A hundred billion bottles
Since writing the previous post, I've had occasion to think again about the message and its meaning. I've remembered that I wasn't in fact schooled by the New Critics, though my sensibility might suggest otherwise, but in post-modernism, in multiplicities of meaning, and in the sway of cultural materialism. Here, then, in deference to my schooling, are some alternative readings.
1. The message as evidence of a late twentieth-century crisis of masculinity. Jonathan, incapable of relationship and even of conversation, has recourse to a wild gesture of evasion. Like so many women of her generation, Mary waits in vain for the fulfilment of his promise. But he is in the end a child and not a man.
2. The message as modern tragedy - this is the reading Beth and Brad seem to advocate. In classical tragedy, pathos arises from the hero's innate greatness and nobility, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero is precisely unheroic, ordinary, even ignoble. He is frail and contemptible, neurotic, unreliable, self-absorbed and self-destructive. In a film version, Jonathan might be played by Paul Giamatti. Or, if it were a Wes Anderson film, by Jason Schwartzman.
3. The message as psychoanalytic biography. We know that the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 off the coast of Newfoundland, not far from Nova Scotia, so it's highly likely the note is connected to that episode in some way, certainly symbolically if not actually. Perhaps our protagonists worked together on the discovery. A tendre develops, but Mary's feelings are not reciprocated. In fact, Jonathan is gay, but the rigid cultural mores of rural Canada in the mid-1980s make it impossible for him to confess this to Mary. Instead, he promises friendship and corresondence, then returns to Nova Scotia, leaving her on Newfoundland. He writes as promised, but sending the letter feels like the final act of deception. Instead he encloses it in a bottle, thus 'bottling up' his emotional authenticity, and hurls it into the North Atlantic, in the general direction of both Mary and the shipwreck that brought them together, that now symbolizes both the 'wreckage' of Mary's hopes and the repression or 'burial' of Jonathan's true self.
4. The message as literary artifact. There are a number of internal contradictions in the structure of the message which give clues to its provenance. There's a shift between the first two lines and the second: "I hope we can keep in correspondence" carries a very different connotation from "I said I would write"; a prospective hope followed by a statement of past undertakings minimally fulfilled. This suggests the message was begun in one frame of mind, and finished in another. "Your friend always" has a note of finality, as though he didn't expect a continuance of the correspondence; which, indeed, his method of correspondence would seem to confirm. Finally the date, written diagonally across the bottom left corner: only a year, no day or month, which suggests that the message was destined to be a relic, consigned to the deep waters of history, rather than one of a series anchored in particularity.
5. The message as hoax. The name and date attached to the message are intended to deflect inquiry from its real author, Francis Bacon.