Climate change, Covid-19 and other stories…: The Titanic metaphor as a parable to depict modern shipwrecks

With his eponymous 1997 blockbuster, James Cameron pulled the wreck of Titanic out of oblivion. By elevating ancient news into a modern myth (Barthes 1957), he made it truly unsinkable. Few may ignore the name of the infamous ship, be it for its tragic fate or the romance Cameron attached to it, even those who have, somehow, not seen the movie. This article first establishes the fact that the Titanic narrative has become shared knowledge: it has been made history, as a fluctuating combination of true and invented events. This hybrid texture makes it an elastic outline that can be reapplied metaphorically to a variety of contexts or, to borrow Turner’s terminology (Turner 1996), a working parable to provide understanding for unprecedented situations. Based on a selection of occurrences retrieved from reference corpora of English, and following the precepts of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff/Johnson 1999, 2003; Lakoff 1993; Langacker 1987, among others), we argue that the Titanic as a shipwreck metaphor exhibits canonical target domains attached to WATER (Crépin 2023) such as FEAR and DANGER, as well as specific features such as CLASS, HUBRIS, or RESPONSIBILITY. The study of Titanic metaphors will also serve as a case in point to investigate the element of fascination that is at the heart – not only of the ocean – but of the metaphorical process more broadly, as we, as individuals, are more likely to retell the stories we are drawn to, and which are apt to teach us something about ourselves. A hundred years after its loss, the Titanic has become something else. It has survived as a narrative, an allegory, which since 2010 has been reapplied to a variety of topical domains of which this article presents a few examples.