industrial civilisation - and so,
very easily, for petroleum too’ (Leiber 1964: 7). A fear of being absorbed or inescapably
immersed in petroculture (or for Daloway, in literal oil) is the key source of tension in Leiber’s
ecohorror.
Oil, along with the culture and landscape it produces, permeates every level of the text.
‘Oil wells’ and ‘oil derricks’ are dotted across the Californian landscape and the text itself
(Leiber 1964: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 17). The narrative is punctuated by the ‘stench of the
petroleum,’ ‘oil’s omnipresent reek,’ and the ‘stench of oil’ (Leiber 1964: 4, 6, 15). Even in
Daloway’s dreams, ‘the reek of the oil is strong’ and ‘grows stronger’ then ‘stronger still suffocatingly so’ as he is pulled deeper into the canal by the Black Gondola (Leiber 1964: 10,
11). Variations of the word ‘black’ are repeated 77 times while the word ‘dark’ makes 18
appearances across as many pages (Leiber 1964: 1-18). Most of the narrative takes place at night,
it is ‘on lonely nights’ the narrator remembers the dreams Daloway relayed to him, dreams which
Daloway describes as occurring during the ‘dark night’ when ‘the street lights are all out,’ there
are ‘no stars in the sky,’ and ‘no light shows’ in the windows of houses (Leiber 1964: 1, 10).
This language works to envelop the reader, like Daloway, in ‘a great unending caress’ of black
oily darkness (Leiber 1964: 11). The constant repetition of words mirrors the repetitive sound of
‘the slow throb of the oil pump’ which in turn is echoed in ‘the swish and the faint fluid-muffled
thump of the gondolier’s pole’ in Daloway’s dream (Leiber 1964: 10). The repetitive sound of a
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pump extracting oil is also a key signifier through which the narrator anthropomorphises oil,
describing the constant throbbing of oil derricks as ‘pulsing the beat of a vast subterranean
chemic heart’ (Leiber 1964: 6).
The text engages in a near constant anthropomorphisation of the non-human. The city of
Los Angeles is described in the language of biology and ascribed human intentionality as it
reaches out to swallow Venice. Oil wells stand ‘cheek-by-jowl’ with houses and shacks, ‘lazily
ducking and lifting their angularly oval metal heads’ (Leiber 1964: 6, 1). Leiber’s use of a ghost
story format to examine humanity’s relation to oil engages in a further level of
anthropomorphism. Chelsea Davis highlights the way in which vengeful non-human entities in
ecohorror tend to ‘respond to our species in the style of our species,’ arguing that any time ‘we
deem a certain place to be haunted, we are engaging in anthropomorphism’ (Davis 2021: 111).
Central to the story is an inversion of the relationship between humanity and oil which hinges on
the humanisation of crude oil’s ‘utter black inhumanity’ (Leiber 1964: 4). Daloway gives a more
literal kind of life to ‘the life-blood of industry and the modern world’ as he explains to the
narrator that oil has a ‘will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness’ (Leiber
1964: 5). Daloway’s theory takes the assertion that ‘oil is the lifeblood of modern technological
culture’ to its next logical step, ‘positing behind the blood a heart - and behind the heart, a brain’
(Leiber 1964: 5). Through Daloway’s conception of oil, the entire planet becomes
anthropomorphised as it guards an oily consciousness ‘within its thick stony skull and earthen
flesh’ (Leiber 1964: 5). Daloway’s theory of oil is concisely summarised by the narrator as the
idea that ‘man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man’ (Leiber 1964: 5). However,
even as the relationship between humanity and oil is inverted, it remains defined by human
intentionality. In order for non-human oil to be represented in the text, it must be placed within a
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framework of human understanding and display human characteristics like intelligence,
intentionality, and inhumane ‘malignancy’ (Leiber 1964: 17).
The text of “The Black Gondolier” can be read as analogous to oil itself. Crude oil is
‘created from the lush vegetation and animal fats of the Carboniferous and adjoining periods,
holding in itself the black essence of all life that had ever been, constituting in fact a great deepdigged black graveyard of the ultimate eldritch past with blackest ghosts’ (Leiber 1964: 5). Just
as crude oil is created through the transmutation of ancient matter, the short story is composed
through a reconfiguration of words, ideas, and texts that preceded it. This analogy is
encapsulated in the narrator’s discussion of ‘the Ballad of the Black Gondola,’ a ‘crude artificial
ballad’ composed of a ‘half-plagiarised melange of ill-fitting cadences’ (Leiber 1964: 7,
emphasis added). Contained within its lyrics is the poetry of Yeats and Lindsay - ‘with a few
changes of word’ - set to a melody from Brecht and Weill’s The Three-Penny Opera (Leiber
1964: 7). Across the wider text are oblique allusions to Greek mythology and Freudian dream
analysis along with specific references to Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Donkey” (1931), H. G.
Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623), Murray’s God of the Witches
(1930) and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1816) (Leiber 1964: 1, 6, 7, 8).
Each work referenced in the text of “The Black Gondolier” echoes a thematic or narrative
element of the short story. War of the Worlds, like “The Black Gondolier,” is recounted by an
anonymous narrator. One of Macbeth’s most striking images is of ‘marching firewood,’ the
primary fuel source of Shakespeare’s age, symbolising the protagonist’s imminent demise
(Shannon et al. 2011: 308). Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is subtitled “A Vision in a Dream” and
depicts a ‘sacred river’ which runs ‘through caverns… down to a sunless sea,’ imagery mirrored
in Daloway’s descriptions of the oil-filled Grand Canal in his dreams leading to ‘a great rocky
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cavern filled with oil’ (Coleridge [1816] 2018: 848; Leiber 1964: 11). “Kubla Khan” also
engages in the anthropomorphisation of the non-human, the earth is described as ‘breathing’ in
‘fast thick pants’ before forcing ‘a mighty fountain’ from its depths (Coleridge [1816] 2018:
848). This image also appears in “The Black Gondola” with a ‘hissing wheeze from the oil well’
as a ‘narrow stream of petroleum was sprayed’ (Leiber 1964: 17). “Kubla Khan” can be read as
confronting the boundaries of creative expression and literary representation, limitations also
encountered by Leiber in his attempt to textually depict crude oil.
Though “The Black Gondolier” appears to represent an ‘oil encounter,’ its reliance on
anthropomorphisation to achieve this demonstrates that oil can only attain literary depiction
through the framework of human understanding (Ghosh 1992: 29). In this way, “The Black
Gondolier” confronts the limitations of human thought and expression. In his attempt to examine
the relationship between oil and humanity, Leiber reveals oil to be a hyperobject, ‘massively
distributed in time and space relative to humans’ (Morton 2013: 1). This unfathomable scope of
oil, textually encountered from a limited human perspective in “The Black Gondolier,” provokes
a terror and awe reminiscent of the Romantic sublime.
Word Count: 1498
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Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. [1816] 2018. ‘Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment’, in
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. by M. Ferguson, M. Salter, and T. Kendall, 6th edn
(New York: W. W. Norton), pp. 848-849
Davis, Chelsea. 2021. ‘An Unhaunted Landscape’, in Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the
Anthropocene, ed. by C. Tidwell and C. Soles (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press)
Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. ‘Petrofiction’, New Republic, 2 March 1992, pp. 29-34.
Leiber, Fritz. 1964. ‘The Black Gondolier’, in Over The Edge, ed. by A. Derleth (Sauk City:
Arkham House)
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)
Shannon, Laurie, Vin Nardizzi, Ken Hiltner, Saree Makdisi, Michael Ziser, Imre Szeman and
Patricia Yaeger. 2011. ‘Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal,
Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and other Energy Sources’, PMLA, 126.2: 305-326
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