While for twenty-first-century biology, the idea of the distinct, bounded organism has given way to more comprehensive approaches that embrace the abundant diversity of life-forms and prioritise complex modes of (co-)existence, the habit of conceiving the world as made up of tidy and bounded entities is a difficult one to break. Considering the influential role of literary fiction in shaping folk ontologies, this paper argues that, while the modern novel in general has contributed to the construction of the anatomic and autonomous individual (as discussed by Ian Watt and Georg Lukács), bodies of water have historically served as productive imaginative spaces for contemplating a more fluid corporeality. Through an analysis of literary works such as Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris” (1961) and Frank Schätzing’s “Der Schwarm” (2004), it will be discussed how the (primordial) ocean has served as an allegory for the ever-evolving nature of life, giving rise to an infinite variety of forms that challenge any essentialist understanding of life. A comparative examination of both works, in turn, mirrors the historical shift fromessentialist approaches to categorizing and delineating life to what the philosopher of biology John Dupré termed a “promiscuous realism”: the acknowledgment that the structure of the world is profoundly complex, and that any ‘cutout’ represents just one possibility among numerous others.