Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972)

Excerpt from The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat, p.66:

“To like ships is first and foremost to like a house, a superlative one since it is unremittingly closed, and not at all vague sailings into the unknown: a ship is a habitat before being a means of transport. And sure enough, all the ships in Jules Verne are perfectly cubby-holes, and the vastness of their circumnavigation further increases the bliss of their closure, the perfection of their inner humanity. The Nautilus is this regards is the most desirable of all caves: the enjoyment of being enclosed reaches its paroxysm when, from the bosom of this unbroken inwardness, it is possible to watch, through a large window-pane the outside vagueness of the waters, thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite.”

“In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship is then no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a traveling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures. The object that is the true opposite of Verne’s Nautilus is Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat, the boat which say ‘I’, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psycho-analysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of explorations.”