Two Ways to Reach the Very End of the World

The Titan tragedy and "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"

“Death closes all: but something ere the end,
some work of noble note, may yet be done,
not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”
- from “Ulysses”, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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I’ve not seen the new Indiana Jones movie. Nor do I plan to. But we should imagine Tennyson’s Ulysses—or Odysseus, if you prefer—somewhat like our latest Indy: a grizzled adventurer, out for one last caper. Twenty years of swashbuckling in the Iliad and Odyssey make peaceful rule in Ithaca feel idle. He’ll risk it all for one last great expedition, and sail to the world’s end: “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:/It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.”

The Titan submersible tragedy brought Tennyson to mind often this week. Shahzada and Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, Stockton Rush—five deaths leaving behind four shattered families, and who knows how many friends, to grieve a loss as awful as it is strange. I choked up in the car yesterday when I heard the Dawoods were from Surbiton, just up the road from me. I wasn’t sure why.

The story has generated much talk about “adventure”. OceanGate’s statement on the deaths described the men—although I can’t help but think of them as four men and a boy—as “true explorers” who “shared a distinct spirit of adventure”. Some—mostly fellow conservative types—have framed the story as a kind of litmus test. Anything less than outright admiration for the venture suggests that you’re lacking in ambition, that you’re captive to the “Safe Space” mindset, that you’ve been Longhoused.

I confess, I’m not so sure. Bethel McGrew wrote earlier in the week about how people were callously dancing on the watery graves of the Titan passengers out of sheer contempt for their wealth, and I share her disgust at such reactions. But I also share her unease with claims that these men died glorious deaths in the name of high adventure, and her gut feeling that this whole trip seems to be simply a dreadful waste. I do not think the normalisation of “Titanic tourism” would be a net good for humanity.

But again: I’m not sure. The story is tragic, however you look at it. The question is what kind of tragedy. Weighing this up in my mind, something else came to mind alongside Tennyson:: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Reepicheep, Caspian, and the World’s End

Throughout the fifth Chronicle of Narnia, the crew of the Dawn Treader seek the rescue of seven lost lords. But along the way, the mouse Reepicheep—a bursting embodiment of medieval gallantry and chivalry—is captivated by another goal: the thought of reaching “The Very End of the World.” No feat could be more worthy of honour.

“That’s how I’ve always imagined it—the World like a great round table and the waters of all the oceans endlessly pouring over the edge. The ship will tip up—stand on her head—for one moment we shall see over the edge—and then down, down, the rush, the speed—”

“And what do you think will be waiting for us at the bottom, eh?” said Drinian.

“Aslan’s country, perhaps,” said the Mouse, its eyes shining. “Or perhaps there isn’t any bottom. Perhaps it goes down for ever and ever. But whatever it is, won’t it be worth anything just to have looked for one moment beyond the edge of the world.”

Reepicheep is one of the few characters in the Narniad who arguably never puts a foot wrong. He seems like a perfect example of an excess virtue straying into vice, yet Lewis never puts him through real consequences for his actions—something he is more than willing to do normally. In fact, he gets his heart’s desire in Dawn Treader, sailing off into the endless high adventure of Aslan’s country to study war no more.

By rights, Reepicheep should seem a pompous ass, but never does—unlike Bree, the noble but haughty titular horse of The Horse and His Boy. He is the chivalric ideal. Lewis once wrote that Dawn Treader was, broadly, about “the spiritual life”—yet Reepicheep seems, to me, to have always already arrived at the end of the spiritual life. We should all feel dwarfed by the Mouse.

Reepicheep shows us one way to reach the Very End of the World. But at the climax of Dawn Treader, we see another—one less admirable.