Why did 'Titanic' loom so large in our imaginations?

CULTURE SHOCK:IN THE LATE 1930s, Alfred Hitchcock considered making a film based on the sinking of Titanicbut concluded that it would not be possible because it would lack the essential ingredient of his movies: suspense. Those of us who were bored rigid by James Cameron's leaden cinematic epic may be inclined to agree.

But, of course, the lack of any inherent aesthetic attraction did nothing to prevent the calamity from becoming a cultural phenomenon. The first movie version, Saved from the Titanic, was released in May 1912, a month after the disaster, starring a survivor, Dorothy Gibson. The first full-length feature movie, Night and Ice, began filming in Germany that June.

Ever since, Titanichas had a place in popular culture that is utterly disproportionate to the scale of its undoubted horror. Who now remembers the sinking of Doña Pazoff the Philippines in 1987, with a loss of life almost three times greater than that on the Titanic? Why should one particular maritime tragedy occupy such a huge imaginative space? In general terms, Titanic's cultural power lies in its adaptability. It functions as an image of the delusions of technological omnipotence, as a harbinger of the coming doom of the first World War, as a parable of class-ridden society, and as a crucible of masculinity (brave men going down with the ship, unspeakable cads worming their way on to the lifeboats).

Of the more specific reasons, the oddest is that this catastrophe was already in the intellectual air before it actually unfolded. In the cultural realm, Titanicwas literally an accident waiting to happen. Famously, Morgan Robertson's otherwise undistinguished novella Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, tells the story of a huge unsinkable transatlantic liner (the name is almost right, and Robertson's detailed descriptions of the ship's size and engineering are uncannily so) that is struck by an iceberg on an April evening and sinks with enormous loss of life. It was published in 1898.

Twelve years earlier, the journalist WT Stead published The Sinking of a Modern Liner, which anticipated the disaster in some detail. (Much good his foresight did him: Stead, a passenger, died when Titanicsank.) These premonitions were rediscovered after the event and cast as eerie warnings. But, as John Wilson Foster has put it, "Quite soon the spoken or unspoken assumption abroad was that the Titanictragedy had been waiting to happen, not just in physical but also in metaphysical terms." In a culture saturated in the classics, Titanicwas quickly assimilated to Greek tragedy as the inevitable nemesis that followed the hubris implied in the doom-filled word "unsinkable". It was not, in a sense, an accident at all but a secular version of the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, God's punishment of human presumption.

The great expression of this feeling is Thomas Hardy's poem The Convergence of the Twain, written for a charity fundraising event for the survivors. His chillingly bleak reflections on human vanity and nature's indifference can hardly have cheered the bereaved. His image of the mirrors in the ship's luxury quarters has the force of a medieval memento mori: "Over the mirrors meant / To glass the opulent / The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent."

The second reason for Titanic's cultural resonance is that remembering it also served as a form of forgetting. George Orwell wrote that "nothing in the whole [first World] war shocked me so deeply as the loss of the Titanica few years earlier." Perhaps it was easier for the mind to grasp the comparatively small horror of the sinking ship than to plumb the fathomless depths of the war's depravity.

In Ireland, and particularly in Belfast, these two forces – the power of premonition and the retrospective meaning given to the sinking by the war – came together in a particular way. Titanicis the harbinger of the Somme. In Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, it serves for the soldiers as an omen of their doom: "Every nail we hammered into the Titanic, we'll die the same amount in this cursed war."

Yet perhaps it is from Belfast, too, that the most aesthetically resonant uses of Titanichave come. The disaster feeds what Ciaran Carson in The Star Factorycalls "labyrinthine anecdotes, moral tales, recovered memories, retrospective omens", all of which have a tendency to artistic bombast. But in Belfast the story was raw and sensitive, bound up in shame and fear and a degree of self-pity.

There was pressure not to speak about it all. The Belfast playwright St John Ervine, for example, wrote a play in 1922 called The Ship. It is clearly about the sinking of Titanic. But he felt obliged to change the liner's name to The Magnificentand have it sail from a fictional English port. Even the city's memorial to its Titanicdead was moved in the 1950s to an obscure corner of the City Hall grounds. Uniquely, Belfast wanted to forget Titanic.

Paradoxically, this very reticence has been an artistic boon, working against the grandiloquence the tragedy tends to evoke. One of the few contemporary artists who has been able to draw on Titanic's power while retaining a sense of artistic discretion is Derek Mahon, whose grandfather worked as a boilermaker at Harland and Wolff. Mahon has contemplated the disaster in a series of poems, including the haunting After the Titanic. But the most potent is surely A Refusal to Mourn, about his grandfather's last days on "a small farmhouse / At the edge of a new estate". The poem is a meticulous evocation of boredom, loneliness and displacement. Mahon imagines the man's very name being erased in time from his gravestone by the "astringent" Irish rain. And then, almost unnoticed, he evokes Titanic: "And his boilers lie like tombs / In the mud of the sea bed / Till the next ice age comes." Subtle, quiet and profound, Mahon's image is everything that artistic uses of Titanictend not to be.