Sea Change : The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville [1 ed.] 9789401211864, 9789042039049

Citation preview

Sea Change

The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Spatial Practices

An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature

20

General Editors:

Christoph Ehland (Universität Paderborn) Chris Thurgar-Dawson (Teesside University) Editorial Board:

Christine Berberich Catrin Gersdorf Jan Hewitt Peter Merriman Ralph Pordzik Merle Tönnies Founding Editors:

Robert Burden Stephan Kohl

Sea Change

The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Christoph Singer

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover image: Untitled 13. Artist: Mark Dorf. www.mdorf.com The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1871-689X ISBN: 978-90-420-3904-9 E-book ISBN: 978-94-012-1186-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands

The Spatial Practices Series The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified national or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geography. Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes and topographies. Robert Burden Stephan Kohl Founding Editors

Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

9

Transformative Shores – An Introduction

11

The Shore: From Geography to Literature On the Literary Shore Introducing Beach Trialectics in Banville’s The Sea

27 33 46

Ambiguity

67

The Semantics of the Limit: Trichotomous Boundaries On Distant Shores – Locating the Utopian Beach Imaginary Shores and Fraying Peripheries The Nostalgic Shore in Alex Garland’s The Beach

70 82 95 106

Liminality

119

Liminal Shores The Liminal Shore in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Peripheral Shorelines: Beaches and Semiospheres Semiospheres in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

126 134 155 161

Transgression

191

The Shore as a Figure of the Third Fluid Transgressions in Shakespeare’s Macbeth On Robinson Crusoe’s Transgressive Shores From Heterotopia to Camp: The Politics of the Shore The Heterotopian Shore in Golding’s Lord of the Flies Fighting Ambiguity on the Shore: The Beach as Camp

200 204 211 222 231 247

4.7

4.8 4.9

Crossing the Epistemic Abyss: Narrating the Other Side in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake A Second Genesis: The Shorelines of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost Post-Apocalyptic Shores and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

253

261 269

5

Conclusion: Epistemic Anxieties

279

6

Works Cited

287

7

Index

299




Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank Christoph Ehland, who has guided and mentored me since my beginnings as a student of English Literature. Ralph Pordzik’s invaluable inspiration and knowledge equally had a great influence. Thank you. My gratitude goes to Cornelia Wächter and Roy Pinkerton whose support goes way beyond this book. Gordon Stewart and HansPeter Söder made possible an inspiring stay at the University of Virginia. Thank you. The encouragement and support of Leonie Rosenberg and my family was elemental in the completion of this project. Thank you. C.S.

1 Transformative Shores – An Introduction The little waves rise and plash, the ginger dog barks. And my life is changed forever. (John Banville, The Sea: 33) Hamm: The waves, how are the waves? Clov: The waves? [He turns the telescope on the waves] Lead. (Samuel Beckett, Endgame: 107)

The shore defies definition. The shore deconstructs and rebuilds, is the beginning or end of a journey, initiates or stops mobility. Here survivors of shipwrecks, like Robinson Crusoe, escape their death; and the weary and tired, like Max Morden, wade back into the womb of nature. The shore is transformation spatialized. While the strip between land and water spatially and symbolically establishes seemingly strict binaries, dichotomies such as land/sea, inside/outside, culture/nature, life/death, subject/other, the shore itself is not afflicted with such rigid distinctions. As a border the shore is an abstraction of the discursive spaces surrounding it and “functions as a third element. It is an ‘inbetween’ – a ‘space between’” (de Certeau 1984: 127). The dichotomies evoked by this liminal line are superficial, and do not withstand scrutiny. Only at first sight do the shores appear to be distinctive dividers of land and sea, yet they are both. To talk about the shore means to talk about the sea and the associations and connotations attached to this vast space. To analyze the shore is also to shed light on the island or the continent it encloses, as well as the individuals or societies living there. Still, the shore as a discursive setting is more than merely a synecdochical or metonymical signifier of the adjacent spaces. It is rather a contact zone, and, hence, the discursive focal point where these discourses, represented by travellers, beachcombers, shipwrecked sailors, tourists, tricksters, etc., encounter, inform and deconstruct each other. Every participant in the respective discourses brings his or her culturally constructed convictions to the coastline; each involves a unique perspective and semiosphere, to use Yuri Lotman’s term; each contains and produces distinctive liminal

12

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

perspectives. The discourses represented on such transitional spaces as the shore are ever changing, parasitic,1 and uncontainable by hegemonic reductionism. How can the following study be located and mapped in the field of literary and critical discourses? While the where of this study are literary representations of shores, beaches, coasts and riverbanks, the who this study is concerned with are protagonists encountering moments of crisis, transgression, and sometimes transformation in this specific locale. The how, as will be explained in detail below, is interdisciplinary the combining focus, however, is instances of thirding, that is discourses deconstructing or opposing dialectical thinking, represented by terms such as liminality, transgression, and its spatial representation2 in form of semiospheres and heterotopias. The footprint on the beach, encountered by Robinson Crusoe, is the perfect metaphor for what the shore as literary setting stands for, 1

Michel Serres uses the concept of the parasite in various ways (cf. Serres 2007) to illustrate the constant re-arrangements and changes of any existing systems. Firstly, the parasite can be read quite literally as somebody or something living off somebody or something else. The parasite is the benefactor of somebody else’s work or effort. As such, the parasite is explicitly not in a symbiosis with its other. Where a symbiosis works on dualistic, binary terms, the parasite is the representative of a third way. In the former concept both included entities benefit from each other, whereas in the later concept only one, the parasite, is gaining from this relationship. This does not mean, however, that the subject afflicted with a parasite is not a parasite himself: “In other words, any given position in the ternary model is, ad libitum, parasitic. Who is the third? Someone, anyone” (Serres 2007: 55). According to Serres, the chain of parasitism is an infinite cascade of relations. He argues: The theory of relations slowly emerges. […] The parasitic series is an irreversible chain, going down the slope, like the river […] We know the end of the process – disorder, noise, chaos, the sea” (Serres 2007: 169). The importance of this theory lies in its pointing out the impossibility of a stable and perfectly structured system. Petra Gehring argues: “Die besondere Leistungsfähigkeit der Figur des Parasiten liegt darin, dass sie mit Komplexität befrachtet werden kann, ohne ins Beliebige oder Verschwommene abzugleiten. [The strength of the figure of the parasite is its capacity to deal with complexities without ending up vague or fuzzy (my translation)] (Gehring 2010: 184).

2

As such the study is of course a product of the Spatial Turn. The “term ‘spatial turn’ seems to have been coined at the end of the 1980s by the human geographer Edward W. Soja, although it was used with programmatic force from the mid-1990s onward (Tönnies and Grimm 2010: 99). For an encompassing analysis of the term Spatial Turn see Döring and Thielman (2008).

Transformative Shores

13

and what is, as this comparative study proposes, a paradigmatic element of this narrative structure. For Robinson Crusoe, surviving the shipwreck, the shoreline is a safe, if strange, haven. Here he transgresses near-death to regain his life. Later, this very abyss, yet again, spits out death on to the shore, in the form of the other, the “cannibal”. This binary alignment of land (life/I) and sea (death/Other) is essentialist, reductionist, and racist in nature. Robinson nurses this worldview, which is ingrained in his identity. His attempts remain futile since in Robinson Crusoe the shore is also the very setting of the imprinted footprint, a metonymical symbol, a sign of difference that decentres and deconstructs the fabric of Robinson’s pre-established mindset. At the very moment Robinson encounters an element of the third the symbolic grain of sand is the epistemic excess his binary thinking is unable to integrate. As Michel Serres argues: “A third exists before the second. A third exists before the other. [...] There is always a mediate, a middle, an intermediary” (Serres 2007: 63). The system is challenged, needs to be readjusted, and remains in constant motion. On a textual level these fissures in the discourse produce an opening that might, at least partly, explain the lasting fascination with Robinson Crusoe. The reasons are two-fold. Firstly, it elevates a blatantly racist and explicitly colonial text from mere propaganda into an attempted discussion about colonialism. Secondly, these openings in the fictionally constructed semiosphere of the narrator, that is Robinson’s, open the text to allow a discursive contact zone with the semiosphere of the implied and real reader. The footprint is the parasitic noise, the epistemic excess that initiates a discursive conflict and hinders binary thinking from being ossified, and keeps semiospheres in contact and motion. The terms beach and shore are often used synonymously. Yet both are not of the same kind. Alex Lockwood asks: How is a beach different from a shore? They are not a binary (shore/beach), but a movement along an axis, where the beach is a commodity, to be possessed, something to note on the hotel brochure [...]. The shore is a more ambivalent representation, one that hints towards what has been extinguished [...]. The shore is not pure wilderness: both meanings are constructed by culture through its discourse, and the shore is as much a cultural articulation as the beach. (Lockwood 2012: 266)

14

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

This distinction between the shore3 as representing a wilderness untouched by mankind, and the beach as the culturally appropriated space is certainly important from a cultural perspective.4 When regarding literary representations of shorelines the distinction is obviously of a different nature, since both the shore and the beach are symbolic productions. Nonetheless the difference in semantics remains important. The moment Robinson Crusoe leaves the sea he arrives at the shore, representing a foreign and wild space to him. This shore he turns increasingly into a beach. “Space appears […] as a practiced place” to apply Michel de Certeau’s distinction from his study The Practice of Everyday Life (1984: 130).5 This transformation from shore to beach does not, however, last forever. Once Robinson encounters the footprint in the sand, “his” island turns into a space of threat and fear, the beach transforms back into shore. The same double nature of the coast is discernible in John Banville’s novel The Sea. The setting initially is a beach in its purest sense, a place where tourists flock to enjoy the summer holidays and escape their daily routines. Yet nature does take its toll: when Chloe and Myles drown in the water the seemingly safe space proves that ultimately it cannot be 3

According to Rachel Carson, the “seashores of the world may be divided into three basic types: the rugged shores of rock, the sand beaches, and the coral reefs and all their associated features” (Carson 1998: ix).

4

An encompassing definition of the beach from natural sciences reads as follows: “In the science of beaches, a biologist defines the beach by its principal natural biological function ‘a habitat’ for birds, turtles, shellfish, and meiofauna (microscopic organisms that live between the sand grains). Geologists and engineers define a beach as a deposit of sediment ranging in size from sand to boulders, formed by waves along a coastline. The beach is said to extend from the dune or vegetation line to an offshore depth at which the sediment is rarely moved and reworked by wave energy except during major storms. The underwater, offshore extension of the beach, the shoreface, commonly extends to a water depth of 30 to 65ft (10 to 20 m) off sandy shores” (Pilkey, Neal, et.al. 2011: 27).

5

Yi-Fu Tuan shares a similar perspective on space and place. Yet, his approach is problematic in the sense that he regards place as a static concept. Rainer Emig argues that “one would perhaps shrink back from linking such insights with Tuan’s wish to find in the relation of human beings to space universal and eternal truths. Tuan’s perspective is also limiting in its assertion of the static nature of place” (Emig 2010: 175). Michel de Certeau proposes place as a concept containing the “univocity or stability of a ‘proper’” (de Certeau 1984: 117).

Transformative Shores

15

controlled. In a study that argues for a dynamic understanding of space and place, such a firmly held distinction cannot be maintained rigidly, as the examples above show. Rainer Emig argues: “Space can become place, but place can also become space again [...]. Space is not only produced, but can also be erased, at least as a meaningful symbolic concept” (Emig 2010: 178). In consequence, the respective terms beach and shore will be used as indicators of the characters’ synchronic perception thereof. Shore and beach are two possible realizations of a single given space. These constant transformations of the cultural inscriptions do affect the perception of the liminal structures thereof. The closer one examines the shore, the more obvious become the liminal structures it produces, incorporates, and transforms. The liminalities at hand are manifold and imply an equal number of possible transgressions. Their abundance reduces and dissolves the constructed distance between I/Other, inside/outside. On the literary shorelines discourses of difference are in constant motion, and perpetual transformation. The implications and realizations of trialectic elements in regard to this setting are diverse and will be at the centre of this study.6 The shore is an essential element of the triad sea/shore/land. Yet it is more than just the line dividing and separating both. This setting functions according to its very own rules. As a result, the shores and the adjacent islands are often presented as a canvas upon which hopes and horrors are projected. These hopes can be colonial, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach at Falesá or Treasure Island; the inherent promises can refer to infinite childhood as presented in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan; or they represent the hope for grace and overcoming grief, as in John Banville’s The Sea. However, the horrors of societies are equally played out on these distant shores, as seen in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nevil Shute’s On the Shore, or 6

In For Space Doreen Massey argues that while structuralism (re-)introduced space as an analytical category its insistence on an atemporal, synchronic perspective opposed an understanding of space as a dynamic entity: “such structures rob the objects to which they refer of their inherent dynamism. They do indeed try to ‘hold the world still’ but this eliminates also any possibility of real change. […] It was evidently undeniable that the world moves and changes. Yet what structuralism famously made of this was a conceptualization of the world in terms of an invariant model on the one hand and variable history on the other” (Massey 2005: 38).

16

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. This setting offers itself as a literary testing ground on which the dreams and nightmares are synchronically realized by the respective societies. The literary shore represents a “spatial utopia […] in which the transformation of social relations and political institutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body” (Jameson 1991: 160). This study focuses, as has been said, on liminalities and transgression, borders and border writing, with a special focus on processes of thirding and trialectics, as they appear on and close to literary shores. The attempt is to map, to use Stallybrass and White’s concept, the shore as a [...] domain[.] of transgression where place, body, group identity and subjectivity interconnect. Points of antagonism, overlap and intersection between the high and the low, the classical and its ‘Other’, provide some of the richest and most powerful symbolic dissonances in the culture. (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 25)

I will follow Stallybrass and White’s argument, that the “high/ low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order [are connected in such a way that] transgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of the domains may have major consequences in the others” (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 3). This intrinsic connection of the various fields and their literal or figurative representations is rhizomic, rather than part of an argumentative trajectory. This study is interested in the breaks and fissures, the inconclusive, counter-intuitive element in these structures.7 The texts are quite diverse with respect to their dates of publication, their themes, and their cultural backgrounds. Yet they do not only share the setting, which informs each and every text in its very own, idiosyncratic way. More importantly, as this study hopes to show, the underlying similarities in themes and tone, in structures and motives are more deeply embedded and further reaching than a look at the contemporary trend of shore-fictions may indicate. The discursive 7

This multiplicity of meaning affects the identity of persons and places. Massey argues: “Just as personal identities are argued to be multiple, shifting, possibly unbounded, so also, it is argued here, are the identities of place” (Massey 1994: 7).

Transformative Shores

17

force that equally informs all texts is, to pick up the coinage by Edward Soja, trialectics (cf. 1996), the deconstruction of binary oppositions, the dissemination of culturally produced dichotomies such as I/Other, inside/outside, good/bad, centre/periphery, and so forth. These dichotomies hinted at here and their relation to the shore will be analyzed in depth below, in relation to John of Gaunt’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. In all cases the literary shore is presented in as a discursive setting, a third space that invites utopian thinking and almost always results in a dystopian or apocalyptic catastrophe. When intending to identify a paradigmatic group of narratives, one comes dangerously close to establishing a reductionist, structuralist narrative outline. And, yes, as has been repeatedly argued (Stephanides and Basnett 2008; Glaser 1996), many of the texts do follow such a pre-established narrative structure, for example the Robinsonade. This time-honoured narrative template does occur again and again: a storm/crisis forces the protagonist to run her or his ship/ society aground, she or he is stranded on a foreign shore where a fight for physical, psychological and spiritual survival ensues, the other in the form of a native inhabitant or the animalistic spirits of the self is encountered. The vilified other is subdued, missionized, killed or befriended. The noble savage elevates the traveller to a more spiritual and moral life. He then may go back to his own society and bestow the goods of wisdom upon his family and fellow citizens. Prospero, Robinson, Gulliver, Hythloday, Marlow, Morden complete this quest into the unknown. From a structuralist point of view Joseph Campbell’s narrative formula8 of the Hero With a Thousand Faces (2003) 8

J.M. Coetzee discusses this aspect of re-writing such a myth over and over again. He presents Robinson as somebody who initially regards these rewrites as an act of cannibalism: “When the first bands of plagiarists and imitators descended upon his island history and foisted on the public their own feigned stories of the castaway life, they seemed to him no more or less than a horde of cannibals falling upon his own flesh, that is to say, his life; and he did not scruple to say so. When I defended myself against the cannibals, who sought to strike me down and roast me and devour me, he wrote, I thought I defended myself against the thing itself. Little did I guess, he wrote, that these cannibals were but figures of a more devilish voracity, that would gnaw at the very substance of truth. But now, reflecting further, there begins to creep into his breast a touch of fellow-feeling for his imitators. For it seems to him now that there are but a handful of stories in the world; and if the young are to be forbidden to prey upon the old then they must sit for ever in silence”. This transfer of a story that has been told many times over is in itself an act of rec-

18

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

comes to mind: a protagonist leaves his home country, he enters a new territory, endures dangers and hardships, repeatedly escapes death, yet in doing so acquires, with the help of friends, new powers and riches, monetary or in the form of wisdom. These are the powers and riches he brings home to his native country. Prospero, after being exiled and fighting for survival, re-establishes his position and restores order. After twenty-eight years on an island Robinson Crusoe returns richer and more mature, rather than poorer and mentally insane, as was to be expected and as presented in Coetzee’s re-write Foe (1986). Marlow experienced at first hand the horrors of colonization in Africa and survived to tell the tale. Ralph, in The Lord of the Flies, escapes the mortal dangers of human nature unbound by culture. And Max Morden, the narrator of John Banville’s The Sea, returns, metaphorically speaking, to the beach that represents his childhood, and finds there, after struggles and grief, the power and will to cope with the death of his beloved wife. Louis Marin summarizes this transitional passage like this: From the time of More's book and for centuries later, utopias tend to begin with a travel, a departure and a journey, most of the time by sea, most of the time interrupted by a storm, a catastrophe that is the sublime way to open a neutral space, one that is absolutely different: a meteoric event, a cosmic accident that eliminates all beacons and markers in order to make the seashore appear at dawn, to welcome the human castaway. (Marin 1993: 414-15)

Marin adds: “And on this frontier-which is also an initiating threshold, strangely enough- human abandonment, the desire of travelling, and the encounter with death merge together” (Marin 1993: 416). This “initiating threshold”, the shore, is at the centre of the following analysis. The structuralist meta-structure provides the narrative and discursive fabric which is necessary to illustrate the fissures and breaks in this spatial matrix of the discursive setting in the first place. In front of this rather static, dichotomist background the elements that escape from and constantly counteract with these binaries are becomreation. As Robinson, the protagonist, had to re-create his island-world based on what he knew, these writers re-create their narratives based on what they have read. The narrative process thus is cyclical, and an endless cascade of narrative parasitism.

Transformative Shores

19

ing discernible. Their inherent instability and transgressive nature become more obvious. According to Russell West-Pavlov, when regarded in opposition to structuralism [...] the spatial paradigms of poststructuralism stress that space persists in a constant re-configuring of already extant configurations. There is no space outside those configurations, disfigurations or reconfigurations, and no virginal space before configured space. Space is the agency of configurement, and the fabric of configurations is from the outset spatial. It is in those spatial processes of configuration and re-configuration that human life takes place and unfolds its unceasing dynamic. (West-Pavlov 2009: 25)

In addition to the spatial setting, this study is also concerned with the characters that are wilfully or forcefully placed betwixt-and-between. These are constantly floating amidst the extremities of discourse, endlessly changing themselves and thus transforming the narrative playing field, the language thereof and, ultimately, the deconstruction of subjectivity and identities. The transgressive powers are represented on all levels. As will be shown, this deconstruction of pre-established fixed structures and systems can be recognized in the heterotopian societies, their political and juridical systems, and the individual’s dissolving language and dismembered body. The protagonist, who is often in a state of personal crisis, is decentred, either by exile (Prospero), shipwreck (Robinson Crusoe), emigration (John Wiltshire), or death (Max Morden, Snowman). She or he finds herself or himself on the shore, where the dissemination and reconstruction thereof takes place. Emily Hicks refers to Paul de Man’s argument, that “the dismemberment of the body corresponds to the dismemberment of language ‘as meaning-tropes are replaced by fragmentation’ into words, syllables, and letters” (Hicks 1991: xxiv). The space as a symbolic domain is equally fragmented and dismembered; the shore stays in constant commotion. As this analysis intends to show, elements of the third can be found in all the texts from Shakespeare to Banville. Their deconstructive force is always at work, and opposes a strictly mimetic representation. These processes are read as a means of critiquing the hegemonic powers-tobe and the damage they inflict by exerting symbolic control. The shore as fictional setting and as real space, is, as has been said, multi-liminal and protean. Geographers (Jeans 1990), anthropol-

20

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ogists (Fiske 1983) and cultural critics (Griem 2012) have already identified the shore as a site of transition. To argue that shores and beaches are spaces of change is, consequently, to state the obvious. The central focus of this study is the how rather than the replication of the changes themselves. West-Pavlov refers to Michel Foucault when he argues: “To go beyond this reproductive paradigm of meaning, one must ask not what artefacts or spaces mean, but how they mean.” (West-Pavlov 2009: 22) Why is the shore a perfect setting, a spatial agent of change and transformation? What is the driving force behind this fascination with the seaside? Is the fact that Britain is an island itself a sufficient explanation? If, as argued, the shore is mostly a site, if not an agent, of transgression and transformation, what then causes the need or the wish for change? It shall be argued that the most famous and lasting examples of shore-narratives are grounded in and represent historical periods of extraordinary change and transformation: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and Pericles for that matter, are deeply steeped in the advent of mobility and colonization. John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost testifies to major changes in the contemporary social, political, and scientific spheres. Satan, after being expelled from heaven, is metaphorically shipwrecked, and exiled amidst the lake of hell, a shore of molten lava in sight. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe contemplates the opposing forces of rising capitalism and providence. The shore is a site of psychological terror, fighting, and mere survival. Darwin’s theory of evolution influenced Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and is represented by the journey along the shorelines of the Congo River and into the de-evolution of the self. The possibility of humankind’s extinction in the wake of atomic warfare reverberates in William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, where the shore is home to the kids’ utopian imaginations and their dystopian, homicidal realizations. The decentred subject in a globalised world is at the heart of Alex Garland’s The Beach. Genetic engineering and neuro-sciences, and the anxieties they cause, influenced the post-apocalyptic world-views of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian satire Oryx and Crake. Here the shore is the very site of a new beginning, in a world utterly transformed by a lethal, genetically engineered virus. Ultimately, all these texts represent “attacks on human narcissism”, as argued by Michel Serres9 (Serres 9

William Paulson argues that “the problem with the writings of Michel Serres

Transformative Shores

21

2007: 8): “That the center of the world be removed from the sun is an objective attack. That the Copernican revolution be interiorized in the mind, the clear or not so clear soul, work and economy, is a triple subjective attack. Our main object is decentered; the subject is decentered in turn three times” (ibid.). Yet, as mentioned above, the crisis at hand need not necessarily be that of a nation or society. The individual subject also finds her or his liminal experience between the sea and the land: John Banville’s The Sea and Ian McEwan’s Chesil Beach present the shore as a site of memory, of sexual awakening, and align the space, almost in a romantic fashion, with the inner torrents and tempests of the protagonist’s psyches. It is important to point out the following observation right at the beginning of this study: Women hardly figure in the shore narratives. In The Tempest Miranda is merely used as a justification for Prospero’s actions. The Isle of Pines is a sexist fever dream. Robinson’s world equally is devoid of women, his mother and wife only mentioned in passing. The women in Heart of Darkness are reduced to stereotypical, essentialised gender-templates. The Lord of the Flies presents an isle without any traces of femininity. Only starting with Huxley’s Island are women introduced into the utopias, and hold central positions in the respective societies. The Beach and Oryx and Crake present the question of feminine leadership as one of their main motives, but then again the gaze is in the respective texts a decidedly male one. This absence of female protagonists I want to read in alignment with a narrative pattern Elahe Haschemi Yekani indentifies as “the privilege of crisis” (cf. Yekani 2011). She analyzes hegemonic presentations of figurations of the white man in crisis. These figurations lend themselves to different narrative patterns. In colonial texts, in general Blackness is often associated with the tropes of superstition, polygamy or cannibalism. Conversely, the figurations of hegemonic masculinity are connected to themes and motives such as the quest into the unknown, the establishment of order, or the loss of control, and as a consequence the plots are shaped by a repeated reference to loneliness (as part of the quest), struggle (in the effort to

is that they do not correspond to the expectations of the humanities community (Pauson 2000: 216).

22

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville establish order) and hygiene (as a means to maintain control). (Yekani 2001: 13)

Yekani identifies these figurations of male crisis in colonial and post-colonial narratives, albeit with gradual differences. Since a majority of the texts in this study come from these very fields, these heteronormative masculinities are deeply embedded in several of these narratives. Prospero, Robinson Crusoe, Jim Hawkins, Marlow, Jack and Ralph, and Richard are not only the central protagonists but often the narrators and focalisers. And many of the narrative patterns identified by Yekani are elemental to the respective plots. The resulting perception, production and presentation of space is for the most part heavily filtered through such a masculine gaze in crisis. And the spaces in general and the beaches specifically take on the features of femininity. Martina Löw argues that “[t]raditionally, spaces are imagined as women(’s bodies)” (Löw 2006: 126). She adds that male “is conceived as moving and active and thus as an expression of time. The female, on the other hand, symbolizes space. Like space, she is seen as passive and corporeal” (Löw 2006: 127).10 These associations are underlying the presentation of the islands as spaces to be conquered, governed and re-shaped. The sea is also a time-honoured metaphor of the motherly body giving birth, which symbolically ties in with the shipwrecked soldiers being re-born onto the shores. This heavily gendered nature of the respective tales, consequently, has to be stressed right at the beginning of this study.11 Since it is the specific goal of this study to identify the causes and paradigmatic realizations of the shore as liminal space, the introduction is not yet the place for an elaborate theory thereof. Prior to 10

Doreen Massey shares this perspective: “It is, moreover, time which is typically coded masculine and space, being absence or lack, as feminine” (Massey 1994: 6).

11

Hardly any of the analysed narratives consciously approaches or problematises the said gender aspects. One exception is J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe. At one point the main protagonist Susan Barton is advised by Robinson not to explore the island on her own “for the apes, he said, would not be as wary of a woman as they were of him and Friday. I wondered at this: was a woman, to an ape, a different species from a man? Nevertheless, I prudently obeyed, and stayed at home, and rested” (Coetzee 1986: 15). The novel in general deals with the question of how the female voice is slowly appropriated, taken over, and rewritten by Foe’s narration.

Transformative Shores

23

analyzing the causes, effects, and representations of transgression and transition, there will be offered an illustration of how the symbolic nature of the shore is constructed in the first place. To do so, the introduction will continue with the following foci: 1.2 traces the semiotization of the shore, the translation of the shore from a topographical and geological space into a symbolic space, including a concise history of shores and beaches in literary history. 1.3 will, in the form of an analysis of John Banville’s The Sea, outline the most common paradigmatic elements of a shore narrative such as its ambiguous setting in time and space, its liminal nature, references to postlapsarianism, the deconstruction of language, bodies and, ultimately, identity, and so on. Since the main part of the study is rhizomic rather than consecutive in its argumentation, this initial analysis will help to pre-establish a connection between the respective paradigmatic elements at hand. This study is subdivided into four main parts which intend to trace back the protean nature of literary shores from space to discursive representation. Following the introduction the consecutive sections are entitled and deal with Ambiguity, Liminality, and Transgression. The first part offers an introductory analysis by illustrating how shores are transformed from real spaces into symbolic, literary spaces. Based on this analysis is a concise overview of beaches and shorelines in literature from Homer to contemporary texts. This section is concluded by an introductory analysis of John Banville’s The Sea which offers an initial outlook on the potential results a trialectic approach can produce. The second section, entitled Ambiguity, approaches the literary shore as a border-region with very specific rules and characteristics. Doing so, the study reads the shore-setting as a fluent, rather than a static space, that undermines dichotomous thinking and binary categorisation. The chapter “The Semantics of the Limit: Trichotomous Boundaries” analyzes the presentation of coastlines as discursive markers in John of Gaunt’s famous soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s Richard II. This soliloquy perfectly illustrates the various binary opposites related to the sea/land divide. The chapter intends to show how even the most exclusive and dichotomous border-thinking cannot escape third thinking. Ultimately, the seemingly clear constructions will be read as nostalgic projections which stress the openness and permeability of the spatial and symbolic borders in the play.

24

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The second subchapter is entitled “On Distant Shores – Locating the Utopian Beach.” This chapter illustrates how the inherent ambiguity of the shore setting is in many cases supported by the following steps. Firstly, this space is located in far off, unknown regions. Secondly, these spaces are narrated by means of highly unreliable narration, which repeatedly casts a shadow of doubt on the setting’s real nature. Thirdly, these border-regions are only reluctant contactzones. Entering and crossing the shore is often an act that demands clear signs of letting go one’s past. The chapter “Imaginary Shores and Fraying Peripheries” further explores the ambiguity of the shore. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe will be read as narrative that at times is highly anti-mimetic and presents a tropic discourse that is only thinly veiled by markers of realism. Robinson Crusoe’s journey down the African Coast will be analyzed for traces of constructivist projections which use the African shores as a canvas. Jacques Rousseau may have praised Robinson Crusoe for its realistic and, hence, didactically beneficial, mode of narration. Diana Loxley cites Rousseau’s statement that “[o]ne should never substitute the symbol for the thing signified” (Loxley 1990: 7). Yet even in the case of Robinson Crusoe, the shore is presented as resisting a realist, and seemingly objective, mode of presentation. The examples of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Alex Garland’s The Beach will equally serve to show how this setting undermines coherent linguistic representation. The overwriting of this other space and the extinction of alterity by means of language will be analysed in the last section of this chapter. “The Nostalgic Shore in Alex Garland’s The Beach” deals with the presentation of the shore in Alex Garland’s novel The Beach. As will be argued, the travellers occupation of the beach in Thailand results in an increasing exclusion of anything that lies beyond the shore. Indigenous cultures are overwritten and completely blocked out. Yet the attempt to build a utopian beach community based on simple dichotomies results in the creation of figurations of the third that ultimately transform the utopian spaces in a dystopian brooding ground of violence, death, and fragmenting bodies. The section on the ambiguity of beaches and shores is followed by a section that is concerned with the Liminality resulting therefrom. Part one traces how the shore’s spatial and semantic ambiguity is be-

Transformative Shores

25

ing inscribed into the protagonists and their communities. Based on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, the first chapter identifies three kinds of liminal processes, which are literally or figuratively related to the shore. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest illustrates Ferdinand’s transformation from prince to duke, Caliban’s liminal subjugation by a process Giorgio Agamben defines as anthropological machine and Ariel’s inherently unstable and transformative nature. This analysis is contrasted by a reading of Aimé Césaire’s postcolonial rendition of Shakespeare’s play A Tempest. Part two of the section on Liminality applies Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere to the riverbanks in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. As will be argued, Lotman’s theory of cultural semiotics allows for a more detailed reading of highly transformative settings as the shore. Rather than being based on an understanding of spaces as mutually exclusive concepts, the semiosphere is a space with open borders and permeable boundaries. The semiotic exchange at these very borders is understood to be an elemental process that affects both the semiosphere’s normative centre and its periphery. Marlow’s journey along the banks of the Congo River will be read as a voyage along the peripheries of his personal semiosphere. The different stations will be analyzed as embedded semiospheres with respectively different norms and cultural languages. The last section, entitled Transgression, analyses how the shore’s ambiguity and the ensuing liminalities translate into discursive processes. These will be read with Michel Foucault’s understanding of transgression. Rather than proposing that transgressions comprise singular acts of crossing a spatial or normative border, transgression is an ongoing, cyclical process that undermines any meaning while confirming it. This process is opposed to a dialectic and binary thinking. These processes of transgression and its metaphorical illustration will be read in different chapters analyzing respectively the witches as figures of the third in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Robinson Crusoe’s struggle with transgressive thinking which is being initiated on or along the shores of his island. The following chapter analyzes how transgressive discourse and spaces are reciprocally connected. Looking at William Golding’s Lord of the Flies it will be argued that transgressive discourses are presented by the constant production and deconstruction of heteroto-

26

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

pias, in Michel Foucault’s terms, that give way to the spatial realization of the camp, in the understanding of Giorgio Agamben. Both spaces are interrelated and illustrate how the shore turns from a space of possibility into a site of punishment and subjugation. It will be argued that the establishment of third spaces, such as heterotopias, in Michel Foucault’s terms, is vital to the production and creation of utopian practice. Spatial utopias […] are not mimetic texts embedded in a flow of congruously and purposefully related events directed towards a logical conclusion, but create themselves a fabric of spatial relations between various discourses, narratives, and points of view sustained by an endless process of differentiation and readjustment in the text. Heterotopia represents the site of conflict where a wide range of discourses – in Foucault’s terms, the ‘real places’ of life within a culture – can be negotiated against the backdrop of the strictly hierarchized closedsystem model […]. (Pordzik 2001: 5)

Analogous to the ambiguous nature of this setting, the societies living here are equally unstable and protean. It is the spatial representation of this “endless process of differentiation and readjustment” (ibid.), as seen on the shore, that will be analyzed in this section. The first part is mainly concerned with the reciprocal relationship of space and utopian thought. These will be read as heterotopias, rather than utopias. The second part of this chapter is concerned with the heterotopia’s spatial other, the camp, as proposed by Giorgio Agamben. Once the utopian societies oppose any inherent changes and transformations, they create these spatial unities that mirror the increasingly ossified nature of their thought-systems. The shore, which once represented re-birth, turns into a stage of punishment and exclusion. Outsiders are intentionally put into a liminal state that casts them as halfhuman/half-animal. This process of othering will be read, along with Giorgio Agamben, as “anthropological machine.” Humans are decategorized, placed in a liminal space and thus detached from any existing rights. The breaking-up of society is represented as the fragmentation of the body and its return to the shore. The alteration from utopian to dystopian thought, from heterotopian to camp-space, will be read as a linguistic and symbolic process. The beach is in the terms of Mary L. Pratt a contact zone (cf. Pratt 1992), a representational space where two cultures, that is semiotic spheres, come into contact and inform and influence each other.

Transformative Shores

27

This is a third space where two cultures meet and re-negotiate their respective identity and create a hybrid space in-between. This impossibility of narrating and capturing this elusive, transgressive space will be explored further in the chapter entitled “Crossing the Epistemic Abyss: Narrating the Other Side in Paradise Lost and Oryx and Crake.” The shores will be read as a contact zone where two messengers, Raphael in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Snowman in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, are endowed with communicating a message which cannot be put into words. Both have to connect two worlds which are separated by an abyss that cannot be crossed spatially or epistemically. The (mis-)use of tropical language is presented as threatening the respective world-view of Adam and Eve as well as that of the Crakers, whose identity is constructed along binary concepts. The final chapter of this section deals with the question of how the ultimate punishment, as seen in Paradise Lost, or the ultimate destruction, as seen in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, leads to a recreation of culture and space that finds the beaches and shorelines as their starting and end-point. The constant transgressions lead to ongoing cycles of creation, destruction, and recreation and in doing so illustrate the shores’ transformative nature. 1.1 The Shore: From Geography to Literature Shores and beaches are, as space in general, produced, as Henri Lefebvre says (Lefebvre 1991). The respective realizations, be they real, mapped or fictional space, inform each other and result in constant transformations and appropriations. It is the latter group this study wants to examine, namely literary, fictional representations of beaches, shores, and coastlines. The focus of this study is the shore as imaginary rather than real, geological and topographical space. It is still necessary for the discussion to take an initial look at the shore’s protean geological and topographical nature, since it is on these geological and topographical realities attached to shorelines and beaches that literary representations are to some extent based. Space is created by human agency. Reciprocally space influences human actions. To use Russell West-

28

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Pavlov’s argument: “Space in its traditional sense is not a pre-existing receptacle for human action, but it is created by that action; space, in turn, exerts its own variety of agency, modelling the human actors who have configured it” (West-Pavlov 2009: 19). From a geological point of view, beaches are difficult to measure and to categorise. Elements from sea and land constantly penetrate and mix with each other. The receding tide adds landmass to the beach, whereas storms and floods result in the opposite. As Sudesh Mishra reminds us: “When we think it is part of the land, the flood tide converts the beach to water; and when we think it is part of the ocean, the ebb tide proves us wrong again” (Mishra 2000: n.p.). Consequently, the elements beaches consist of are from the sea, such as corals, algae, and bones; yet they also originate from the adjacent landmass, such as soil, wood, and grass. On the beach land and sea meet and mingle; the beach forms a hybrid category of its own. Topographically speaking, the beach may divide land and sea. When looking at maps the shore is reduced to a fine line demarcating the end of the land and the beginning of water. As is the nature of maps, however, this perspective is more of a reductionist abstraction rather than a topographical reality. Changing the perspective does not reduce the abstractness of coastlines. Upon examination the coastlines on maps or globes appear to be perfectly outlined, clearly mapped, and often, as in the case of Scotland’s Firth of Forth, the island of Manhattan, or the Great Lakes, immediately recognizable. Yet, as Thorsten Feldbusch argues, coastlines are not measurable: Selbst die Mathematik der fraktalen Geometrie nach Benoit Mandelbrot (*1924) zur Erfassung extrem verschachtelter Naturformen kommt nicht über ein Annäherungsmodell hinaus. [...] Zeigen auch Karten und Globen Küsten als fest umrissene und hauchdünne Linien, auf deren einen Seite sich das Festland und auf deren andern sich das Meer befindet, so ist gleichwohl von Räumen mit überaus unscharfen Rändern auszugehen, an denen sich die Elemente auf verschiedene Weise durchdringen. (Feldbusch 2003: 12) [Even Benoit Mandelbrot’s (*1924) fractal geometry of nature offers only an approximation. […] Maps and globes may indicate the coastlines as clearly outlined with thin lines separating the sea and the mainland these spaces have nonetheless very unclear borders where different elements mix and mingle. (my translation)]

Transformative Shores

29

This impossibility to be measured in their totality represents the shorelines as spaces of a problematic epistemology.12 It is not only from a geological and topographical perspective that the beach is a space of hybridity. Its hybrid nature affects the symbolic and semantic understanding of the shore. According to the anthropologist John Fiske, the “beach is an anomalous category between land and sea that is neither one nor the other but has characteristics of both. This means it has simply too much meaning, an excess of meaning potential, that derives from its status as anomalous” (Fiske 1983: 120). This ambiguity of the beach creates and supports a field of binary oppositions that are constantly shifting and refuse to be mediated. These oppositions translate into the symbolic concepts and discourses surrounding this space. Fiske argues that Man wishes to mediate this big binary opposition for reasons to do with comfort and the avoidance of terror […]. The land, then, becomes culture, the city, civilization, the sea becomes nature, untamed, uncivilized, raw. The beach mediates this terrifying boundary. (Fiske 1983: 121)

The beach thus turns from a topographical/geological space into a symbolic space. As the times change, so do perceptions of nature and the production of symbolic spaces these inform. The geographer Robert Preston-Whyte argues that the “cultural tastes and preferences of tourists to the seafront may influence the landscape that emerges around these leisure spaces” (Preston-Whyte 2001: 582). He adds: Spaces assume a hierarchy of importance governed by the desire and/or opportunity to use them. Thus, sunbathers, surfers, bathers, fishers, promenaders, and sailors are likely to use their common understanding to partition spaces subjectively on the basis of their level of familiarity and interaction with various elements of the environment. (Preston-Whyte 2001: 583)

12

Michel Serres argues in this respect: “This whole question is fractal. Leibniz described fractal reality, formed of pools and fish, filled in turn with fish and pools, ad infinitum. Mandelbrot repeats this of the world, inventing the world, and undoubtedly, the thing. I am saying the same thing of the process of knowledge” (Serres 2007: 73). In this sense, fractal epistemologies do not allow for closure, ever.

30

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

There is, consequently, no such thing as the beach: contemporary associations will likely conjure up images related to holidays, swimming, sunbathing, and the smell of sunscreen. These beaches are touristic imaginations and can and often do undergo cosmetic changes in order to adapt the real space to the imagined space. This can be seen in various places: the British Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology notes that about half of the British coastline is currently protected by “hard defences” (2009: 1), by devices such as gabions, boulder barriers, revetments, sea walls, and groynes.13 An extreme production of real space based on touristic expectations can be found in Dubai: whole strips of land are rebuild into spatial icons; vast stretches of artificial beaches are shaped to resemble palms (“The Palm, Jumeirah”, “The Palm, Deira”) or islands intended to resemble “The World”, or “The Universe.” Real space is also remodelled to better resemble imagined and fictional spaces. When the film adaption of Alex Garland’s novel The Beach was being produced in Thailand, the local beaches were deemed unfit to represent the pristine, fictional shore. In consequence the producers spent a considerable amount of money and time to appropriate the local Maya Beach on the island of Phi Phi. Activists from various countries protested against this intrusion and claimed “alterations to the beach made by producers have ruined the area’s eco system” (BBC 1999). It is not without irony that nature in the form of the 2004 tsunami undid many of the changes resulting from tampering with the landscape. The opposite approach, that is minimal invasion into natural processes, is, however, equally a cultural technique. The implementation of nature reserves keeps the coast of Northumberland, the white cliffs of Beachy Head, and the cliffs of Flamborough Head protected from development. In total, thirty-three per cent of the English coast is reserved as part of the so-called “Heritage Coast” (Natural England 2006). In addition to the environmental aspect, the name “Heritage Coast” indicates another cultural technique, namely that of cultural memorization. The English shore thus not only represents unspoiled nature, but also refers to the historic past of the British Isle. In this case, the production of space is at the same time material and symbol13

For a study on the often futile fight for preserving the shorelines see Cornelia Dean (1999): Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches. New York: Columbia UP.

Transformative Shores

31

ic. The beach turns into a cultural artefact that can be altered and adapted at the will of society. It can be tamed and beautified, restructured and overwritten. This process is ironic, almost paradoxical. The beach combines land and sea, culture and nature. Yet the touristic image of the beach is that of a pristine, unspoiled locale. This image can only be produced by de-naturalizing the shore and by applying various cultural techniques. To maintain the image of a pristine, untouched nature, increasing cultural interventions like landscaping, waste disposal, filtering techniques, and surveillance are necessary. The beach has to be denaturalized, e.g. freed from flotsam like stinking kelp, dead fish, algae, or jellyfish. In addition, the excrements of an industrialized society, such as plastics and the spillage of oil and chemicals, also need to be disposed of. To maintain the image of an edenic space and of personal freedom an abundance of regulations is required, in order to prohibit noise and waste. In contrast with the perfect, waste-free Paradise in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where “what redounds, transpires” (PL 5.438), the excessive dirt of human culture does resurface and materialize on shore. Thus, slowly but steadily, topographical and geological space transforms into cultural and symbolic space. Geographies are taken over by what Edward Said calls imagined geographies (cf. Said 1995). Kothari and Wilkinson employ this term by Said, when they argue that [...] a geographic imaginary refers, literally, to how spaces are ‘imagined’, how meaning is ascribed to physical spaces (such that they are perceived, represented, and interpreted in particular ways), how knowledge about these places is produced, and how these representations make various courses of action possible. Geography is ‘imagined’ in the sense that it does not necessarily relate to a physically distinct space, although boundaries may be constructed on the basis of these imaginations designating spaces as ‘here’ and ‘there’, and belonging to ‘us’ or ‘them’. (Kothari and Wilkinson 2010: 1397).

But not only is the beach a zone where nature and culture merge. In addition to the contact between nature and culture, another essential attribute of the beach is that of a contact zone between different cultures. Looking into literature, it is the shore where King Horn fights off the Saracens, Ferdinand is rescued and guided by Ariel, Robinson

32

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

meets Friday, Marlow finds Kurtz and his African tribe, and it is on a post-apocalyptic beach where Snowman teaches the Crakers. The beach is not the no-man’s-land between two entities; it is the ground where both meet. The term contact zone is a concept proposed by Mary Louise Pratt, which does [...] refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. […] By using the term ‘contact,’ I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness and apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radical asymmetrical relations of power. (Pratt 1992: 6f)

Yet the beach not only poses as a mere contact zone between binary opposed cultures and concepts. It rather is the liminal space inbetween, the suture that connects both, yet is ever changing. As the shore is neither sea nor land, it does not exclusively represent one discourse or the other. The shore as literary setting stages forced encounters. It poses as the space that metaphorically connects, fosters and makes the hybridization of discourse possible in the first place. The shore demarcates heterotopias and other literary socio-spatial imaginations of society. Ultimately, the abundance of signification, mentioned above, leads to an excess of meaning. The overlapping of the physical structure of land/sea with the symbolic structure nature/culture and the various dichotomies attached to it are fused and translated into fiction. According to Hubert Zapf [t]he beach seems to offer an ecosemiotic space in which complex interactions between archaic-evolutionary, historical-cultural, and metaphoric-imaginative frames of significance can be staged and explored in ways which are particularly important for the aesthetic dimension and function of texts. (Zapf: n.p.)

Transformative Shores

33

1.2 On the Literary Shore The beach as a literary setting and ecosemiotic and culturally constructed space stands in a long tradition of narratives, as a concise historic overview of literary shores will illustrate. (For a survey on western island literature see Van Duzer 2006, Glaser 1996.) According to Lena Lenček und Gideon Bosker, Coming to grips with the uncertainties of existence, our ancestors concocted myths of beauties and beasts, gods and demons, heavenly rewards and divine retribution – all staged on the beach. Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Virgil, Ovid, and countless, nameless bards have spun plots of supernatural metamorphoses, erotic transgressions, fateful loves, irresolvable strife, and miraculous homecomings that are lifted directly from the script of nature. In the feelings stirred by the perpetual shifting of land, water, sand, and clouds, the beach has inspired profound and beautiful poetry and prose. (Lenček and Bosker 2000: 8)

Homer’s Iliad, e.g., evokes the beach as a space adjacent to the battlezone; for ten years the Achaeans occupy this space to conquer Troy. It is here that Achilles grieves and contemplates the injustice inflicted by Agamemnon. Thus the shore is a contact zone between two cultures diametrically opposed to each other, of man versus man, God versus God. The prize may be Helena, but based on the shore the epic poem narrates a fight of hegemonic ideas, convictions, and beliefs. In parasitic fashion the Greeks, inside the wooden horse, find their way into the fortress. Homer’s Odyssey then turns the beach into a floating signifier constantly escaping the hero’s reach; Odysseus is unable to arrive at his home-shore, he strands repeatedly on other, undesired shores. His heart longs for Ithaca, his nostos delivers him onto the islands of Ogygia, Scheria, and Aiaia. The seashore, however, is not merely a space of longing, a symbol for homecoming; the opposite is equally true. According to the historian Alain Corbin, the “sea-shore of antiquity, as imagined in the classical period, remains haunted by the possibility of a monster bursting forth or of the sudden incursion of foreigners, who are comparable to monsters” (Corbin 1994: 14). The Bible presents in the book of Genesis God’s fourth dichotomy, namely that of sea/land: “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so” (King James Bible: Genesis 1.9). Alain Corbin

34

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

refers to Mosaic cosmogony which held that “there are two great expanses of water: that which fills the oceans and that which is held within the vaults of heaven. In separating them, the Creator drew two dividing lines: the coast, which delineates the respective domains of the sea and the earth, and the clouds, that shifting limes” (Corbin 1994: 2). The prophet Jeremiah likewise dichotomised the contrast of land and sea, the shore belonging clearly to the latter. “The prophet Jeremiah, exalting the Creator’s might, makes him say: ‘[I] have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it; and though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail’” (Corbin 1994: 26). His ill-fated creation God then undid by resetting the binary land/sea; two are turned to one: “And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein [is] the breath of life, from under heaven; [and] every thing that [is] in the earth shall die” (King James Bible: Genesis 6.17). Noah and his swimming microcosm, representing the best of a world undone, finally reach a new shore. Noah has to transform God’s creation, according to the newly established covenant, into a lawabiding society. Moses, with the help of God, divides the waters of the Red Sea and connects the shores, to guide his people from enslavement on Egypt’s shore towards the Promised Land ‘flowing with milk and honey’. God initiates this exodus by erasing the liminalities of entrapment: “And I will set thy bounds from the red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee” (King James Bible: Exodus 23.31). Another biblical episode tells the story of Jonah, who after three days and nights of praying and repenting, imprisoned in a whale’s pitch-black belly, is resurrected: “And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry” (King James Bible: Jonah 2.10). On the shore Jonah, the sinner, is reborn as Jonah, the prophet. The New Testament offers less dramatic shore-episodes. Still, according to Christopher Connery, “many scholars read the aquatic or ichthyan motifs in the Jesus story – baptism, the loaves and the fishes, the miracle of walking on water – as reflecting this primal relationship between God and the sea, a struggle that the apocalypse of St. John of Revelations brings to a close” (Connery 2006: 499). From early on the cliffs and shores of England were a site of largely unsuccessful invasion. Yet, even an invasion can be turned

Transformative Shores

35

into a victory for the British, as Clive Aslet’s description of Walmer Beach in The Landmarks of Britain shows: Julius Caesar found the “white Cliffs lined with tribesmen, ready to hurl rocks and javelins down onto his troops” (Aslet 2005: 97). The Britons, bad weather, and an impenetrable shoreline caused Caesar to retreat, only to return “with five legions and an astonishing 800 ships” (ibid.). The ultimate victory was, in the end, based on the disunity of the local tribes, who sued for peace. Aslet goes on to assume that Caesar “was probably more than relieved to grant it [before he] hurried back across the Channel” (ibid.). He does not fail to conclude his description of the events on Walmer Beach by adding that “He [Caesar] never returned” (ibid.). To Caesar himself, at least judging from his account in De Bello Gallico, the shores of Britannia are the end of the known-land and he is unable to gather knowledge on anything that lies beyond the shores: he could discover neither the size of the island, nor the number or the strength of the tribes inhabiting it, nor their manner of warfare, nor the ordinances they observed, nor the harbours suitable for a number of large ships. (De Bello Gallico IV: 207)

The defensive nature of the British shore Caesar describes as follows: “Such was the nature of the ground, so steep the heights which banked the sea, that a missile could be hurled from the higher levels on to the shore” (De Bello Gallico IV: 211).14 The middle ages take on the hellish and infernal threat associated with the sea. Irish Immrama present their saints as heroes on sea voyages fighting the waves to steer towards unknown islands, each of them utopian and otherworldly. And while Beowulf was and remains one of the most powerful English sea-narratives, the epic poem King Horn is a story of transition and liminalities set directly on the shore. King Horn turns the beach, in Homer’s tradition, into a battleground, a 14

Once the Roman Empire conquered the British Isle it was up to the Romans to defend the coastline. One building signifying the Romans’ power was the “‘Great Monument’, the symbolic gateway to the new province of Britannia. [...] By the mid-3rd century AD [...] a new foe had appeared in the form of pirates, the fore runners of the Saxon settlers of later times, who were coming in across the foggy waters of the northern seas. Shortly afterwards the monument was totally levelled, the earth bank slighted, and the ditches were filled in when the walls of the Saxon Shore fort were built” (Fields 2006: 4).

36

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

site of invasion. Horn, with the help of Irish knights, fights off the Saracens, who are invading the shore. Like the setting, the poem can be identified as “[t]hematically and metrically [...] ‘transitional’” (Sobecki 2006: 11). Sebastian Sobecki illustrates how this is so: Horn’s identity is shaped by his borderline existence, as he is, like the language with which his name is etymologically linked, chronically landless yet ‘londisse’ by birth and cultural affinity. Even the poem’s topography expresses the transitional nature of the tale; virtually the entire plot is set along the shore, the meeting point of land and sea. The fate of every ‘londisse’ person and every Saracen is determined along a narrow strip of land. (Sobecki 2006: 82)

The Early Modern Period, then, not only experiences the conquest and colonization of foreign countries and continents; as natural philosophy challenges religion, so the seafarers conquer their fear of the abominable abyss. How the coast shaped the Early Modern mindset will be illustrated in detail below. In 1712 the poet William Diaper writes a pastoral of the sea, of Nereides or Sea-Eclogues, a pastoral transferred from the lush meadows of the land to an enchantment under the sea (Diaper 1951). The narrative perspective is inverted: rather than humans looking out to the sea in horror and disdain, Diaper depicts Nereides gazing from the sea inland, across the beach; these mythical beings mourn the humans, who live to toil, unable to join them in their diluvian paradise under the sea. What they see on the beach are hardened and poor fishermen living a life undesirable and poor. They also identify the beach as a signifier of change, as the following dialogue shows: MURAENA. But see – The tide swells on the shore, and forward creeps, And with new slime besmears the sandy heaps. What makes this constant flux? I've often thought The cause is wondrous, and in vain I sought. (Diaper 1951: Eclogue IV, 26)

Muraena asks the very question, which is at the heart of this study: “What makes this constant flux?” (ibid.) The English as a rising nation certainly do appreciate the necessity for “flux”, identify it as colonial conquest and leave their home shores to encounter new ones.

Transformative Shores

37

The fictions of the time elevate some of them to utopias, islands resembling an Eden long lost. Numerous narratives attest to these encounters: Thomas More’s Utopia, of course, and also William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines. In these narratives the shores, or their explicit absence, may not yet be at the centre of transformation as in later texts, but it is here, nonetheless, that the topology of the beach as liminal and transgressive space is (re-)established. The Romantics, standing on the beach and witnessing the tempestuous sea, combine the revulsion of old with the fascination of the sublime (cf. Corbin 1994). The dreadful agony of shipwrecked seamen is turned into a spectacle watched from the safety of the shore, and is transcribed into colours and letters. The beach, suddenly, turns into a stage, from which they watch the grandest, most terrifying, most sublime event of all. For those unwilling or unable to complete the Grand Tour, the missed experience of shivering in the face of Alpine glaciers, “rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices” (Shelley 1996: 106) is equalled by watching the sea, shipwrecks and tempests from the shore. In his 1861 study entitled The Sea, Jules Michelet describes the impression of the sublime sea from Granville: Ascending by a ladder, rather than a staircase, into a dark little room, I looked out upon the strange wild scene, as strange and tragic, as wild and impressive, as that which had presented itself, when, also from a window, I had caught my first view of the great glacier of the Swiss Grindenwald. The glacier had shown an enormous monster of peaked icebergs which seemed crashing down upon me; and this vexed sea of Granville seemed an army of monstrous waves all rushing together to the attack. (Michelet 1861: 27)

The experience of the sublime is still based on the otherworldliness of the sea with its “monstrous waves” which like a horde of enemies is ceaselessly attacking the shore. And the attack takes its toll; the shore is a site of misery and loss. Michelet’s host is grief-stricken since “upon that shore his only brother had perished” (ibid.). Only the elevated position from a “dark little room” seems to allow some distancing from this “strange wild scene.” Paintings, for example William Westall’s “The Deluge”, illustrate the fascination of the Romantics with this subject (cf. Boase 1959). Like Westall’s, Clarkson Stan-

38

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

field’s picture “The Last of the Crew” (1854) directs the viewer’s perspective on the unfolding drama from safe shore towards raging sea: to the left a tempest-beaten vessel, to the right, overlooking the stormy scenery, the ruin of a castle, in the middle, spraying waves breaking on edgy rocks. William Wordsworth uses an inverted perspective, from the sea-beaten ship towards the safe shore, to describe such an elemental fight in the following words, taken from the elegy “To the Daisy”, written in 1805, mourning his brother’s death at sea: Ill-fated Vessel! – ghastly shock! – At length delivered from the rock, The deep she hath regained; And through the stormy night they steer Labouring for life, in hope and fear, To reach a safer shore – how near, Yet not to be attained! (Wordsworth 1895: 579)

The shore “near, / yet not to be attained” (ibid.) represents the safe harbour, it is close and still too far, a space that cruelly promises safety and home-coming, yet is elusive and never to be reached alive.15 The relation to the beach is a conflicting one. W.H. Auden in his analysis of romantic sensibilities, The Enchaféd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea (1979), presents the sea and the sea voyage as the space of aspirations, whereas the shore and shore-life are felt to be rather dull and insignificant. Corbin on the other hand, analyzing more generally European Romanticism, argues that In the same period, the shore, that theatre in which helpless mourning was played out, also became a locus of horror. It was no longer navigation, or even drifting on the waves, that triggered the dramatic event, but the very strand itself. Its uncertain, confused topography made it easy for a bather to be cut down by the undertow, and allowed 15

George Crabbe’s poem “The Borough” from 1810 presents in the form of 24 letters the life of a community living on the shore. Letter I describes in heroic couplets how the villagers meet at night on the shore to watch the terrible sight of a sinking ship. Crabbe, a close friend of Edmund Burke, sketches the sublime event, as follows: “From parted clouds the moon her radiance throws / On the wild waves, and all the danger shows; / But shows them beaming in her shining vest, / Terrific splendour! gloom in glory dress’d! / This for a moment, and then clouds again/ Hide every beam, and fear and darkness reign” (Crabbe 1810: The Borough, Letter I).

Transformative Shores

39

the rising tide to surprise its victim. The sense of this shiftiness grew at the same time as the belief in the unalterable purpose of the sea’s boundaries was fading away, and the new time-scale, proposed by actualist geologists, was becoming accepted. (Corbin 1994: 246)

Even more importantly the geological realities are symbolically aligned with society and culture. As this study proposes, the most important beach narratives, whether whole novels or specific scenes, were produced in times of upheaval and social change. For the Romantics, the shore’s shiftiness “acquired a consistency that corresponded to the new uncertainty in values and the social order” (ibid.). The Victorians, finally, popularized the beach as a space of leisure, relaxation, and convalescence.16 This medicinal aspect was the first motivation to spend time on the shore.17 The abyss’ waves were suddenly en vogue. Where the fishermen toiled, the tourist sunbathed; where the seafarer drowned, the swimmer frolicked. The Victorians were, however, not the first to discover the sea as a space of joy. Already before the Victorian Period, in 1793, “the Annalen der Britischen Geschichte (vol 7) describes the first English sea-baths of Deal, Weymouth, and Harwich” (Corbin 1994: 363). According to Darren Webb, “the popular seaside holiday tradition originated in the mill towns of industrial Lancashire” (Webb 2005: 124). Yet it is under Queen Victoria that the beaches at Brighton and Blackpool gain unprecedented popularity and turn into a meeting 16

The shore, nonetheless, retained its ambiguous nature. Chris Ryan argues: “Our Victorian forbears were aware of that ambivalence. At one time it was common to bathe nude, but with greater use of the beach came the bathing-hut and the bathing-costume. […] Beaches are marginal littoral strips neither of land or sea; a site of rest and relaxation, which while, in part, private, are also places of bodily disclosure where both sexes can stare and imagine fulfilling the sexual adventure of their ‘beachtime’ books and papers” (Ryan 2002: 156). The example of the Victorian seaside resort thus highlights the interconnection of space, body, and the reciprocal production of normative and spatial boundaries as governed by the gaze of individuals and societies, a gaze that itself is already informed by pre-conceived (non-)fictional imaginations.

17

According to John Urry, the first spa opened as early as 1626 in Scarborough. “Various other spas developed, in Bath, Buxton, Harrogate, Tunbridge Wells and so on. An amazing range of disorders were supposedly improved by both swallowing the waters and by bathing in them. Scarborough, though, was distinctive since it was not only a major spa but was also by the sea” (Urry 1990: 17).

40

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

point of social classes, while the notion of the beach as a transitional space nonetheless remains (cf. Shields 1991: 73-105). Here on the shore Victorians escape the cities and their stratifications of class and gender as well as the impact of industrialization. In a sense Ovid’s four ages of mankind were not separated temporally anymore, but spatially. As tourists Victorians flee the Iron Age of Industrial England to relive a Golden Age on the beaches. They leave the sooty, sickening, and crime-infested city for the sunlit, healthy, and peaceful coast. Here the Victorian tourist forms an imagined community and the resulting social tableau is beautifully represented by William Frith’s clothed masses in the painting “Ramsgate Sands”, purchased by Queen Victoria. The sea resort is understood and marketed as an Arcadian space, where time stands still, summer is eternal, life blissful and free of responsibilities. That this is merely a cultural construction was not forgotten. Charles Dickens’s short story “The Tuggses at Ramsgate”, for example, tells the narrative of a family of nouveaux riches heading towards the seashore at Ramsgate, where they intend to introduce themselves into higher society. However, lacking the required habitus and being overly naïve, their otherness is spotted by a group of impostors, who with an elaborate trickster-scheme, playing on the Tuggses’ own pretensions, steal their newly acquired riches. The beach here is a netherworld of false appearances, of immodest aspirations, of pretence and phantasms. Thanks to tourism the shore may have been cultivated and neatly ordered according to the social strata of the time yet the social realities that are aspired to are subverted and dissolved. And, most importantly, the beaches are not severed from the spaces of industry and capitalism. The touristic beach is not a heterotopia but only a pretence thereof. On the beach, according to Henri Lefebvre, the body tends to “behave as a differential field. It behaves in other words, as a total body, breaking out of the temporal and spatial shell developed in response to labour, to the division of labour, to the localizing of work and the specialization of places” (Lefebvre 1991: 384). The beach of leisure and of mass-tourism is only an extension of the spaces of work and capitalism. Rather than breaking up the hegemonic dichotomies the beach-dweller is even further integrated into the system at hand, “a pedagogy of space and time is beginning to shape” (ibid.).

Transformative Shores

41

For the Victorians, however, geology and biology questioned the very construct of space and time, resulting in great insecurity. It would be wrong to think of Victorian faith and doubt as binary opposites. The relationship between them is more complex, a relationship Lance Butler defines in his study Victorian Doubt as follows: “doubt can readily be seen not as a mere shadow of faith, a ghost prowling at the feast of the believers, but as the very condition of there being faith at all” (Butler 1991: 1). It is especially in this context that the shore as a site of doubt and reflection, a space afflicted with temporality remains a powerful and evocative setting. In 1831 Sir David Brewster’s Victorian biography The Life of Isaac Newton cites Newton as follows: I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Brewster 1855, 300f)

In choosing this quotation I am less concerned with Newton himself. Rather I think that the imagery in this quotation speaks especially to the Victorians. For Brewster’s Newton the search for truth not only resembles the careless play of a child but is more importantly a serendipitous affair. The searching subject only finds what the sea deposits on the shore, and the “smooth pebble” is only a metonymical reference to the unimaginable riches beyond. The metaphorical shore for Newton is a point of epistemic departure, promising and inviting. This metaphorical construction is, as Rob Shields says, “half topology, half metaphor – [and] inscribed as an emotive ordering or coded geography” (Shields 1991: 265). William Dyce’s painting “Pegwell Bay, Kent – A Recollection of October 5th 1858” is a more complex symbolic representation of the coast as a spatial super-signifier. Here the littoral is liminal and illustrates simultaneity of states and beliefs. “Pegwell Bay” represents the shore as part of the land and part of the sea, as a space of leisure and a space of work. Time is depicted twofold: one focus is on the present (October 5th), yet the cliff’s various layers of chalk, Palaeogene sediments and red ‘brickearth’ (Drahos and Thompson 2012: 10) signify deep geological time. The painting could be read from a catastrophist perspective with the cliff as post-diluvian remainder and reminder. It

42

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

could also be regarded from a Uniformitarian perspective, stating that these geological formations developed over millennia rather than being the result of a catastrophic event like the Great Flood. While geology undermined religious beliefs, the hardly visible Donati-comet at the top-centre of the painting has been read as an allusion to the star of Bethlehem. And it is equally significant that Pegwell Bay was St. Augustine’s and therefore Christianity’s point of entry to the British Isles in 597. Victorian poetry shared the setting and the subject, e.g. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. Where “The Lotos-Eaters” is concerned with decisionmaking itself, “Dover Beach” deals with the loss of faith. Both the lyrical I of “Dover Beach” and the lyrical We of the “Lotos-Eaters” are located not only in a transitional space but also in a transitional state. In “Dover Beach” the first stanza lures the unsuspecting reader into a pastoral state of ease, which according to Terry Gifford quickly turns into an “anti-pastoral poem” (Gifford 1999, 120): “The sea is calm”, the bay “tranquil”, and the night-air “sweet”. The first two stanzas work by means of sensual perception: seeing (“window”, “glimmering”, “gleam”), hearing (“listen”, the “grating roar of the pebbles”), smelling and feeling the “sweet night air”. From the “eternal note of sadness” onward the poem focuses on what cannot be perceived sensually: faith and doubt. In Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters” the setting is initially equally edenic. The mariners are “upon the yellow sand, / Between the sun and moon upon the shore”. The space they encounter is paradisical with the “apple, waxing over-mellow” and branches “Laden with flower and fruit”. There is no “toil”. Time is suspended, “it seemed always afternoon” It is here, between land and sea, in this zone of transition, where they are contemplating their liminal state. The sailors are half-asleep, their past “half-forgotten”. They long for the sound of “hearing the downward stream, / With half-shut eyes ever to seem / Falling asleep in a half-dream!” In “The Lotos-Eaters” the spaces and their perception lose distinction, erode, and disintegrate, just like the sailors’ identity and past, into “[p]ortions and parcels”. One can find a reverse creation of sorts, an erasure of the first dichotomy established in the book of Genesis:

Transformative Shores

43

Where “[in] the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (King James, Genesis 1.1.) the poem reconnects both, at least visually, into “dark-blue sky, / Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea”. This image will be reused in one of the classic texts dealing with the death of God. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s Aphorism 125 from Gay Science the madman exclaims: “How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?” (Nietzsche 1882, 1974: 181). In both poems language fails to describe the surroundings and the realities. For what is real to the doubting mind? Both poems avoid closure and remain as ambiguous and shifty as their coastal setting. And both transfer their respective questions to the reader, who thus stands with the lyric I on the shore. The reader has to pick up the fragments and has to answer the existential question – in a protomodernist fashion – for her- or himself. Where Tennyson and Arnold illustrate the struggle with uncertainty and doubt but avoid an answer, William H. Mallock offers an attempt at an epistemic closure. Mallock’s poem “Proteus” from 1880 responds to the questions asked by Tennyson and Arnold. While employing the same setting, imagery, and context as Tennyson’s and Arnold’s poems, it is a representation of a belief that appears firm in times of endemic Victorian uncertainty. He deals with the same existential questions: “Doubt we, and ask we whither lead Thy ways? / Ask, whither! Nay, see whence, pale, doubtful face!” Mallock uses similar Arcadian imagery: “Valleys where leaves and clear streams sleep and stir”. The language is equally ambiguous, e.g. the paradoxes like “familiar Mystery”. Yet Mallock begins where Tennyson and Arnold ended: in darkness. His lyric I stands on the coast, “sole in blank boundless darkness, dimly bright”. The paradoxical “dimly bright” is reminiscent of John Milton’s description of the burning lake in hell: “from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible.” (Milton, PL I, 62f) And standing there “facing the darkness where the sea is, and the night” the lyric I is feeling “It coming again, again, / Up from the deeps as Proteus did of old.” It is a “Formless Desire, which no eye may behold, / No hands of ours can weary, and no spell chain.” In this context one understands why for Carl Young Proteus is a symbol for the unconscious, a reading that would turn the shore into the space between the unconscious and the conscious, dreaming and waking, and – maybe – between doubting and believing.

44

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Like Tennyson and Arnold, Mallock stresses the shifting nature of his surroundings and of his own state. He even acknowledges the possibility of a God that will “never be revealed to us” on earth. Yet, the doubt and the resulting “unrest” are fully accepted. While Tennyson’s sailors decide to “not wander anymore” and Arnold’s lyric I gives in to despair, for Mallock the unrest, the wandering, and the endless search for truth are a precondition of belief, rather than detrimental to it. According to him, one needs to believe to finally see “The sunrise, and the sunset, and the sea”. The poem demands that one accepts that the existence of a/the God might only be revealed after death. In his argumentation Mallock follows Benjamin Jowett’s argument as cited in Henry Mansel’s 1858 Bampton Lectures. Jowett believes that God transcends and is beyond human understanding. Once again, the search for God’s existence is illustrated on shore. Newton’s “smoother pebble” and “prettier shell” are Benjamin Jowett’s “watch”, as cited in Mansel’s notes to “Limits of Religious Thought”: As certainly as the man who found a watch or piece of mechanism on the seashore would conclude, ‘here are marks of design, indications of an intelligent artist,’ so certainly, if he came across the meanest or the highest of the works of nature, would he infer, ‘this was not made by man, nor by any human art and skill.’ (cited in Mansel 1858: 355)

The Modernists in particular and the twentieth century in general continue the use of this spatial trope. Modernist literature has notable shore episodes and protagonists dealing with personal crisis and longing for change, such as T.S. Eliot’s “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1920), or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1926). James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) combines this setting with transformation of identity: the novel presents the beach in different ways: Firstly, Stephen’s family name Dedalus recalls of course the mythical creator of wings with which he and his son Icarus intended to flee the shores of Crete. Secondly, Stephen Dedalus’s teacher uses the shore and its countless grains of sand to illustrate the eternities in hell awaiting sinners. Thus he uses the shore in one of its oldest metaphorical forms to indicate the passage of time. Once more beach, sea, and satanic space are aligned. Thirdly, Stephen’s decisive epiphany, however, which leads towards self-acceptance, is staged on the shore during his personal crisis and his greatest need for a transformation

Transformative Shores

45

that could free him from the expectations of his family, teachers and peers: Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he? (Joyce 1964: 175)

The shore is the site of inspection and the dissolution of existing convictions, it is a space where transgression is followed by transformation. The transformative nature of the beach, however, is not restricted to modernist literature. In middlebrow writing,18 for example The Good Comrade by Una Lucy Silberrad, the heroine Julia Polkington’s coming-of-age is also staged on the beach. And according to Ina Haberman, Daphne Du Maurier’s novels repeatedly use the coasts of Cornwall as transformative spaces. Haberman elaborates that the “spectrum here comprises plot elements such as ship wrecking, smuggling, illegal landings and clandestine escapes as well as a psychological dimension which takes the liminal space of the beach as a symbol of personal crises and transformations” (cf. Haberman 2009). In contemporary literature the trend continues. The protagonists in Ian McEwan’s Saturday or John Banville’s The Sea experience moments of crisis; the beaches and shorelines are, again, sites of transition. Up to the present the literary beach remains what it always has 18

Writer and journalist Henry Major Tomlinson describes the life on the shores of the Thames in his work “London River” (1921) from a naturalist point of view: The book presents the river, its shores and the people living there as something different altogether: “There were sounds which reached me at last from the opposite shore, faint with distance and terror. The warning from an unseen steamer going out was as if a soul, crossing this Styx, now knew all. There is no London on the Thames, after sundown. Most of us know very little of the River by day. It might then be no more native to our capital than the Orientals who stand under the Limehouse gas lamps at night. It surprises us. We turn and look at it from our seat in a tram, and watch a barge going down on the ebb […] as if a door had unexpectedly opened on a mystery, revealing another world in London, and another sort of life than ours” (Tomlinson 1921: Book II). The river that defines London to a great degree is rendered otherworldly. The Thames so vital for London is presented as the Styx, it is a “mystery” and glimpsing into this other life is akin to Marlow’s experiences in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

46

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

been, as space for transformation, change and, most importantly, utopian thinking.19 1.3 Introducing Beach Trialectics in John Banville’s The Sea This introduction will close by outlining the paradigmatic elements, which will be analyzed in detail in the following chapters, surrounding the beach as third space by applying them right away to a literary analysis. The novel to be considered is John Banville’s The Sea (2005) which provides a culmination of almost all the characteristics that will be identified as essential for a paradigmatic group of beach narratives. What makes this novel so worthwhile for this initial analysis is its combination of various elements that recur from William Shakespeare to Margaret Atwood. While The Sea is perfectly contemporary in its setting, it is infused with metaphors and references that encompass Greek mythology, Biblical and philosophical themes, as well as psychological questions related to the construction of identity and memory. In addition, the paradigmatic elements of shore narratives, as represented by the topological fields body, psyche, society, and language are deeply intertwined. The Sea tells the story of Max Morden who lost his wife Anne to cancer. In his grief he decides to revisit the beach of his childhood memories. Here he recollects a defining summer where he met and joined the company of the Grace family. Banville tells a story of coming-of-age, of transgression, and endless liminality. This story of change and of de-categorisation finds its end on the beach, and that is where it begins: They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run

19

The list of recently published novels is extensive and encompasses low-, middle-, and highbrow. The Boolean search terms “beach AND novel” on the homepage of the online bookshop Amazon.com, alone yield 4,180 results.

Transformative Shores

47

aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. (Sea 3)

The similarity to another protagonist who ventures into hell, albeit willingly, is striking: in Dante’s Inferno the narrator’s journey is likewise presented as starting on the beach. Banville aligns his narrator Max Morden, who is mourning the death of his beloved Anne, with Dante and his story: the poet who descends into hell to finally meet his beloved Beatrice. Both Max and Dante begin their journey for solace and redemption by presenting themselves as shipwrecked sailors washed on shore. In The Inferno, Canto 1, Dante describes the beginning of his voyage towards Purgatorio with the following implicit metaphor: E come quei che con lena affannata Uscito fuor del plago alla riva Si volge all’acqua perigliosa e guata Just as a swimmer, still with panting breath, now safe upon the shore, out of the deep, might turn for one last look at the dangerous waters, (Dante Alighieri, 1995: 1.22-4)

This Homeric simile compares Dante’s experience to that of a shipwrecked sailor, who right after his wreck arrives at the shore, right after escaping death looks back towards the dangerous tides. The implicit metaphor of the beach is effective as it presents the transition from one state into another, from waking into dreaming, from earth towards hell. For both, Dante and Max, their story begins with an experience as devastating as a shipwreck and impending death by drowning. Both are being shocked out of their daily experience. Their ships, which can be read as metaphors for their love and relationships with Anne and Beatrice respectively, are destroyed. The important distinction to be made is that Max’s ship, that is his relation to Anne, is aligned with a “freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember [and] must have thought it was being granted a relaunch” (Sea 3). After many years of marriage their relationship did come to a standstill, the feelings and love for each other reappear in face of the catastrophe of cancer. For both, Max and Dante, the sea represents the uncontrolled struggle with feelings and emo-

48

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

tions, the grief and devastation that death, metaphorized as tempest, brought upon them. The beach for the moment represents safety; it is the line that divides water and land, death and life, past and future. Yet, it is not a mere safe haven, but represents the changes inflicted upon both. Max recognizes the sand “that for years had known no wetting save for rain and [waves] lapping the very bases of the dunes” (Sea 3). Here the beach represents his former life, which escaped death as represented by the sea for years, but now the very fundament of this life, the “very bases” (ibid.), are about to dissolve and go the way of the cliffs that lend their name to the Cliff Walk: “whatever cliffs there may once have been the sea had long ago eroded” (Sea 12). For Morden the sea, as seen from the beach is heavily connected to death. It is here that his first love Chloe and her brother Myles drowned. In a parallel example his wife Anne’s last living minutes in the hospital are described with similar imagery. She is depicted as somebody who is drowning: Anne “looked at me wide-eyed in the underwater glimmer of the nightlight” (Sea 239). The alignment of sea and death finds its way into one of Max’s dreams, where he imagines himself sitting on the shore. Here the waves told him “eagerly of some ancient catastrophe, the sack of Troy, perhaps, or the sinking of Atlantis. […] I see the black ship in the distance, looming imperceptibly nearer at every instant” (Sea 132). The black ship, representing death, is approaching the shore, to bring him into Hades. Yet, as opposed to Dante, Max welcomes the lure of the sea; he dreads “the delicate business of being the survivor” (Sea 146) and welcomes death: “I hear your siren’s song. I am there, almost there” (Sea 132). This attraction for death as represented by sea, the suicidal imagination, conjures up older connotations with the sea: [D]as Christentum galt als das Schiff, das die Gläubigen über die wilden Wellen der feindlichen Außenwelt, symbolisiert im Meer, trug und gegen das verderbliche Meer der Ungläubigen abgrenzte. Getreu der ambivalenten Haltung der Menschen jener wandlungsreichen Jahrhunderte entsprachen diese negativen Sichtweisen des Meeres als Ort der Hölle, der Teufel, der Versuchungen (man beachte die Gestalten der Nymphen, Nixen oder anderer weiblichen Gewässerbewohner) […]. (Schnurrman in Klein 2003: 50-1) [Christianity was regarded as a ship, that carried believers over the wild waves of a hostile world, represented by the sea, and separated

Transformative Shores

49

the believers from the corrupting sea of non-believers. In accordance with the ambivalent perspectives of these transformative centuries, these negative perspectives were analogous to the understanding of the sea as a space of hell, the devils, temptations personified by nymphs, mermaids or other female sea-dwellers. (my translation)]

In the second half of his life, with his lover lost, death also lost its terror. He compares himself to “a lyreless Orpheus” (Sea 24). Yet he knows that he cannot commit suicide: “I think [my daughter] was worried I might be bent on drowning myself. She must not know what a coward I am” (Sea 44f). Still, he remains in the intermediate space, between life and death, contemplating his fate. Not dead, not living either. This situation alludes to T.S. Eliot’s Alfred Prufrock: I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. […………………………………………………..] We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (T.S. Eliot 1963: “Prufrock and Other Observations”)

Like Morden, Prufrock feels the temptation of the sea.20 He equally longs for death but knows he is too weak, too human to answer the siren calls. However, whereas Prufrock is indecision and passiveness allegorized, Morden decides to cope with death and grief. He wilfully stays on this border between life and death, past and present. He turns himself, as in his childhood, into a figure of the third, positioned in a liminal space, a space not only between land/sea, life/death, agency/passiveness, reality/dream but also a chronotopos, 20

This imagery is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice. While the young Max Morden has to watch how Chloe and Myles are drowning, the perspective in Death in Venice is inversed. Here it is Tazio, who, standing in the water, observes Gustav Aschenbach’s death: “[He] looked back over his shoulder towards the shore. There on the beach, the watching Aschenbach sat as he had sat once before, when those twilight-gray eyes had first glanced back over that fateful threshold and met his own” (Mann 1911: 218). Following this description the focalization changes and the reader follows Aschenbach’s perspective. Dying “slumped over sideways in his chair” (ibid.) he imagines himself leaving the shore and wading into the sea for a final time. Max Morden resembles Gustav Aschenbach in his wish to get away and to regain his lost creativity and the will to continue his life.

50

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

where present and past overlap, intertwine and influence each other. It is a transitional space that carries the dangers of regression as well as the possibility of a resurrection from grief. Here at the Cedars, the Graces’s old beach-resort, Max is offered a space where the liminalities and dichotomies that govern his daily existence are not effective. This space, in a romanticist way, resembles his state of mind: I had felt myself break through the membrane of mere consciousness into another state, one which had no name, where ordinary laws did not operate, where time moved differently if it moved at all, where I was neither alive nor the other thing and yet more vividly present than ever I could be in what we call, because we must, the real world. (Sea 97f)

This very state of being betwixt-and-between is just what he encountered as a child on the same beach, albeit for different reasons. After his wife’s death he is drawn back to this locale that mirrors his personal situation. Going there, not only death/life, sea/city open up a space in between, but so do the present and the past. As Max himself says “I seemed to inhabit a twilit netherworld in which it was scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking, since both waking and dreaming had the same penetrable, darkly velutinous texture […]” (Sea 96f). As mentioned above, the essential paradigmatic element of the beach, whether as literal or figural spatial entity, is its ability to combine and/or dissolve dichotomies and binary discourses. Not only is the beach, geologically speaking, a hybrid of land and sea, but it works as a third space on different levels of signification. To illustrate this thirding of binaries, I will proceed from the concrete to the increasingly abstract. After looking at the spatial oppositions in Banville’s The Sea, I will proceed to the socio-politics, body-politics and sexuality, concluding with an analysis of language in connection with identity constructions. The spatial set-up in The Sea is, initially, quite straightforward. With Max Morden the reader encounters a first-person-narrator not unlike Robinson Crusoe. There is a span of many years between the experiencing and the narrating I. The narrating I, an art scholar, has very clear views on sea- vs. city-life. While the perception of the beach and beach-life changes dramatically for Max, the dichotomy sea/city is clearly oppositional and echoes the nature/culture divide,

Transformative Shores

51

where the cultural side, represented by hospitals and cities, is viewed with contempt. The first of few city-spaces to be described is the hospital: the “building was a new one, all glass and steel”, outside there was “tarmac” and in the sunlight the “[c]ar roofs glared” (Sea 14). That Max views with revulsion the very place where his wife is diagnosed with cancer is understandable. Yet his view on cities and their inhabitants is presented in an equally negative vein. Anne’s interest for the shadier parts of London, for example, he cannot understand: “The East End called to her, Brick Lane, Spitalfields, such places” (Sea 101). The dismissive “such places”, a hiss of contempt almost, is echoed by his reaction to his daughter’s giving up her scholarly career “to take up the teaching of backward children in one of the city’s increasingly numerous, seething slums” (Sea 63). This single sentence is one of the very few remarks on city-life in the novel, and thus the more powerful and revealing. His contempt for the “backward children” is as obvious as is his perception of the regressing cities turning into “seething slums”. This harsh reaction may be grounded in Max’s disappointment over his daughter’s abandoned scholarly career. Still, considering that there are years between the events and their narration, one realizes that this disregard festering in Morden’s mind is as powerful as ever. But is that not a contradiction? When, as argued above, the sea represents death and regression, and when the city does so as well, where is the dichotomy already mentioned to be found? Banville effectively fuses two time periods: Max’s childhood and coming-of-age as an eleven-year-old boy on the beach, as well as his contemporary self, travelling back to the beach of his childhood and into his memories. To borrow Michel Serres’s words: “At this point in time, several chronies intertwine” (Serres 2007: 72). The beach he is looking for is therefore a nostalgic projection. This “twilit netherworld” (Sea 96) is, however, not only a regressive phantasm which he intends to recreate and restage. The voyage back in time holds various promises for him. These are connected to his childhood experiences centered on the Grace family he met as a child during his beach holidays. Here Banville establishes another binary, this time with the help of telling names. One has to be careful though, for Max Morden is an utterly unreliable narrator: for one thing Max Morden changed his own name during his life. Also, the narrating I does admit that his memory is not at its best: “What was her name? What was it. No it

52

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

will come – so much for memory’s prodigious memory” (Sea 161). Hedda Friberg, consequently, calls the novel “an investigation of the distorting processes of memory” (Friberg 2005: 111). Unlike Dante’s invocation of the muses, Max doubts that Mnemo, the muse of memory, is on his side: “I take back all my praise, if it is Memory herself who is at work here and not some other, more fanciful muse” (Sea 163). Consequently, he has to invent names, and this process is another essential trait of many beach narratives, namely the pitfalls of constructivism and perception, the inability to represent reality by means of language. In Max’s case the telling names he invents and recalls do fit into his pre-established binary surrounding land and sea: “Mrs Strand, I shall call her Mrs Strand, if she has to be called anything” (Sea 161). Mrs Strand is, as her makeshift name indicates, working as a vendor at the beach. Max Morden is a speaking name as well, derived from the German verb “morden”, which translates as “to kill”. This German root of Max’s family name is not a linguistic coincidence, as the narrator is very much able to understand German. The doctor who diagnosed Anna’s terminal illness, is aptly named “Mr Todd” on which Max sarcastically remarks: “This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De’Ath” (Sea 13). Max’s family name symbolises his being a liminal persona, somebody who is betwixt-and-between two states, to speak as Victor Turner puts it. Turner argues that the “structural ‘invisibility’ of liminal personae has a twofold character. They are at once no longer classified and not yet classified. In so far as they are no longer classified, the symbols that represent them are, in many societies, drawn from the biology of death, decomposition, catabolism, and other physical processes that have a negative tinge […]” (Turner 1987: 6). These names associated with death are counteracted by the name of the family he meets during the holidays; the Grace family holds the very promise their name signifies: peace, redemption and deification, as will be shown below. Among them, Max the boy experiences more than one “Edenic moment” (Sea 89) and Max, the man, longs to return to this state. Upon entering the holiday house on the beach for the first time since his childhood, he feels like he “would have to take on the house, to put it on, as it were, like something I had

Transformative Shores

53

worn in another, prelapsarian life” (Sea 156). This he wants to return to, an edenic, prelapsarian life of unspoiled perfection. What is it the Grace family can offer him? In the narrative’s present, the memory of them helps Max to cope with his grief. In the past these beach-dwellers offered the fulfilment of his biggest wish: “From earliest days I wanted to be someone else” (Sea 216). The Grace family, voluntarily or not, grants him this wish. Like the beach where he meets and spends most of the time with them, they defy any existing category. They are figures of the third who belong nowhere and who counteract expectations. To Max they are mythical beings descending into his lowly world, or, to be more precise, stepping out of the water on to the land. They certainly don’t care for social conventions; Max encounters them on a restricted part of the beach: “This was part of the beach that was tacitly reserved for residents of the Golf Hotel, the lawn of which ended just behind the dunes, and indignant stares were being directed at these heedlessly interloping villa people […]” (Sea 26f). In a social order where space is neatly compartmentalized according to class, their invasion of space is a breach of this very order: “The social structure of our summer world was as fixed and hard of climbing as a ziggurat” (Sea 108). The ziggurat, a temple-structure such as the tower of Babel, is a powerful metaphor in this context. Max wants to climb this ladder, this temple, in order to be somebody else, somebody better, and the Grace family opens the third space between his class and their class that gives him the possibility of doing so. Their difference is not only of a social kind. Even more evocative is the imagery that is repeatedly used to describe this family; various categories are fused and hybridized. Not only does Banville refer to the voyage of Dante, but the metaphoric field he uses most extensively and explicitly to illustrate the fascination and otherness of this family is that of the Greek myths. The family consists of Carlo Grace, the father; Connie, the mother; Chloe and Myles, inseparable twins and Rose, the nursemaid. While Max, the grown-up, compares himself explicitly to Orpheus and implicitly to Odysseus with “no promise of homecoming” (Sea 25) the Graces of his memory are the Gods and fabled beings he encountered on this journey home. The Graces’s mythical otherness is described as follows: Carlo Grace, the father, was “in command over us all, a laughing deity, the

54

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Poseidon of our summer” (Sea 123). Not only is he compared to the God of the Sea, but also to a satyr with “furred hind legs” and “with all his sharp little teeth on show and his ice-blue eyes alight with mirthful lust” (Sea 79). The sexualized appearance and the hairy looks are considered as unnatural by some, or rather too natural for a cultivated being. Anna’s dad comments: “hair, he said, is fur, no human being should tolerate it” (Sea 102). This disregard of human hair, representing ever-growing, untameable nature, does other “Mr Grace, old grinning goat god” (Sea 125). Mrs Grace, Connie, is equally sexualized by being likened to the sea and animality. At one point she “was wearing a black swimsuit, tight and darkly lustrous as sealskin” (Sea 28); at a later instance the black swimsuit looked “less like a sealskin than the pelt of a panther” (Sea 77). The sexual attraction she holds for Max is strange and new to him, something he cannot categorize. Mrs Grace, “a faceless idol, ancient and elemental” (Sea 118) is a shape shifter in Max’s perception, repeatedly moving from the cultural to the natural: “Under my greedy gaze Mrs Grace had been transformed from woman into daemon and then in a moment was mere woman again” (Sea 118). The connection of the Graces with mythical sea-creatures continues in the description of the twins Chloe and Myles. The water is their natural habitat: “The twins [clove] the waves effortlessly, like two pairs of gleaming shears” (Sea 135). Myles is othered most extremely by the narrator. For one thing, he has membranes between his toes: “When he splayed them, which he could do as easily as if they were fingers, the membranes between them would stretch into a gossamer webbing, pink and translucent and shot through leaf-like with a tracery of fine veins red like covered flame, the marks of a godling, sure as heaven” (Sea 61). And what is more alienating about this “godling”, even to his family, is his being mute. The boy with the “elfin smile” (Sea 82) “said nothing but he was never silent” (Sea 83). While Myles, despite being mute, is able to communicate with his sister Chloe in ways that remain a secret to Max, Max himself is unable to describe and categorize Chloe. The girl he finally and deeply falls for escapes his linguistic and constructivist means: Chloe cannot be translated into a single form of representation, linguistically and conceptually; she is constantly evading categorization. Max is only capable of recalling Chloe synecdochically; he describes her hair,

Transformative Shores

55

her teeth, her behaviour, which is often cruel and cold, yet he is unable to conjure a single, coherent image of her: “All this I remember, intensely remember, yet it is all disparate, I cannot assemble it into a unity” (Sea 139). To Max, “[t]his was her difference” (Sea 167). These descriptions not only place the Graces socially between the upper-classes and the lower-middle-classes, gods and humans, nature and culture, but their behaviour and looks, their whole beingin-the-world refuses categorization. In Max’s perception they constantly change, they repeatedly transform, they counteract his expectations, they are shifting and floating. Yet it is exactly this repeated deconstruction of social scripts and expectations that allows Max to become a part of them in the first place. They are opening up the very space for his goal to construct the new identity he desires so much. His own family is too caught up in classical gender-roles and the social behaviour required of them to give Max the possibility of changing and progressing. Their life is fossilized; they are oblivious to Max’s demand for transformation and soon the family is falling apart. Max’s father leaves Ireland for England, and Max is left with his resentful mother. The unpredictability and difference of the Graces is so important because they fulfil the function of a mirror. As somebody who is unable to understand himself, who is forging a new identity out of an old one, it is their lack of definition, their otherness that allows him to go ahead. The very inability to understand each other and oneself is being reflected in this whole family. The grown-up Max remarks that: A savant whose name for the moment I forget has posited as a refutation of something or other the assertion that it is impossible for a human being to imagine fully what it would be like to be a bat. I take his point in general, but I believe I could have given him a fair account of such creaturehood when I was young and still part animal myself. (Sea 135)

With his being “part animal” (ibid.) as a child he feels closer to them. The argument he refers to is Thomas Nagel’s statement on the inability to understand animals, such as bats, and to emphasize with their perception of the world. Nagel argues: But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to sup-

56

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville pose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. (Nagel 2006: 168f)

This statement ties in with the novel’s narrative in two ways. Myles could be read as a being of the sea, but his description is also referring to a bat, with his webbed toes, and his constantly making sounds. Myles himself liked “pretending to be a wild beast […]” (Sea 144). Does Max really belong in this family? Not completely: he does remain an outsider of sorts, however, with a paradoxically close relation to the family. This is a relation that could be called, to use Michel Serres’s terminology, parasitic. He is not turning completely into one of them, but he still is part of a relationship that is based on certain knowledge and the withholding thereof. Especially with Chloe is this parasitic element of importance. For one thing, his relationship to the Graces is in constant flux; it is a system of floating signification and, thus, relations. Initially, he falls in love with Mrs Grace, or mistakes sexual attraction for love. This love he later identifies as the floating signifier for what Jacques Lacan calls jouissance, the constant floating and shifting of desire from one object or subject to another, the very impossibility of stasis in any system, be it social, political, or as in this case psychological. Max says: “Love, as we call it, has a fickle tendency to transfer itself, by a heartless, sidewise shift, from one bright object to a brighter, in the most inappropriate of circumstances” (Sea 164). In Max’s case, this love quickly shifts from mother to daughter, from Connie to Chloe. With Chloe and Myles Max builds a Freudian triad. This very triad is essential for the narrative as a whole, and the narrative that is Max’s memory/identity. Banville presents the three children in the classical Freudian, psychoanalytical triad: Ego, Id, Super-Ego. Before Max joins, the dyadic relationship of the twins was, according to Chloe, “‘Like two magnets,’ she said, ‘but turned the wrong way, pulling and pushing’” (Sea 81). Yet, together with Max, everybody finds his natural position: Myles, the “beast”, the mute presence, constantly fighting and teasing, can be read as a signifier for the Id. Chloe, cold, scant, devoid of any uncontrolled emotions, represents the Super-Ego. Max, the boy coming-of-age, looking for a new identity, is the Ego, absolutely dependent on Chloe and Myles. The three

Transformative Shores

57

form a temporary triad. Two questions are of importance. Firstly, what is the price Max has to pay for his being part of this “summer’s saltbleached triptych” (Sea 224)? Secondly, what is he ultimately looking for? Whether Chloe is as fascinated with Max as vice versa never really becomes clear. What he, in his own perception, can offer her is the withholding of information, namely the awareness of her faults, “that she smelled of stale biscuits, or that Joe from the Field had remarked the green tinge of her teeth” (Sea 167). Max presents himself as the Adam, who saves his Eve from the pain of insight, concluding: “there must be no confrontations, no brutal enlightenments, no telling of terrible truths […] she must be kept inviolate, unpolluted by too much self-knowledge or, indeed, too sharp a knowledge of me” (Sea 167). Yet, this is the very sentence that gives away the parasitic nature of Max’s relation to Chloe. Max’s sexual attraction to Mrs Grace was directed from him to her, a relation where he invested, and Mrs Grace enjoyed the attention. Max’s attraction to Chloe is directed the other way: he admits that her “self-esteem was of far less importance to me than my own, although the latter was dependent on the former” (Sea 167). He pays the price, in order to be granted the transformation, and deification, ultimately the acceptance and change he longed for. Yet, he has to pay another price for his change. When the three attack a city-boy, who is swimming in the sea, Max is disturbed by the re-sponse of the boy: “what unsettled me was the expression of ac-ceptance in his glance, the ovine unsurprisedness at my perfidy. […] I found intolerable the thought of being known in the way that he seemed to know me. Better than I knew myself. Worse” (Sea 172). Max uses the chance to transgress, to become somebody else, to change from a parasite living off the Graces without giving anything back into an essential part of the triad. Yet, in doing so, he realized that this was never what he wanted. Despite saying so, as the quotation above shows, Max later realizes that change is actually suspect to him: “[…] since why should I desire change, I who have come back to live amidst the rubble of the past?” (Sea 4) The above quotation on the shifting and transforming of love already gives away his inner dislike of change. What is he really looking for? What is this home he is referring to?

58

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

He is looking for the perfect system, an impossibility since the edenic, prelapsarian state only exists in his mind. The idea of a prelapsarian state is a utopian imagination and as closed and immovable as utopias themselves. While he is absolutely aware of the changing nature of life, he is, paradoxically, at the same time oblivious of it. Yet, as beach narratives illustrate, the possibility of an absence of change is an illusion, as is the belief in a closed, perfectly self-contained system. Any system is constantly transforming, and the beach where these changes are repeatedly initiated is, in The Sea, the metaphorical space for this movement. Here Max meets the Graces, here he falls in love and has his first sexual experiences, actively and passively: in a scene recalling Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Caliban and Stephano caught under the tarpaulin, Max has the following encounter on the beach: “I almost stumbled over a couple lying in a shallow sandy pit making love under a raincoat. Their extensions had caused the coat to ride up, so that it covered their heads but not their tails […]” (Sea 74). From the beach he watches Chloe and Myles drowning. His longing for a stable, unchanging state of being is futile. This kind of transformation Max wants to stop by withholding certain knowledge from Chloe, but at the same time he is afraid of Chloe’s possible responses and the harm they can do to his self-image. Max Morden, as has been mentioned, is increasingly unwilling to accept these changes and transformations. What he longs for is a stasis he can not produce himself. His desire is regressive, as he himself admits: To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indifferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. (Sea 60)

Another metaphor for this guarded, utopian state-of-being in the novel is the egg: “Before it is a beginning an egg is an absolute end. It is the very definition of self-containment” (Sea 159). This statement gives away his wish to be alone and, more importantly, to be able to live alone. That this is impossible he has to experience, an insight which recalls John Donne’s Meditation 17: “No Man is an island, entire of itself; every man is part of the continent, a part of the main”.

Transformative Shores

59

Max, metaphorically speaking, desires this utopian state of an enclosed as well as a shielded nature as an “island.” As Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Basnett argue, “Utopia’s transformation from land to island expresses the social desire for self-containment, autonomy, and unchangeable stability” (Stephanides and Basnett 2008: 12). This goal, however, is unattainable. Max is paradoxically caught in an almost pathological situation; he initially craves change, a transformation of his identity, which is, ultimately, presented in his changing his name. He is obsessed with mirrors and self-reflection, yet he is terrified of what he can see. The only kind of mirror is that personified by his wife Anna. As opposed to his first love Chloe, who can be brutally honest, “Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight” (Sea 216). In both cases, he escapes a true reflection. By not telling Chloe his true thoughts about her, Max doesn’t elicit any honest response on her side. By choosing Anna, who like a “fairground mirror” straightens out his “distortions”, he actively chooses a partner, who in her special ways, supports his selfconstructive actions. His view of himself is as reductionist as his perspective on the sea-shore: “At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky” (Sea 10). Max may actively create and support the identity he constructed for himself. However, he is in no way oblivious to this desire. Actually, he is fully aware of these processes, yet he is unable to stop them. Max Morden’s psychological desire is utopian not only in the sense that his goal is ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unattainable’. His utopian ideal, rather is “[i]nvolving, based or founded on, imaginary or chimerical perfection; impossibly ideal” (Oxford English Dictionary: “utopian”); more importantly, his attempt to create an unspoiled, perfectly coherent image of himself is very utopian in the way that it does not allow for outside influence. Every additional influence that affects this selfcreated identity this construction cannot cope with. He is unable to create, as has been said, an identity, that is an ‘island of its own.’ The traumatic death of Chloe and Myles shatters their triad and Max is left alone, his transformation and coming-of-age not yet finished. “I moved among the rooms as if I were myself a thing of air, a drifting spirit, Ariel set free and at a loss” (Sea 247). Here the narrator employs another metaphor taken from The Tempest. Max likens himself

60

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

to Ariel, set free from Prospero’s power, yet the sudden freedom is too much for him. The freedom he desired paradoxically realizes itself as a confinement to the past. Max is unable to move on: while he feels everybody around him grows older, and older, he feels as if frozen in time. His desire for perfection influences and is represented by all four fields Stallybrass and White analyze in their study as elemental in the interplay of liminality and transgression: “psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 3). As analyzed above, Max desires to be part of another social class, represented by the Graces: “How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known.” (Sea 107f). The geographical space that offers him the opportunity to get in contact with the Graces is the beach. His ardent search for a perfect, unchangeable union results in the opposite; his attempt to achieve a state of perfection is actually an act of transgression, and is ultimately represented by a grotesque image of himself and his body. The transgressive act, however, is not his wish for upward mobility, requited love and admiration (which his parents cannot offer). The price of fulfilling his dreams would be absolute self-acceptance, but this he cannot or will not do. His transgressive act is his inherent unwillingness to change his self-image. Transgression implies mobility, metaphorical or literal, a stepping over the line; the refusal to change, to transform, and most importantly, to alter the liminalities themselves which are the frame of one’s constructed identity, leads in Max’s case to regression rather than transgression. Max’s nostalgia causes him to move backwards in time: his voyage to the shore to re-create a nostalgic past in the present is almost pathological in its results for Max. Again, Banville applies a Freudian concept: Max, the narrating I, is not only looking back to the past, he is stuck in the past; his nostalgia is deadly, rather than comforting. To cite Daniel Berthold-Bond: “Freud speaks of the ‘path of regression’ taken by the libido which has been ‘repulsed by reality’ and must seek satisfaction through a ‘withdrawal from the ego and its laws’” (Berthold-Bond 1995: 100). In the extent of Max’s nostalgia and its devastating influence on him, one could almost read this protagonist as an allegory for the diagnosis exemplified by Freud. As illustrated above, Max’s concept of reality

Transformative Shores

61

is dissolving, and he does flee from his ego and the pains inflicted upon him. Max’s attempt to re-live the various defining events of this defining summer on the shore, if only in memory, are acts of “transgressions of gender, territorial boundaries, sexual preference, family and group norms [which] are transcoded into the ‘grotesque body’” (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 24). His admiration for and deification of the physical and the psychological beauty of Conny and Chloe Grace cause him to see himself as the very opposite, as ugly, nasty, disgustingly human. The apotheosis of the Graces, “these divinities” (Sea 107f), leads to the demotion of himself: “I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Hallowe’en mask made of sagging, pinkish-grey rubber that bears no more than passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head” (Sea 128). This quotation reveals how his realitycrisis is grounded in the identity crisis caused by the traumatic events in his life. To conclude with Stallybrass and White, the social, gendered, and psychological discourses transcribe themselves in the image of the ‘grotesque body’: The grotesque body, as Bakhtin makes clear, has its discursive norms too: impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitancy, clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements, a focus upon gaps, orifices and symbolic filth (what Mary Douglas calls ‘matter out of place’), physical needs and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, materiality and parody. (Stallybrass and White 1986: 23)

Max’s view of himself represents this very Bakhtinian understanding of the ‘grotesque body’. Max states that Before Anna’s illness I had held my physical self in no more than fond disgust, […] tolerant, necessarily, of the products of my sadly inescapable humanity, the various effluvia, the eructations fore and aft, the gleet, the scurf, the sweat and other common leakages […]. I developed a crawling repugnance of my flesh. (Sea 69f)

In a interesting linguistic move the narrator enumerates all the elements of his daily disgust in minute detail, yet does so in a language and a wording that immediately distances him and the reader from the content of these words: “effluvia”, “eructations”, “leakages”

62

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

(Sea 70) are almost euphemistic in their echoing of a distanced, medicinal discourse. For good measure he throws in a literal allusion by referring to the “Bard of Hartford” (ibid.), referring to Wallace Stevens and his poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” Max Morden, traumatized by the death of his wife and the memory of Chloe’s and Myles’s drowning, is caught in between life and death, outside and inside, past and present. His nostalgia is stopping any change that could be beneficial in his state of crisis; his self is stuck in the pitfalls of binary thinking, a frame consisting of selfcreated dichotomies that don’t allow for a third. These dichotomies are illusions: Max remains a dissolved subject, caught in the liminal act of constantly transgressing, in Michel Foucault’s understanding of this term. Foucault, building his argument on Bataille, describes the “shattering of the philosophical subject” (Foucault 1997: 43) as follows, and in this very outline one recognizes Max Morden: [I]n the constant movement to different levels of speech and a systematic disengagement from the ‘I’ who has begun to speak and is already on the verge of deploying his language and installing himself in it: temporal disengagements (‘I was writing this,’ or similarly ‘in retrospect, if I turn to this matter’), shifts in the distance separating a speaker from his words (in a diary, notebooks, poems, stories, meditations and discourses intended for demonstration). (Foucault 1997: 42)

This state of being perfectly sums up Max Morden’s situation, his fragmented sense of self, and entrapment in a liminal, transgressive situation, located on the beach. His inability to escape this liminal stage by creating a new identity for himself is signified in the form of a dream: “last night in a dream, it has just come back to me, I was trying to write my will on a machine that was lacking the word I. The letter I that is small and large” (Sea 71). This allegory beautifully exemplifies his paradoxical situation: he is a man of the word, a scholar and writer, as somebody highly educated and aware of the constructed nature of culture and the self. His narrative of his grief is presented in a most elaborate, allusive and referential style. As has been shown, his self-description evokes literature such as Dante, William Shakespeare, Wallace Stevens; it refers to eco-criticism such as Nagel; his narrative recalls psychoanalytical theories such as Sigmund Freud’s or Jacques Lacan’s. In a word, his narrative is multi-referential. This abundance of references he employs to fill and at the same time evade the empty

Transformative Shores

63

space in the middle the elemental everything is about. Yet his dream reveals him as a first-person narrator who lost the “I”, the letter turned signifier for his entirety, a single, seemingly insignificant line that divides him from others. Paradoxically, the single missing letter results in an abundance of words, sentences, whole paragraphs that attempt to fill this hole in the “sands of silence” (Foucault 1997: 30). Foucault’s analysis of transgression continues: language “proceeds to the limit and to its opening where its being surges forth, but where it is already completely lost, completely overflowing itself, emptied of itself to the point where it becomes an absolute void – an opening which is communication” (Foucault 1997: 43). This aspect of losing the self, the I, as represented by the missing I of the typewriter in Max’s dream, carries also a double meaning. The I representing the subject is homophone to and evokes the eye, representing the subject’s ability to see and understand, also the chance for others to detect the subject’s nature by looking into the eye. The narrator uses this triple meaning of I/I/eye to show his absolute loss of self: “one’s eyes are always those of someone else, the mad and desperate dwarf crouched within” (Sea 19). What ultimately saves Max Morden, is a figure of the third, somebody who is equally stuck in a liminal stage, also caused by the death of Chloe and Myles. This is a protagonist that throughout the narrative is present, and at the same time paradoxically absent. The nursemaid Rose is part of the Grace family, legitimized by her position. On the one hand she is closer to the family than anybody else. On the other hand, she is hardly present, neither in Max’s narrative nor in the perception of the Graces. Rose’s position oscillates between absolute intimacy with and considerable distance from the Graces and Max. Her presence or absence is often overlooked, and seldom registered. “Rose – where is Rose? […] But how did she get here?” (Sea 130) Paradoxically, as Max says, “it is she, oddly, who is most sharply delineated on the wall of my memory” (Sea 223f). As opposed to the Graces, who are the results of Max’s own constructing of a memory, the memory of Rose “is by another, unknown hand” (Sea 224). Not only does she seem to escape Max’s perception, her being part of his memory is attributed to a different force. In the end, it is Rose that saves Max. As the narrator tells at the end of the novel, Rose is the landlady of the beach-house where he is

64

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

residing. After the death of the Graces she is unable to move on and live a life of her own, but instead she stays at the Graces’s holidayhouse, continuing her work as nurse-maid, if only for the memory of the dead. She is, for one thing, the bridge between the past and the present. More importantly, Rose is Max’s double: both are in love with the Graces in general, and with Chloe and Connie respectively. Both are outsiders of sorts, yet intimately close to the family and their members. Both hold the secrets that, as they assumed, threatened the Graces’s identity as a family. Max is convinced he has to save Chloe from spoiling her positive self-image. Rose hides the fact that she is in love with Mrs Grace, and accepts that everybody is caught under the assumption that she loves Mr Grace. Both in their respective ways feel responsible for the deaths of Chloe and Myles. Both share a feeling of guilt that weighs them down, yet they are unable to speak about it, in order to break the spell of the past. In a narrative that is spelling out all the events and the narrator’s perceptions in minute detail, a narrative whose very use of language is foregrounded by this overtly deliberate, perfectionist, almost clinically cold prose style, what saves both, ultimately, is silence. Max moves into the Cedars, full of questions about the past, full of curiosity about what really happened, eager to settle the question of who was to blame for the tragic events. Facing Rose “old, unasked questions come swarming forward again” (Sea 261). In the end, the crucial, essential question remains unasked; the answers are not given. Max encountering his double, seeing his own lack of agency in her, detecting his obsession with the past in her, is answer enough. After this realization Max is free to leave the Cedars: it is now that in the narrative past and present conflate one last time. Max uses a seemingly unimportant event from his childhood to describe his moment of closure, a moment that brought him back from the sea, representing death and the past, closer to the land: I was standing up to my waist in water that was perfectly transparent […] As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way towards the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference. (Sea 264)

Transformative Shores

65

John Banville’s novel The Sea is a post-structuralist attempt to present a protagonist’s language shattered by trauma, his memories constructed by the language itself, resulting in an identity that is a mosaic of these contradicting pieces of memory. Banville presents the beach, on the one hand, as the metaphorical setting that mirrors and initiates the fragmentation of binary structures and of seemingly coherent systems of social order, identity and bodily functions; on the other hand, the beach is a spatial utopia holding the promise of overcoming the very losses that caused this overflow of differentiation, and regaining the upper-hand over an ever-dissolving self and reality. The beach, in Banville’s The Sea, is the spatial representation of these liminal processes: Undoing, dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by processes of growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns. It is interesting to note how, by the principle of the economy (or parsimony) of symbolic reference, logically antithetical processes of death and growth may be represented by the same tokens, for example by huts and tunnels that are at once tombs and wombs […] This coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation characterizes the peculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both. (Turner 1987: 9)

In the following chapters this study aims to extrapolate similar discursive realizations of the liminal, this ‘betwixt and betweenness’ as presented on literary beaches and islands, ranging from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.




2 Ambiguity Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: 10) How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? […] What we are most likely confronted with here is a sort of instant infinity, a situation reminiscent of a Mondrian painting. (Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space: 85)

Cartography is a symbolic representation of hegemonic power in one of its oldest forms. Making maps is to align power and space. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, who has just arrived in the capital, is waiting to see the director of the company, his future employer. Standing in the antechamber of the director’s office, he is facing a multicoloured map of the world, representing the colonial powers and their domains. The way Marlow describes the map is reminiscent of a visitor in an artmuseum describing a piece of fine art: he mentions the colours, the “red”, the “blue”, the “green”, the “purple” and the “orange” (ibid.) He identifies geometrical forms, the “vast amount”, a “deuce”, “smears”, and a “patch” (ibid.). The colours and forms block out his understanding of what lies beneath: he merely appreciates the “good work” of the British and the “jolly pioneers” (ibid.). The order and beauty of the map make him oblivious to what lies beyond the colonial surface, the colonized countries. He is immediately caught by the propagandistic effect this map successfully expresses. Marlow is deluded by the ‘beauty of empires.’ The location of this map is telling. Its place is the antechamber, the “waiting-room” (HoD 10), where Marlow is expecting to be ad-

68

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

mitted into the main office, the centre of power. The alignment of Marlow, the map, and the antechamber creates a transitional moment.1 Marlow is a liminal persona, without a job, and therefore without any status, away from his native country and the privileges and securities it provides him with. He is stripped of any sustainable status. For Marlow his liminal situation is equally expressed by the fact that his aunt had to organize the job for which he is applying right now: “I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work – to get a job! Heavens!!” (HoD 8) Marlow is betwixt-and-between: he is thus positioned by the text in a liminal stage. In this way the waiting room represents this state: it positions him neither here, nor there, neither in a public space, nor in the office he needs to visit. Waiting rooms suspend the subject in time, halt their progress, and make them aware that they have no powers and rights here. The waiting room exerts power and control on the waiting subject. On the other side of the closed door this power finds its fulfilment and representation in the form of the company’s manager: either Marlow is given a new job, and is thus introduced into society and endowed with a new status, or he is rejected and has to remain in this liminal state. In this context the map expresses the reach of this very power, its extension over countries and peoples. These are equally suspended in a liminal state, a situation and a space where their lives and soil are subjugated to a foreign force, a force that intentionally takes away any pre-defined human status and all the rights attached to it. Yet the way the map is laid out places its focus on those in power, as represented by the colours. Marlow standing in front of the map is aligned with those subjugated and overpowered; he is reminded that his position is similar. Without detecting the map’s assertion of the company’s power Marlow is drawn into the existing hegemonic discourse. As a liminal persona in a liminal space Marlow awaits being assigned a status and being introduced into the company. For Marlow looking at this

























































1

Michel de Certeau argues, that the “map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation” (de Certeau 1984: 121). The antechamber in Heart of Darkness replicates this function. Here too different heterogeneous places “collate[.] on the same plane” (ibid.). However, the “observation” that produces the perception of this specific place is heavily guided, the production of space (as intended by the company) overpowers the subjective and individual perception of those waiting here.

Ambiguity

69

map serves as the beginning of an initiation into the system of power the map represents. Mapping is a reductionist process, often intentionally so, and a very subjective one at that. Jeremy Crampton argues: Even casting a cursory glance at the history of cartography should lead us to suspect that mapping and maps have a whole series of engagements in politics, propaganda, crime and public health, imperialist boundary-making, community activism, the nation-state, cyberspace, and the internet. That is, mapping has a politics. It is hard to imagine mapping that does not in some way or other involve politics, mapping is itself a political act. (Crampton 2010: 9)

Political maps, especially maps of Empires, have the very goal of avoiding ambiguity and want to express the following: ‘This space is ours; this space is us.’ The map in Heart of Darkness in its alignment of colours and forms does resemble a propagandistic piece of art; as such it is closer to a “Mondrian painting” (Lefebvre 1991: 85) than to an objectified, mapped reality. The following three structural elements are the focus of the three main sections of this study. In chapter two the shore will be analysed as an ambiguous space and the study will focus on the semantic openness of borderspaces; in chapter three the focus will be on presentations of liminality made possible by this ambiguous space and the way in which the categorical openness of the space is reflected in the protagonists will be analyzed; in chapter four the presented discourses will be analysed as transgressive in the sense of Michel Foucault and thus opposed to dichotomous thinking. In Heart of Darkness, interestingly, the shiny map, prominently exhibited in the main office, is never mentioned again in the novel, nor is any other map. This map, displayed at the centre of the company and its colonies, is the last hint at a pre-structured, neatly ordered arrangement of space and power. Marlow “was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre” (HoD 10). This centre, however, is not the centre of a clearly defined space, representing a clearly defined identity. Marlow’s voyage along the shore represents a voyage right in the centre of a liminal space, and a liminal state, a space of “instant infinity” (Lefebvre 1991: 85). Marlow describes this transition as follows: “For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straight-forward facts, but the feeling would not last long” (HoD 14). What he and

70

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

many other protagonists of shore/beach-narratives are experiencing is a widening gap between reality and its representation, the opening of a transgressive space. This opening requires a language of its own, spaces that represent the symbolic abundance provided by ambiguity and anti-dichotomous discourses. Michel Serres asks in this respect: How can we cross the sea? What does it mean to cross the sea? Images. The space of transformation as such emerges from this hodgepodge of abundance whose merit lies in having taken diagonally, askew, crosswise, many of the usual and stupid distinctions of philosophy. (Serres 2007: 71)

The literary shore is such a space of transformation, a space where the protagonists entangle themselves in this “hodge-podge of abundance” and take the reader on a voyage across the sea towards these other places where maps dissolve, borders fray, and language like “turbulence is a stable and unstable phenomenon where liquid moves and stays in randomly fixed form” (Serres 2007: 71). 2.1 The Semantics of the Limit: Trichotomous Boundaries […] my presence in a totally alien environment, for which the archetypical connotations of the word ‘forest’ provide an inevitable metaphor. (Ursula Le Guin, “Vaster than empires”: 115) The fact that the unification of two different languages is achieved by a metaphor is proof of the essential differences between them. (Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: 126)

What turns beaches and shorelines into signifiers of liminality is, as argued above, the hybrid nature of their geographical and geological status as located ‘in-between.’ The symbolic nature of the shore as limit is equally undetermined. This chapter will focus on the various semantic meanings of the shore as limit and the cultural production and deconstruction of dichotomies resulting from this linguistic ambiguity. This process will be illustrated by the soliloquy of John of Gaunt in William Shakespeare’s Richard II. As opposed to other Shakespearian presentations of coasts and islands, say in Hamlet or Othello, John of Gaunt’s nostalgic depiction of England is fixed and

Ambiguity

71

strictly binary. It belongs to a worldview that Tom Betteridge describes as follows: Early modern Europe was obsessed with borders. It found, imagined and manufactured new borders for its travellers to cross. It celebrated and feared borders as places or states where meanings were created and transformed. In early modern Europe, crossing a border could take many forms. […] Borders were places that people lived on, through and against. Some were temporary like illness, while others claimed to be absolute, like that between the civilized world and the savage, but to cross any of them was an exciting, anxious and often potentially dangerous act. (Betteridge 2007: 1)

At the same time this obsession with its borders resulted in a skewed perception thereof, which Lisa Hopkins recognizes as “early modern England’s persistent misrecognition of its own borders” (Hopkins 2005: 1). Concerning John of Gaunt’s monologue she argues: “Although John of Gaunt’s speech […] seems to imply that it would be a good thing if England were indeed an island, England was in fact much troubled by the numerous actual islands that lay off her coasts. They were thought of as strange, liminal places” (Hopkins 2005: 87). John of Gaunt does not explicitly mention a beach, he nonetheless refers to the “rocky shore.” According to Sudesh Mishra, “A beach symptropically [sic] defines an island. It is the limit point necessary to any attempt at mapping an island. Even when there is no beach in sight, the crag, the scarp, the mangrove swamp and the littoral rocks are potential beach sites” (Mishra 2000: n.p.). If the beach is a liminal space, representing the transgressive middle-ground in between two oppositional states, then it quickly becomes clear why it doesn’t figure in Gaunt’s depiction of his native isle. John of Gaunt builds his argument on strict binaries, its very purpose being to neglect any existing middle ground: This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall

72

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. [……………………………………………] England, bound in with the triumphant sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds. (Richard II 2.1.40-64)

John of Gaunt is a man mourning the socio-political transformations of his beloved island. His perspective is nostalgic: he speaks from a temporal point of view, when the bloody future slowly transforms the present into a glorious past. John of Gaunt’s point of view is a decidedly postlapsarian one; he is an Adam reminiscing his “demiparadise” (ibid.). His imaginations of England of old are demarcated by dichotomies such as inside/outside, citizen/stranger, and righteous rule/corrupted power. These binaries, according to Greg Dening, are typical for island nations:2 Inselvölker versicherten sich ihrer kulturellen Identität – versicherten sich ihrer selbst – […] durch große Polaritäten: Eingeborener/Fremder, Land/Meer, illegitime Gewalt/legitime Autorität. (Dening 2003: 21) [Island nations confirmed their cultural and individual identities […] by means of strong polarities: native/stranger, land/sea, illegitimate power/legitimate authority. (my translation)]

John of Gaunt refers to all of these binaries and their respective discourses: inside/outside, health/sickness, peace/war as well as legit-

























































2

The coast is of course not only a marker of exclusion the inverse is equally true. Susan and Rick Hosking explain in relation to Australia: “Beaches are places of contact, of confrontation and friction: first-comers always arrive on a beach. After European settlement made its tenuous beginnings at Sydney Cove, it was close on a hundred years before the inland was travelled and settled by non-Indigenous people. The continent’s littoral was the first frontier to be defined: by 1803 the outline of the land mass had been drawn, the charting completed, the blank map inscribed with names that usually celebrate and codify the European discovery and conquest. Flinders’ circumnavigation in 1802 had mapped ‘Australia’ […] revealing the land as ‘girt by sea’, as the national anthem continues to remind us” (Sue Hosking, Rick Hosking, et.al. 2009: vii).

Ambiguity

73

imate power/illegitimate power.3 The distinctions so dear to him, however, are dissolving. John of Gaunt depicts a utopian state at the very moment of its breaking apart; the dichotomies are about to shatter as will his England. John of Gaunt’s perspective, and his wish for the island to remain a hermetically sealed structure, remain embedded in a worldview Albrecht Koschorke describes as follows: Die klassische abendländische Episteme war binär organisiert und dachte das Dritte regulär nur in der Form des Übergangs oder der Verbindung zur höheren Einheit – und nicht als Größe, die neben den beiden Termen dualistischer Semantiken vom Typ wahr/falsch, Geist/Materie, Gott/Welt, gut/böse, Kultur/Natur, innen/außen, eigen/fremd bestehen bleibt. (Koschorke 2010: 9) [The classic, occidental episteme was structured in binaries; the third was only present as a form of transition, or a synthesis towards a higher unity. The third was not an element of thought that could persist next to the dual semantic terminology as in true/wrong, ghost/material, God/world, good/bad, culture/nature, inside/outside, known/unknown. (my translation)]

John of Gaunt’s description of England represents these very binaries and the coastline incorporates them. The “rocky shore” shapes and defines the island or continent within by means of enclosing it. John of Gaunt’s mapping of England generates meaning by representing nations and their neighbouring spaces as mutually exclusive, as dichotomies. Mapped spaces require their oppositional other that defines them and brings them into existence in the first place. The signifier ‘England’ represents the inside of a socio-political unity and excludes everything that is outside its frontiers. The signifier ‘Atlantic Ocean’ represents the sea by means of excluding the land on its margins.

























































3

Donna Haraway argues in relation to these dualisms: “To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man” (Haraway 2004: 35).

74

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The limit, however, presented geographically or by language, is highly ambiguous. Multiple meanings are linked to a single signifier, a slim line tracing the extent of mapped space: ‘the limit,’ ‘the border,’ ‘the frontier,’ ‘the margin,’ and ‘the edge’. These sharp lines dividing the municipal areas are symbolic abstractions; only at first sight do they erase the liminal middleground. The limit itself dissolves this structuralistic unit. As represented by a single line it is a complicated and complicating signifier that refers to three significations at once: the symbol of the frontier defines the very sea, the land, and itself. Beaches and shorelines are the literal and figurative spaces that represent the openness of borders and at the same time the dichotomist relationship of the adjacent entities: the limits are fluid in a literal and figurative sense of the word, they are multi-liminal, constantly changing and highly ambiguous in their semantic structure and the realities they represent. To argue with Sudesh Mishra: “As a limit point the beach is, however, obstinately protean” (Mishra 2000: n.p.). So are the discourses attached to the beach. They are multifaceted and defy easy categorization. The very limit hints at the problems of mapping, of aligning power and space, meaning and place. As a triple signifier the ‘limen’ represents liminality, the processes of transgressions therein, and the possibility of crossing and transition. The linguist Paul Chilton analyzes in his article “Grenzsemantik [Semantics of Borders]” the possible meanings of the ‘limit’ and its semantic variations ‘bound’, ‘boundary’; ‘border’; ‘frontier’; and ‘margin’ (Chilton 1999: 26). Chilton argues that the word ‘boundary’, like the word ‘limit’, abstractly relates to one-dimensional spaces. It is not the dividing line itself; the ‘boundary’ is an abstract realization thereof. It may be arbitrary and agreed upon by convention, law or political decisions. At the same time the ‘boundary’s invisible limits are still realized. The function of such a line is, first of all, to designate the outermost circumference of the land it contains. The boundary’s legally binding function and its respective implications can range from property rights granted to individuals and those belonging to a nation. In that case the ‘boundary’ evolves from being a mere denominator of a spatial enclosure into one that spatially defines a cultural, sociopolitical, and historical unit.

Ambiguity

75

Applying Paul Chilton’s analysis to John of Gaunt’s speech, one can also recognize how ‘boundary’ and the ‘border’ of England as he presents it are overlapping. For Gaunt, this “sceptred isle” is a “fortress build by nature […]”. The “silver sea […] serves it in the office of a wall / or as a moat”. In this context the term ‘border’ refers to a broader strip of space that is neither part of one entity, nor of the other, a liminal line in-between. By transforming the metaphorical imagery John of Gaunt changes the waters surrounding England, the “silver sea”, that is a broad horizontal border, into a vertical boundary. The border space is directed upwards, the horizontal space of the sea is transformed into a vertical wall. The sea, which initially represents a space in between two different units, a border, is transformed into a boundary, and thus demarcates more clearly the line that separates England from its neighbours. With this spatial re-conceptualisation, John of Gaunt voices a very outspoken claim for the sea as belonging to England’s domain, and he even naturalises it. This claim for the sea as being part of a national space reflects contemporary politics in their attempt to territorialize the sea. According to J.D. Alsop, the “early seventeenth century witnessed a prolonged international debate on the subject of the freedom of the sea” (Alsop 1980: 172). It was slightly before the turn of the century that “‘William Welwood, the Professor of Civil Law at the University of St Andrews, had produced the first independent treatise on sea law in Britain in 1590’; Welwood argued that ‘As God had divided the earth after the Flood, so he had divided the sea, which therefore could be distinguished by boundaries, despite its fluidity’” (Armitage 2000: 110). Thus from Scotland came the concept of the mare clausum as opposed to adherence to the mare librum held by England at the time. Where the former followed Cicero’s often cited claim that “there is no private property by nature” (Armitage 2000: 103) the latter opted for a sea free to be navigated by any nation. Welwood does recognize the sea and its boundaries as fluent, yet he assumes the role of God and himself presents a symbolic abstraction of the intended boundaries. Welwood’s intention was to deliminalize parts of the sea, to turn them from a space ungoverned by law into a space ruled by the adjacent country that is in his case England. In 1613 Welwood published an enlarged version of An Abridgement of All Sea Lawes. Here his “principal conclusions were that only the oceans and large seas were free and that sovereignty could be held

76

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

over all waters near to land” (Alsop 1980: 171). Yet, where Welwood was mostly concerned with fishing rights, Shakespeare presents John of Gaunt as thinking on a grander scheme. His depiction of England, nonetheless, is partly involved in this discussion of the liminal nature of the sea. John of Gaunt’s turning the sea into part of the nation, and transforming it symbolically from a border into a boundary does obliterate the border’s capacity as a contact zone. The sea was to be a space where different cultures meet without entering each other’s territory, a heavily contested, yet neutral, space. When understanding the sea as a boundary, the existence of a contact zone is undermined. Thus, by turning the border into a boundary John of Gaunt crystallizes the inside-outside dichotomy. For him the sea represents a boundary that has to be defended by all means, hence the connection to the God of war “Mars” is also related to establishing the proclaimed binary “innen/außen” (Koschorke 2010: 9). In the context of war, the coastline gains yet another semantic meaning. It turns into a ‘frontier’. According to Chilton, the term ‘frontier’ is etymologically related to the Latin word “frontem” (Chilton 1999: 27), designating the forehead, an association which later assumed military connotations: “Die erste metaphorische oder metonymische Verschiebung des Front- oder Stirnbegriffs war zur militärischen Frontlinie, und von dort aus wiederum durch Metonymie zum äußeren Rand von Imperien und Staaten. [The first metaphorical or metonymic shift of this term was towards the military frontline. From there the term was applied as a metonymy to the outer periphery of Empires and states (my translation)]” (Chilton 1999: 27). Whereas the boundary is considered more of a symbolic container, outlining the enclosed spaces, the coast as a ‘frontier’ implies a movement towards this line. For Gaunt this movement is represented by “infections and the hand of war”, intent on crossing that very line. These “infections and the hand of war” signify two dichotomies: peace/war and health/sickness. They are presented as coming from “less happier lands”, implying countries less civilized, less successful, less cultured than England, and hence construct the binary culture/ nature. This seemingly unambiguous signifier of space expresses various mean-ings. Louis Marin argues:

Ambiguity

77

Thus the frontier is the limit that separates two states. The limit is the abstract notion of the frontier, its juridical meaning. The limit is just a line, the boundary line between domains and territories. But even as a mere line, the limit makes manifest an interval between contiguities and vicinities, at least in its etymon. The Latin limes signifies in its etymological origin a path or a passage, a way between two fields; the limes is the distance between two edges. (Marin 1993: 408f)

A nation that is successfully shielded from the outside is also hermetically enclosed on the inside. The focus on the possible dangers from the outside seems to eliminate the threats from within England. The forces defending the island against these “infections” can easily turn against the citizens they are supposed to defend. The war as a means to maintain freedom can turn into a force of suppression. At this point in Gaunt’s history of England, utopia turns into a dystopia, “demiparadise” transforms itself into a postlapsarian nation. The “rocky shore beat[ing] back the envious siege” is substituted by “rotten parchment bonds”. And since both the limits designating England and its culture are reciprocal, both have to change if one transforms. If the solidity of the “rocky shore” is superimposed by the “rotten parchment bonds”, the solidity of the community within is likewise dissolving and about to be fractured. Mary Louise Pratt confirms that “[b]orders and all, the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out” (Pratt 1992: 6). The production of meaning and space goes two ways and is not monodirectional. The ‘limit’ and its literal or figural representations are not static, singular signifiers. Chilton argues: Der Begriff ‘Grenze’ sollte aber nicht als einzelnes kognitives Element betrachtet werden, sondern als wesentlicher Aspekt einer kognitiven Gestalt, namentlich des Bildschemas des einschließenden Raumes (oder Behälters), das aus gegenseitig definierenden Elementen (Innen, Außen, Grenzen) besteht. (Chilton 1999: 29) [The concept of the ‘border’ should not be understood as a single cognitive entity. It is rather an elemental aspect of a cognitive form, namely that of the image of a including space (or container) that consists of mutually defining elements (an inside, an outside, and borders)]

The beach as a spatial metaphor for open discourses does partly that, and is able to incorporate various cognitive representations. This

78

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

reciprocal relationship, however, goes beyond a merely structuralist process of signification. The liminal space as a ‘limit’ is the very space in-between two different states. While Paul Chilton argues against a “Verunreinigung von Internen und Externen in der Behälterlogik (a pollution of the internal and external in relation to the logic of containers [my translation])” (Chilton 1999: 30). Kevin Hetherington uses the same metaphor to express that liminal spaces are not sealed systems: “Liminal spaces […] act as a dangerous and polluting margin” (Hetherington 1997: 34). They put hegemonic discourses in question and threaten the status quo. Even in John of Gaunt’s essentially binary representation of England such a liminal space does exist. Here the firm, unambiguous boundaries may imply binary mindsets, and the hope for binary realities. Yet this speech is not just an explicit paean of praise for England’s spatial seclusion; implicitly it shows the dangers arising from such a restrictive mindset. The focus on the threats from the outside leads to neglecting the dangers from within. This only goes to show that such an intentionally patriotic presentation is inherently ambiguous.4 Space, as in Gaunt’s speech, may be constructed as binary, containing diametrically opposing concepts. Yet there are spaces, such as the beach, that represent this very ‘Verunreinigung’ of the internal and external. This does not entail that the beach, as will be shown, necessarily represents a ‘medium’-state: the beach is not a space that synthesizes binary oppositions. Many beach narratives, as will be shown, deal with just that impossibility of exclusively binary thinking, be it as an intended means of utopian realizations or as ways of hegemonic ideology. The beach as a third space rather represents the forces and

























































4

Merle Tönnies and Ina Grimm argue: “From today’s perspective, even seminal textual representations of national identity in the area of the British Isles do more to subvert than to establish uniformity. The myth of the island status, of ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’, which is meant to delimit ‘England’ from the rest of the world in John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech in Richard II (Act II, scene 1, I.48), points to the inherent fragility of the construct in the very attempt to naturalise it with geographical references. In its marginalising impact the ageold conflation of Britain and England already prefigures the conflicts of spaces and identities that have come to the fore in Britain in times of devolution, and it is obvious that their disruptive force is increased by the postcolonial issues of domination and exclusion which still run through British society” (Tönnies and Grimm 2012: 102).

Ambiguity

79

energies deconstructing binaries on the spatial, social and semantic level. Its liminal nature opens the discourses to different possibilities. As opposed to the terms frontier or margin, the term border and its implications contain various conceptual facets. Walter Mignolo argues that ‘Borders’ are not only geographic but also political, subjective (e.g. cultural) and epistemic, and, contrary to frontiers, the very concept of ‘border’ implies the existence of people, languages, religions and knowledge on both sides linked through relations established by the coloniality of power (e.g. structured by the imperial and colonial differences). […] If we limit our observations to the geographic, epistemic and subjective types of borders in the modern/colonial world (from the European Renaissance till today), we will see that they all have been created from the perspective of European imperial/colonial expansion […]. (Mignolo 2006: 208)

As has been seen, John of Gaunt’s conceptualization of an England is steeped in binary thinking and dichotomies. At the same time, this lack of a middle road can be read, as argued above, as one of the reasons why this England fails. It is a utopia turning into a dystopia, as a result of its missing ability to incorporate other ideologies and a broader conceptual thinking. While the historical context of Shakespeare’s Richard II may be different, the underlying changes and motifs are exactly the ones Shakespeare’s England, in the wake of Empire and exploration, had to face. John of Gaunt dreads the contact with any invader, literally and figuratively, be they military or epistemic. His depiction of England does not have a space that would allow contact between two cultures in the first place. His England neither wants nor aspires to contact with alterity. To quote Mary Louise Pratt: “Borders and all, the entity called Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out” (Pratt 1992: 6). Gaunt’s construction of England certainly acknowledges the idea of the outside coming in. His mode of constructing identity is directed from the inside out. His depiction of the English coasts reflects this perspective. In a way, his perspective represents what could be called a historical contact zone. Not only does he compare the inside with the outside, more importantly, his nostalgic depiction of an idealized past is countered by the disillusions of the corrupted present. While outside and inside do not overlap and foreigners and Englishmen do not encounter each other, past and present paradoxically inter-

80

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

twine. The remnants of the glorious past are taken over by the forces of the present, a period of honour is being dishonoured. This aspect of temporality hints at a second important aspect of island-narratives as microcosms. As will be further explained below, these narratives depict atemporal variations of their respective present: to be more precise, all the times and places meet in this one single space. The beach represents an annex, a suture of time, space, nature and cultures. As such, the beach is an epistemic testing ground. As the intermediate space between land and sea, culture and nature, it is discursively located in these respective associations. Svend Erik Larsen argues that culture, and thus the identity of a specific culture, is part of a semiotic process that stands in close relation to nature. When it comes to the liminality and intermediate nature of the beach as a location between land and sea there emerges a major binary and its transgression which I have so far only touched upon. This binary is that of nature/culture. As illustrated in the introduction the sea has traditionally been related to nature and associations of chaos, hell, death, regression, whereas the land signifies order, culture, life, and progression. The beach, however, is the intermediate, geographical, geological, and, ultimately, symbolical. This intermediate nature also illustrates that while both terms, nature and culture, depend on each other, there is still an area of semiotic transgression in between. Svend Erik Larsen argues that [C]ulture and nature are phenomena that are mutually dependent on one another without a clear demarcation line. The ocean waves form the coastline and create some naturally conditioned cultural possibilities and problems, which again change as dikes are constructed to hold back the waves and reclaim land from the ocean. Therefore, we cannot see nature independently of culture, rather, nature receives meaning within culture as a necessary condition for our relationship to it, a meaning which may place nature outside culture. (Larsen 2000: 360)

Both entities, sea and land, reciprocally inform each other. This process of mutual influence is an infinite process: with every change in the middle, that is the beach, sea and land are influenced. The spatial mutations can be read as metaphorical representations of a discursive process. Doing so illustrates that dichotomies are only created in relation to a third, infinitely changing element. The di- and the bi- are both etymologically related to the word two. But the two is nothing

Ambiguity

81

without the third. A synchronic look at the results of cultural semiotics may foreground the respective binaries and their contemporary connotations. But a diachronic view will highlight the discursive processes in between. Both, however, are necessary, since the sub-cultures and respective languages and texts of these cultures change and transform themselves at different diachronic speeds. The Foucauldian notion of the end of history and its focus on space rather than time may be mistaken for the extinction of a diachronic perspective. The concept of third space, however, helps us not to lose sight of the tertiary elements of discourse. When it comes to cultural semiotics in relation to the construction of the binary nature/culture, Larsen proposes: Therefore, the focus of cultural semiotics is the interrelation of two fields of investigation: (1) The borders of a culture in relation to its natural foundation, aided by the semiotic systems controlled by humans. This relates to the creation of culture. (2) The conditional requirements set for those borders to allow them to create culture that can be differentiated as different human cultures. (Larsen 2000: 361)

The beaches and shorelines are, as repeatedly argued, borders that stem from their natural foundation. Yet, as this study intends to show, the “semiotic systems controlled by humans” (ibid.) that help in the symbolic construction of these borders are anything but clear-cut. The “conditional requirements set for those borders” transfer their natural ambiguity into the symbolic domain, thus rendering a binary perspective, as John of Gaunt’s view of his “sceptred isle”, impossible. This transference of symbolical ambiguity lends literary borderspaces their metaphorical power. In her study on migration and utopia María do Mar Castro Varela distinguishes between the following kinds of borders: territorial, cultural, social, temporal, and those related to the human body (Varela 2007: 54ff). In his short description of his native isle John of Gaunt relates to all these connotations of the border space. He refers to the nation state, its culture and society, the aspect of changing times, as well as the island as a body that is endangered by “infections”. John of Gaunt creates a super-signifier of a single border space and thus projects every fear on to that construct. His organization of limits and borders is, ultimately, a story he tells himself, but this story is essential for the production of limits. According to Michel de Certeau: “By considering the role of stories in delim-

82

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

itation, one can see that the primary function is to authorize the establishment, displacement or transcendence of limits, and as a consequence, to set in opposition within the closed field of discourse, two movements that intersect (setting and transgressing limits)” (de Certeau 1984: 123). His desperate delimitation of England may be an act of authorizing the establishment in the end this illustrates the weakness and ambiguity of the borders and limits at hand, rather than supporting them. 2.2 On Distant Shores – Locating the Utopian Beach The beaches and shorelines in the narratives analyzed below are usually detached and distanced from the spaces and often also the times that serve as the backdrop of the respective texts. It is striking to note that the shoreline is always the protagonists’ first spatial goal, which is not always as self-evident as it may sound. The beach is the beginning, no matter the direction they are coming from. If they are shipwrecked,5 the beach as the first spot of solid ground is, of course, the logical destination, since this is the closest space promising survival. Yet, there are other examples to be found, in which the movement towards the shore is not as self-evident: in Lord of the Flies the plane crashes in the middle of the island, yet the kids, separated by the accident, move towards and meet on the shore, rather than finding a safe spot in the island’s centre. In the Island of Dr Moreau the disintegra-

























































5

Robert Louis Stevenson famously ridiculed literary accounts of shipwreck and survival on an island in his adventure novel Kidnapped. The main protagonist, David Balfour, survives a shipwreck and is washed ashore on a small islet off the west coast of Scotland. Balfour acknowledges that “being inland bred, I was short of knowledge as of means” (Stevenson 1886: 108). Neither his ignorance, nor his starving and freezing to death, nor his sore throat and “the horrid solitude of the isle” (Stevenson 1886: 110) prevent him from feeling a sense of ownership, sitting on what he calls “my island” (Stevenson 1886: 109). As it turns out, “his” island is a tidal island, which regularly is connected to the mainland by an isthmus. David Balfour only finds this passageway only because he is lucky, rather than investigative. He is neither an explorer, nor is he a scientist: “I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both, and I believe both get paid in the end; but the fools first” (Stevenson 1886: 116).

Ambiguity

83

tion of order on the island results in the man-animals leaving their homes in the forest and gathering on the shore. In the post-apocalyptic world of Oryx and Crake immediately after the biologically engineered virus has killed almost the entirety of humankind, Snowman and the Crakers head towards the shore, rather than staying where they are. An example from contemporary American literature that employs this spatial trope most impressively in the form of a quest (cf. Cooper 2011), is The Road by Cormac McCarthy (McCarthy 2006). The Road is a tale set in an apocalyptic wasteland. The cause and extent of the catastrophe that turned America into an uninhabitable wasteland are never explicitly stated. The focalization never leaves the two main protagonists and thus adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere. A father and his son manage to survive for many years after the catastrophic event. Their journey through this world of ecological and moral wasteland brings them to a shore located somewhere in the south. The only justification given for this journey is that the father fears that they would not be able to survive another winter in the North. Nonetheless that voyage takes on the afore-mentioned structure of a quest; the shore is presented as the only remaining place of security. Still they do not know what to expect there and how long their journey is going to last.6 As opposed to the protagonists in island narratives, their goal lies many, many miles away. Robinson, for example, is able to cross his island in a couple of weeks, for the boys in Lord of the Flies the walk to the beach is merely a question of hours, while the protagonists in The Road, on the other hand, are walking for years. Another common denominator of most of these narratives is the way the respective spaces are narrated. Whether these are relatively small islands or vast continents the reader is rarely presented with minutely detailed set-descriptions. The reader’s perception of the setting is analogous to those of the focalizers. It is through their eyes and minds that we see the spaces and we see them grow step by step. The reader encounters this island by means of block descriptions.7 In Hen-

























































6

According to Chad Harbach, “[t]hey are travelling south through the Eastern US toward the sea, less because there’s anything there (the sea is dead, too), than because they need a destination, and because a long journey [...] seems to be an indispensable feature of the new post-catastrophic novel” (Harbach 2007: n.p.).

7

This kind of narrative production of space and place is very much related to a

84

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ry Neville’s The Isle of Pines the reader follows the explorers on their voyage across the island, and “Six days together did we thus travel” (The Isle of Pines 205). Their voyage is, thus, an act of creation, imitating the Genesis account in the number of days and the expanded perception of fauna and flora. This exploration confirms the perfect form of this microcosm: by their “coasting it, [the explorers] conceive it to be of an oval form” (The Isle of Pines 205). The journey around the coast not only mimics God’s creation of the world in respect of the number of days, but the result is equally edenic. The transformation of space to place is a rather slow, gradual process. This process, however, is elemental for the creation of ambiguity and ultimately liminality. By retaining the spaces surrounding the protagonists’ points of arrival in a mist of vagueness, the narrative possibilities multiply many times over. Rather than anticipating certain events and causally connecting them to those events already told the lack of pre-described spaces results in the impossibility of immediately creating causal relations. Robinson does not know what to expect beyond the shore, nor does the reader. The islands grow with the process of reading. Creation and categorisation of space go hand in hand. The possibilities are as open and as manifold. As opposed to classical utopias, such as Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, these texts are liminal utopias. In Roland Barthes’ terminology the former utopias are highly “authorly” texts, whereas the latter are
























































































































distinction made by Michel de Certeau, who argues: “In other words, description oscillates between the terms of an alternative: either seeing (the knowledge of an order of places) or going (spatializing actions). Either it presents a tableau (‘there are...’), or it organizes movements (‘you enter, you go across, you turn...’)” (de Certeau 1984: 119). His deduction is based on a study of oral narratives by C. Linde and W. Labov, who “recognize two distinct types, which they call the ‘map’ and the ‘tour’” (ibid.). According to the study a vast majority of descriptions employs the latter type, the “map” which “organizes movements”. When applying this distinction to the spaces and places narrated in the respective beach narratives one can equally detect a clear preference for the second type. This type firstly increases suspense (by means of creating endless spatial and narrative options), secondly it demands readerly participation (by creating “gaps of meaning” in Wolfgang Iser’s terms), thirdly one could ask whether this type of spatial narration is closer to the conceptualisation of space as it appears in the human geography and thus more “realistic” as a vast, extended, highly mimetic block description. If that is the way how humans perceive, think, and produce space linguistically, then this type of description is closer to realistic writing.

Ambiguity

85

mainly “readerly” texts. Thomas More’s highly detailed, authorly description of Utopia hardly leaves room for the reader’s own interpretation. Every category is firmly established, everything is in its place, everybody is firmly fixed in his or her position. In liminal utopias, however, firm categories do not yet exist. The space is only about to undergo a re-creation into place. The language with which these spaces are being perceived has yet to be written and developed. Their abundance of narrative possibilities invites the reader to anticipate and thus transform the space into a place. The result is a spatial setting that strips the protagonists of their pre-existing status and the readers of their pre-existing expectations. According to Gilles Deleuze, this process of focussing on oneself is essential for Island narratives: Dreaming of islands – whether with joy or in fear, it doesn't matter – is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone – or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. (Deleuze 2004: 10)

So why do these liminal utopias commence and often end on the shorelines? As mentioned above, they offer the first safe spot for escaping imminent death by drowning. A second, related explanation would be, of course, that the shipwrecked or exiled protagonists are on the look-out for a ship that will rescue them, and thus metaphorically re-introduce them into society. Prospero waits for twelve years until he is able to guide his brother’s fleet towards his island’s shore. Robinson is equally on the lookout for a vessel to take him onboard as are the kids in Lord of the Flies. Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1977) inverses this perspective: a submarine is heading towards the American shore to look for survivors on the beaches of a continent devastated by atomic warfare. Still, this explanation cannot be applied to narratives where the protagonists do not intend to return to their cultures of origin and dread ever having to leave their utopian shores, as seen in Island or The Beach. And what about apocalyptic narratives, where no such thing as a society, in the sense of an organized and mutually dependent, intentional community, is left? These narratives hardly offer hope for the survivors to be saved. There is no socio-political metastructure left into which they could be re-integrated. Despite these differences, whatever represents the crises, their causes and their ef-

86

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

fects, whatever separated the protagonists from their past, the beach is in all examples the first goal. So why is the beach the first line, no matter whether the protagonists are arriving via the sea or via land? Louis Marin argues that From the time of More’s book [Utopia] and for centuries later, utopias tend to begin with a travel, a departure and a journey, most of the time by sea, most of the time interrupted by a storm, a catastrophe that is the sublime way to open a neutral space, one that is absolutely different: a meteoric event, a cosmic accident that eliminates all beacons and markers in order to make the seashore appear at dawn, to welcome the human castaway. (Marin 1993: 415)

One elemental aspect of the literary beach as border space is its being distanced in space and time. They share John of Gaunt’s mindset in the sense that these shorelines synecdochically are related to communities that have no intention of coming into contact with other cultures. The beaches and the adjacent sea, however, are perceived as a constant threat of the outside coming in. Heterotopian beach narratives are like classic utopias or science-fiction narratives, spatially organized and grounded. The spaces stand in stark contrast to their neighbouring spaces and their cultures. Prior to the age of exploration, at a time when the maps were blotted with blank spaces these other spaces could be imagined anywhere, e.g. the edenic joie de la court in Medieval Romance, located in impenetrable forests; the Land of Cockaigne, enclosed by a wall of food or a pit of pig-piss depending on the version of the story; the utopian Shangri-La, hidden on an elevated location in the mountains; or Paradise which is heavily guarded and only accessible after a life of performing ritual gestures that prove the subject’s worthiness. With increasing mobility, however, and the discovery of new continents and countries the apparently rigid structure of the mappamundi was challenged and began to dissolve, giving way to infinite possibilities and at the same time necessitating the hiding of the other place inside the borders of the known world. These counter-representational spaces are, then, more commonly located in the far distance, on islands, as exemplified by More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, or Huxley’s Island. This turns islands, according to Rod Edmond, into “the beginning of a new chapter, the truly unknown element in the otherwise undifferentiated space of oceans” (Edmond

Ambiguity

87

2006: 199). Later, science fiction dislocates utopia from a completely mapped world into space and onto different planets. If the utopian space and liminal beach are for that matter not spatially distanced, they are dislocated in time. Thus, the utopian spaces are presented as inaccessible due to their temporal placement in the past, such as the Golden Age presented by Ovid, or the future, as seen in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. When Max Morden in John Banville’s The Sea returns to the beach in Ballyless, he really attempts to return to the beach of his childhood, the shore as he remembers it. George Orwell’s dystopia 1984 combines this distancing through space and time: the dystopian island Ozeania is spatially separated from its arch-enemies Eurasia and Eastasia. By means of manipulating the writing of history, the dystopia also distances itself from the past. The breaking of spatio-temporal barriers and thresholds is also made possible by the use of technology, such as the timemachine in H.G. Wells’s novel of the same title, or the internet as a space of mobility in William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome.” Wherever and whenever utopia was, is, or will be, distance can be defined as its elemental spatio-temporal attribute. One does not simply walk into utopia, one is invited, arrives there by accident, sent there as an exile, and in addition one has to pass various tests and tribulations to prove one’s worthiness. To conclude with Peter Ruppert: “[T]he very sites that utopias construct so meticulously to sustain their vision of order […] are by definition unreal and unreachable” (Ruppert 1986: x). The beach as a heterotopian location stands in this very tradition, in addition to a set of idiosyncratic attributes: these beaches are often placed inside or in relation to the known world. The beach belongs to a part of a hidden, unlocated isle, as in The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Island of Dr Moreau, Island, Lord of the Flies, or The Beach. Rather than being given a specific location, they are placed in a realm of otherness, from the perspective of the Early Modern, Romantic, Victorian, Modern reader. Yet their exact location remains hidden, stays unclear or is blacked out. Thomas More’s Utopia goes furthest when it comes to the description of human agency and spatial seclusion. The isthmus that connected the isle with the mainland was cut off by King Utopus and his men and thus secluded the Utopians from any outside contact. He

88

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

“caused fifteen miles space of uplandish ground, where the sea had not passage, to be cut and digged up” (Utopia 50). Still the narrative explicitly places the island inside the known world but blocks out the exact location by means of a disturbing sound: at the very moment when Raphael Hythloday is willing to announce the whereabouts of Utopia, “one of the company, by reason of cold (taken, I think, ashipboard,) coughed out so loud, that he took from my hearing certain of his words” (Utopia 126). These words blocked out by a sneeze are of course the location of its place. By this move the narrator, at the same time, confirms the existence of Utopia in the here and now, and hides it forever. “Thus in the ironic fiction of an accident, the possible inscription of the island on a map disappears completely” (Marin 1993: 416). Shakespeare’s The Tempest does mention various place names. “The explicit geography of The Tempest points primarily to Italy and North Africa. The place names mentioned in the text include Milan, Naples, Tunis, Carthage and Algiers” (Hulme and Sherman 2000: 73). These, however, remain insufficient to locate the island. They may hint at real locations, but make it impossible to pin down the island’s exact position. The Isle of Pines likewise gives an account of various islands such as Madagascar, “the island of St. Lawrence” and the “Isla del Principe” (The Isles of Pines: 190), yet again it is tempestuous weather that displaces the voyagers into a no-man’s-land. The island in Lord of the Flies is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, but neither the kids, the people looking for them nor the reader know exactly where. The protagonists in Huxley’s Island or Garland’s The Beach vaguely know of the utopias’ existence, but it is not until they are given a map that they can reach these places. Especially in The Beach ownership and even knowledge of the map is presented as a very dangerous affair, both for the community living on the beach and for those who know of the map. And even with these maps the voyage is treacherous and potentially fatal. Set in a space of mobility where everyone is able to reach every place with the help of the Lonely Planet guidebooks the last unmapped spaces are transformed into almost sacred spaces. The “sea-locked cliffs” (Beach 82) are not enough to hide the beach from the gaze of mass tourism: “There’s no way to keep it out of Lonely Planet, and once that happens it’s countdown to doomsday” (Beach 139). All these utopian islands are highly contested spaces. They fear

Ambiguity

89

outside influence and try to defend themselves against this potential threat to their systemic nature. The spatial and/or temporal distance between the space of origin and that of the utopian/dystopian is not merely a mode of spatial foregrounding, that is marking the islands and beaches as strange, unknown domains. More importantly, the distance also initiates and demands mobility and movement. In his study of mobility in Early Modern drama Christoph Ehland concludes: “Distanz muss aber als Schlüssel zum Verständnis einer Epistemologie der Bewegung gesehen werden.” [Distance is the key for an understanding of an epistemology of mobility.] (Ehland 2009: 228); the mobility results in a “fragmentierende und entfremdende Erfahrung [fragmenting and estranging experience]” (ibid.) of this spatial distance. The journey is the figuration of this mobility, and it is mobility that brings the symbolic meaning of space alive. Louis Marin argues that with the journey as a figure [...] a narrative begins, with a before and after, a point of departure and a point of arrival, a happy coming back or a final permanent exile. The locus has become space: directions, speeds, travel-timing give motion to the map with the tracings of various routes. With all these temporal processes, these potential action programs, with all these proximities and distances, space ‘awakens’ to narrative and loci are opened up to various practices that change and transform them through variations, transgressions, and so forth. (Marin 1993: 414)

The beach narratives are deeply related to utopian thinking, often with its dystopian realizations. Whereas classical utopias such as Thomas More’s Utopia present an already established utopian society, the beach utopias represent the utopian society in its making. The creation of utopia is, necessarily, not only a creation of space, but in addition utopias represent the creation of a specific cultural construct. The same holds true for utopia’s opposites: dystopian societies. In order to maintain their structural integrity, these cultures need to be coherent and are repeatedly presented as heavily shielded from and guarded against the outside. More’s Utopia, e.g., is accessible only by passing through a single entryway to the island, which itself is guarded by towers and weapons. The utopian island in The Isle of Pines is also rendered as almost inaccessible: only one opening on the shore allows an entry

90

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

onto the isle. If one reads the utopian space of Paradise in Paradise Lost as an island set apart from its surrounding spaces, one can likewise see that John Milton represents this utopian space as heavily guarded. In Robinson Crusoe it is Robinson himself who firmly shields the shore of ‘his’ islands from any external intruders. Huxley’s Island is blocked from the outside view by “sea-locked cliffs” (Island 234), which have the effect of “walls of an inverse castle” (Island 234). In Garland’s The Beach the community is “camouflage[d]” (Beach 88) by a “cavernous ceiling of wood and leaves” (Beach 232) which the community-members planted for this very effect. And the utopias in Oryx and Crake that are the compounds are guarded from the outside by heavy defence mechanisms. The shorelines that guard the utopian/dystopian spaces are thus heavily guarded from any outside influence. This intense separation of the spaces from any intrusion renders any trespassing of the shores a decisive kernel of the respective narratives. Trespassing is key to the development of the plot and consequently transgression is foregrounded. To maintain the inherent structure of the utopian spaces, their order cannot include any intrusion from the outside, whether in the form of people or in the form of information. The ambiguous utopias that people the islands rely on the absence of any epistemic excess. Ralph Goodman illustrates this elemental defect of utopian societies in relation to the Garden of Eden: In Western thought the classic utopian representation is the Garden of Eden – the paradigmatic ‘trim garden’ which could not even sustain the eating of a wrong kind of apple. The frangibility of utopian stasis is exposed by the sin of Adam and Eve, which broke the laid-down rules for conformity in this particular utopia. (Goodman 2003: 1)

In consequence the utopian societies attempt to shield themselves from anything that could cause change from the outside or from within. The ambassador of Pala in Huxley’s Island expresses this as follows: “The idea of turning it [Pala] into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society” (Island 58). Consequently, the question of who is allowed to enter and join the utopian/dystopian community is of essential importance. Not everyone can or should do so. The same holds true for heterotopic space, which will be analyzed in detail below. Michel Foucault argues that

Ambiguity

91

“[i]n general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications” (Foucault 1986: 26). Every newcomer to these societies has to perform these very “rites and purifications” (ibid.). In the narratives analyzed here many, but not all, protagonists are forced to live on the island, e.g. Prospero, Robinson, and the boys in Lord of the Flies. Others decide deliberately to live in these places, such as the community in The Beach. However, at a certain point all of them try to change the situation to their advantage and implement, more or less successfully, utopian thoughts. For newcomers, however, the entrance into the existing societies proves increasingly hard, if not impossible. In the following section I will exemplify the “rites and purifications” that are required to obtain the “permission” to enter the utopian isles by using the examples of Huxley’s Island and Garland’s The Beach. Will Farnaby in Island is certainly not invited to enter the island. The utopian island Pala is, however, anything but “completely off the map […] and meanwhile the outside world has been closing in on this little island” (Island 58). That is why its inhabitants require various means to make sure visitors are not threatening their existence. One way to do this is to group visitors according to their status, depending on their profession. Such groups are the “Alpha Plus undesirables” and “as a journalist [Will] rank[s] as a Beta. Not the kind of person we should ever dream of inviting to Pala” (Island 111) as Dr Roberts remarks. The fact that Will almost drowns on his way to Pala and is intent on staying requires him to complete various rituals of introduction and purification. The rite of introduction consists of an extended and detailed theoretical introduction to the society’s history, customs, and philosophy. He completes his ritual of introduction by taking the “moksha-medicine” (Island 280). This drug in combination with the lengthy indoctrination results in him leaving behind his past and its culture; his cynicism is dissolving: “Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last on to his cheeks” (Island 283). The introduction into the utopian society of The Beach is presented from various angles and stresses the importance of an existing sense of coherence to maintain the community. The Beach presents a beach community whose most elemental rule is to allow new mem-

92

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

bers only after a personal selection and an ensuing invitation. This rule was initiated by the founding-members of this touristic colony: “Bugs, Sylvester and Daffy” (Beach 136). Their nicknames, which are derived from the Warner Bros cartoon series Looney Toons, indicate not only their detachment from reality, but also their homogeneity, since all of their newly acquired names are taken from a single, specific cultural source. It is these three who initially decide who is allowed in and who is not. The criteria for possible inclusion into the group are manifold: some are welcomed for their bravery, such as Keaty, while Unhygienix is accepted for his cooking skills, Moshe for his helpfulness, and others like Cassie and Ella are included for their positive character (Beach 243). So whatever may be the underlying reason for a traveller obtaining an invitation the final decision is up to the founding members. It is they who have the last say on who is allowed to transgress the beach’s boundaries and enter their utopia. The fact that they make the final selection already indicates that their utopia is one based on minority decisions rather than a communal idea. In a way the people they invite fit into their mindset, and don’t threaten their semiospheres: the neophytes are tools to achieve the utopian dream, rather than individuals that are included for their own sake. The beach as a boundary is, however, not impenetrable. The system of control does not function without fault. There are some that make it into the community without receiving an invitation and without completing any rites of admission. Their intrusion is perceived as an act of transgressing the community’s rules and identity. Thus these invaders threaten the stability of the system and remind it of its liminal state, its very fleeting nature. With every such transgression the beach representing this exclusive boundary is guarded more heavily, the rule itself increases in its importance, the punishment for transgressing gets more and more severe. This development finally reaches the point when Sal decides not to warn the latest newcomers of the Thai farmers’ existence. Sal decides to watch them being shot by the drug-famers rather than to allow their intrusion. Another example, from earlier in the novel, is the character Jed. He also arrives at the beach without an invitation. This perceived threat to the community’s secrecy and hence to its further existence causes an “instant panic” (Beach 156). Since sending him away, now that he knows of this utopia’s existence, poses a greater threat than allowing him to stay, they decide for the latter. His presence, however, is suffered rather than

Ambiguity

93

welcomed: Jed is never fully integrated and remains an outsider always. Consequently, he stays away “from the rest of the camp for most of the day” (Beach 234). Why then are Richard, Françoise and Étienne integrated into the group? They also arrive on the island without an invitation. They complete various trials; their transgressions and border-crossings are perceived as a proof of bravery and character, as opposed to Jed’s arrival on a boat. For one thing, they arrive at the island after swimming a long distance. To do so they set off from another island’s shore. They realize they can only succeed in swimming the vast distance by leaving most of their belongings on the shore they are departing from. They strip themselves of anything they deem unnecessary, and in a way they turn themselves into liminal personae: by leaving their consumer goods they strip themselves of any pre-existing status. Their second act of border crossing, once they have arrived on the island, is to jump into a lagoon from a waterfall the height of a “fourstorey building” (Beach 82). Despite not knowing what awaits them down in the water, a dangerously shallow pool or a deep lagoon, they decide to take the risk. Their leap of faith is a ritual act, which metaphorically stands for leaving their former society and its securities by jumping into the unknown, utopian reality waiting below. In a community that is obsessed with identifying themselves as travellers rather than as frowned upon tourists their voyage with “too much effort, too many shocks and dilemmas to dissect” (Beach 84) proves that Richard, Françoise, and Étienne are travellers in the sense of its etymological root. Another reason they are accepted and integrated into the beach-society is the fact that Richard is in possession of a map of the beach’s location, hand-drawn by Duffy. Not only is this accepted as a substitute for an invitation, but additionally, Richard reminds Sal of the colony’s founder Duffy (Beach 321). But these ritual transgressions do not yet turn them into valid group members and they still represent, if only partly, the outside, the world everyone wants to escape from. Only when the three are about to forget this outside world and fall under the beach’s “amnesia spell” (Beach 232) can they turn into fully integrated members of the group. Only then are they ritually awarded with shell-necklaces whose absence up to then signified their status as neophytes: “being the only ones without necklaces drew attention to our new-arrival status”

94

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

(Beach 129). For Richard being given these necklaces feels “like our acceptance had been made official” (ibid.). The rules that turn the beach into a border and its crossing into a transgression illustrate how this utopian space cannot merely be entered by an individual. The beach is looking for its members, not vice versa. Richard remarks: “It doesn’t matter why I found it so easy to assimilate myself into the beach life. The question is why the beach life found it so easy to assimilate me” (Beach 116). Considering the outcome of the narrative Richard’s question can be considered as a prefiguration of sorts. Once he changes the rules of the community according to his own ideas the assimilation quickly reverses into its opposite. The beach community creates outsiders as quickly as insiders. Ultimately the ambiguity of the shores affects the respective utopian societies all of which with only a few exceptions are unable to maintain their utopian status and either perish or turn into dystopian societies. This especially holds true for the contemporary narratives that were written in times that were highly critical of utopian thinking, especially in the light of the atrocities of the twentieth century. The resulting emergence of ambiguous utopias necessarily affects the representation of the spaces they create and occupy, which in turn are equally unstable and ambiguous. The stability of Thomas More’s island society with its clear and accurate spatial division and sociostructural endurance is already opposed by John Milton’s cosmos in Paradise Lost where every trespassing of normative boundaries is followed by the creation of new spaces. Trespassing and transgression are presented as acts of mobility that reach from shore to shore. The beaches and their ambiguous presentation of multiple borders in a single space do yield an increasing number of spatial realizations and rearrangements. As will be analyzed in detail the beaches’ semiotic and structural openness can be effectively theorized with Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. I will discuss the separate liminal spaces that are being produced in the respective narratives by connecting Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts as heterotopias/camps. Despite the criticism Foucault’s concept of ‘other spaces’ encountered, [his] notion of heterotopia contests the certainty engendered by the conventional utopia/dystopia opposition, setting the reader off on a

Ambiguity

95

very different journey of discovery – to seek the virtues of instability and shifting meaning instead of static spaces irrevocably inscribed with unambiguous significance (Nozick 1974: 328)

The beach as literary space represents the dissolution of the afore-mentioned oppositions, and these “virtues of instability and shifting meaning” (ibid.). The literary shores are anything but static spaces. They are ambiguity spatialised. 2.3 Imaginary Shores and Fraying Peripheries The ambiguous nature of shorelines, which is an essential narrative element in this paradigmatic group, is not only based on their geographical or geological ambiguity. In addition, and maybe more importantly, they are spaces of narrative unreliability. The shorelines are screens for the narrator’s, focaliser’s, and ultimately the reader’s often ill-directed imagination.8

























































8

This ambiguous and tropical language cannot only be found in fictional accounts. It is also detectable in the writings of naturalists whose language also seems to be taken over by this special setting. The afore-mentioned Rachel Carson, e.g., describes a walk on the shore as resulting in a change of perception where the realities of daily life are blocked out. Carson tells the reader that “in that enchanted place on the threshold of the sea the realities that possessed my mind were far from those of the land world I had left an hour before” (Carson 1955). This fusion of scientific and poetic discourse resembles the work of Jean Painlevé, a French filmmaker with close ties to the surrealist movement. One of his short-films entitled L’Hippocampe (The Sea-Horse) depicts the underwater world of these animals. In his presentation Painlevé repeatedly switches between scientific and anthropomorphical language. He attests these animals’ “dignity”, “distinguished sadness”, “old repressed gargoyles” “manners” (Bellows and MacDougall 2000: 68) only to cut open their pouch with a sharp razor seconds later. Both, Carson and Painlevé, stand in the tradition of writers. Another notable example is George Henry Lewes. The English philosopher, who lived in the 19th century, wrote an extensive account of observations set on the seaside. According to Philip Erchinger “Lewes’s Sea Side Studies, then, represent a love affair with an elusive subject, instigated by a powerful affection that constantly tends to drag the act of studying away from any topic on which it may hope to settle, diverting and decentring its course. The waywardness of the rambling writing is an effect of the uncontrollable attraction exerted by a powerful passion that seems beyond authoritative control because it constantly keeps throwing up fresh aspects of maritime life for the naturalist to pick up or look at, like the sea itself, flinging her crea-

96

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

An essential element of the liminal beach is what I would like to call dislocation by narration. While the geographical references place the islands and their shores in the worlds which readers knew or believed to exist, this pretended empirical location is deconstructed by the respective narrators’ unreliability. Either the narratives are presented in the form of intradiegetic narration, as in More’s Utopia, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Garland’s The Beach or the extradiegetic narration is highly unreliable. Utopia’s messenger Raphael Hythloday is marked by his name, which translates to ‘talker of nonsense’ as an unreliable narrator. Satan in Paradise Lost is not a narrator as such, yet his communication with Eve initiates the fall of man. In the case of Robinson Crusoe an extended temporal distance of many years between the experiencing and the narrating I undermine the reliability of the narrated events. The narrator in Heart of Darkness is described as “inconclusive” (HoD 7). Richard, the narrator in Garland’s The Beach is equally unreliable. Roger Bowen argues that he is unreliable “not because he tells an untrue story but because he has no understanding of what his story means” (Bowen 2007: 52). Richard, however, is aware of his tendency to lie and falsify: “The fact is, I’ve never grown out of playing pretend, and so far there are no signs that I ever will” (Garland 1996: 33). One of Coetzee’s main themes in the novel Foe is the very discussion of how narratives shape identities, and how these narratives are constantly falsified. For surely, with every day that passes, our memories grow less certain, as even a statue in marble is worn away by rain, till at last we can no longer tell what shape the sculptor’s hand gave it. What memories do you even now preserve of the fatal storm, the prayers of your companions, your terror when the waves engulfed you, your gratitude as you were cast up on the shore, your first stumbling explorations, your fear of savage beasts, the discomforts of those first nights (did you not tell me you slept in a tree?)? (Coetzee 1986: 17)

Coetzee’s novel addresses explicitly the makeshift nature of the narratives of island-dwellers. Their reaching the shores results in a mode of constructivist perception that in turn informs everything based on narrative structures, that is identities and cultures. And Max Morden’s
























































































































tures onto the shore” (Erchinger 2013).

Ambiguity

97

narrative in The Sea is also to be taken with caution, as illustrated in the introduction. Most of these narratives are retold from memory, and realistic as they may appear in their seemingly objective language, they are prone to misrepresentation. As will be illustrated below, the very narrative construction of the liminal beaches is based on this faulty constructivist mode. For now it shall suffice to show how the utopian islands and their liminal beaches are even more distanced and removed from any map.9 One main argument against (fictional) travel-literature, and colonial literature in general, is the complete omission of a perspective and voice other than the colonial voice. Patrick Brantlinger argues: “Abroad, the culture of the ‘conquering race’ seemed unchallenged: in imperialist discourse the voices of the dominated are represented almost entirely by their silence, their absence” (Brantlinger 1985: 167). To go a step further I would like to argue that the local spaces are as such equally omitted. As shown above language at the peripheries of the respective semiospheres is presented as frayed, ambiguous, and in a highly anti-realistic mode. Consequently, the foreign beaches hardly find their way into the protagonists’ perception, either because they are unable to put the otherness into words of their own, or they are not interested in doing so. What the characters perceive and narrate is already so heavily filtered that the respective reports are anti-mimetic and anything but realistic. To illustrate this deconstruction of reality I will look at the presentation of the shorelines in Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies. To counter the alterity they encounter at the semiospheres’ peripheries the protagonists heavily appropriate their perceptions of space to deal with the unknown.

























































9

These narratives carry allegorical traces, which is also expressed by the names of many characters. Raphael Hythloday, Prospero, Crusoe, Farnaby, Morden all have telling names, which hint at some of their elemental characteristics or related themes. Hythloday is the ‘presenter of nonsense.’ Prospero refers to his creating and changing the course of events. Crusoe, which is derived from the German name Kreuzner illustrates his having to carry his own cross. Farnaby may be read as an oxymoronic combination of ‘far’ and ‘nearby.’ After all he is distanced from the island’s culture through his cynicism and being an outsider, yet he is growing into the utopian society. And Max Morden’s name recalls the deaths he is surrounded with and feels partly responsible for.

98

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is an important example when it comes to the representation of otherness. A first indicator that Robinson’s perception of his surroundings is anything but objective is his voyage along the shores of Africa after escaping his enslavement in Sallee. The coast- and shorelines provide the spatial foil for his projected fears. The shores he perceives from the ship are a background that sparks his imagination and re-activates the propagandistic narratives related to the discourses of his origin. Palms, bushes and shrubbery form a boundary that makes it impossible to gaze beyond them into the spaces of otherness. The vegetation forms a visual barrier that allows Crusoe to see and hear only minimal aspects of the life beyond. Robinson is reduced to a cognitive perception that is only fuelled by an intake of synecdochical and fragmented information. Both Robinson and Xury decide against exploring the coast because “as soon as it was quite dark, we heard such dreadful noises of the barking, roaring, and howling of wild creatures, of we knew not what kinds” (RC 29). Robinson may hear an abundance of sounds, yet is unable to identify their source, which in turn makes him decide to stay on the boat and keep away from the shore. On a different occasion an animal leaves the beach and swims towards their boat. Because of the darkness “[w]e could not see him, but we might hear him” (RC 29). Sights and sounds are hardly ever attached to an image. The subject or object is reduced to a representation by means of tropes. Signifier and signified are differentiated and deconstructed so that the protagonists have to connect the signifiers to a signified based on their own assumption. In another case Robinson actually does see the animals on the shore, but he has still no idea what they are: “we saw vast great creatures (we knew not what to call them) of many sorts come down to the seashore” (RC 29). He perceives the object but lacks the name to describe it. What adds to his unreliability as a narrator is his admission that his eyesight is not perfect, at least in relation to his companion Xury “whose eyes were more about him than it seems mine were” (RC 32). This admission makes the proposed reality of his narrative even more doubtful. Signifier and signified never complete a symbolic union in his perception. Robinson is only able to make sense of his surroundings by means of ambiguous tropical language: the substituting signifier,

Ambiguity

99

however, is quickly adopted as the real thing. Xury, e.g., catches an animal that, according to Robinson is “like a hare” (RC 30). The simile describing this unknown animal is quickly used in a non-tropical, literal sense: “we […] feasted on the hare we had killed” (RC 31). Robinson applies the matrix of his signifying system randomly over the unknown territories, which is conceptualised by repeated similes: “a fowl like our curlews” (RC 26); “a thick bushy tree like a fir” (RC 51); “a creature like a wild cat” (RC 58); “fowls like ducks” (RC 74). Robinson falls prey to a kind of dualistic production of space which Rob Shields describes as follows: Real spaces are hypostatized into the symbolic realm of imaginary space relations. The world is cognitively territorialised so that on the datum of physical geographic knowledge, the world is recoded as a set of spaces and places which are infinitely shared with connotative characteristics and emotive associations. (Shields 1991: 264, original emphasis)

Robinson does have a “physical geographic knowledge”, he is aware of his location, the approximate outline of the African coast, and he has an understanding of where he should go. But hand in hand with his knowledge of the African coast comes a number of “characteristics and emotive associations” (ibid.). That this second kind of knowledge Robinson possesses is doubtful becomes obvious once he has to make a decision on how to deal with the cannibals that randomly visit the island. He contemplates: “I might fall into the hand of savages [...] That if I once came into their power, I should run a hazard more than a thousand to one of being kill'd, and perhaps of being eaten; for I had heard that the people of the Caribbean coast were Cannibals, or Man-Eaters” (RC 124). Robinson’s perception of the natives landing on the island is heavily influenced by an assumption based on something he has “heard”, a fact he has not yet verified by judging the situation at hand with his own eyes.10 Robinson is stuck in his prefabricated mindset, a process Victor Turner describes as follows: “As

























































10

Carla Frecerro illustrates the long history of the ‘cannibal-myth’: “Ktesias (Ctesias), Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Augustine, Isidore of Seville: these and more testify to the dog-headed (sometimes dog-faced) human-eating peoples at the extremities of their worlds, as does the fifth-sixth century Buddhist missionary Hui-Sheng as recorded in the Liang Shu” (Freccero 2010: 49) (see also Frecerro 1994, Seth 2003.).

100

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

members of society, most of us see only what we expect to see, and what we expect to see is what we are conditioned to see when we have learned the definitions and classifications of our culture” (Turner 1987: 6). In consequence Robinson necessarily experiences the humans landing on the shore filtered through second-hand accounts as well as his imagination rather than as something that requires a new categorical evaluation.11 Robinson himself is tempted to base his decision on how to react to the perceived atrocities on the beach on assumptions rather than first-hand experiences. For one, he has only “heard” that these people were man-eaters. Secondly, the findings of human remains and the ashes of a fire on the beach may seem like a convincing case of anthropophagy, but in the end, they are not. Robinson never actually perceives the cannibals to be man-eaters. He deduces that they devour other humans merely from combining the myths he has heard with the bones he found on the shore: “I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where it is supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their inhuman feastings upon the bodies of their fellow creatures” (RC 163). He may observe the potential site of anthropophagy with his own eyes, but what he reads into the traces he finds on the shore is “supposed” (ibid.) and deduced rather than observed as well. The contact with the bones on the shore is in the end only a contact which Crusoe has with his own culture and his own pre-conceptions. This renders doubtful the claim that the reader encounters a realistic novel. In the end, Robinson Crusoe is anything but a purely

























































11

This is reminiscent of Christopher Columbus’s account of his supposed encounter with cannibals. Joseph Hurt explains: “Kolumbus berichtet hier nicht etwas, was er de visu, mit eigenen Augen, erkannt hat, wie etwa die physische Erscheinung der Indianer, sondern er interpretiert Gehörtes (er ‘glaubt’, ‘verstanden zu haben’), projiziert auf die peripheren Völker die Bilder, die seit der Antike tradiert wurden (monoculi und kynokephaloi), und assoziiert mit diesen Bildern dasjenige der Anthropophagie.” [“Columbus does not report anything he has seen de visu, with his own eyes, e.g. the physical reality of the Indians. He interprets what he heard (he ‘believes’, ‘to have understood’) and projects images, which have been propagated since antiquity (monoculi and kynokephaloi) on to the peripheral peoples and then connects these images by means of association with anthropophagic images. (my translation)”] (Hurt 2002: 46).

Ambiguity

101

realistic and mimetic text. For one, the protagonist’s perception is already highly pre-determined by his culture of origin and its norms and concepts. Secondly, Robinson is unable to create what Larsen calls a contactual universe (Larsen 2000: 316). According to Larsen, who builds his theory on Karl Bühler’s semantic theories, a contactual universe is present when three elements exist simultaneously in the same physical space: the sign (e.g., smell); the object to which it refers (e.g., food); and the perceiving organism, which through different channels (wind, touch, neurological apparatus, etc.) connects sign and object […]. (Larsen 2000: 316)

This tripartite semiotic relation, however, is seldom present. In the process of decoding the surroundings one of the three entities is usually missing or deliberately left open. Either what Robinson perceives is highly ambiguous in its symbolic nature, or he encounters signifieds lacking the signifiers. The shore for Crusoe remains an antimimetic space. The shore most famously shatters the world-view Robinson has constructed when he is “exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to see in the sand” (RC 152). This single metonymical sign completely dissolves all pre-existing concepts; signifiers are detached from their signified. In this scene his contactual universe consists of a sign, that is the footprint, and a perceiving organism, that is himself. The decoding, however, is treacherously open, because the third element, “the object to which [the sign] refers” (Larsen 2006: 316), is not given. The footprint is only a metonymical sign for the object. In the novel the footprint may be presented by means of seemingly realistic language. Robinson as narrator goes to great lengths to describe the print. Nonetheless, he is left with a distortion in his contactual universe: the missing object leaves too many possibilities concerning its exact nature. After all “the object can have more than one status in relation to the same sign” (Larsen 2000: 364). In consequence Robinson’s constructivist world-view falters rapidly. The island’s places, as appropriated by Crusoe, are turned back into potentially dangerous spaces. He is “mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man; nor is it possible to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in” (RC 152) The single metonymical sign of

102

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

the footprint found on the shore illustrates how quickly transgressive thinking can be triggered. The footprint is the grain of sand that breaks the coherent semiotic space Crusoe created for himself and re-establishes a space that is yet again open to manifold possibilities: Is the footprint a mere geological incident? Is it a friend’s or a foe’s? Or is the footprint a creation of “the Devil” (RC 153)? The potential causes are manifold and encompass the realistic and the fictional. Steven Connor describes sandy areas in a way that applies to Robinson Crusoe’s perception of the shore: “It is an arena of hallucinations, a terrestrial aurora” (Connor 2010: n.p.). As a result of Crusoe’s fearful projections onto this single print in the sand his perception of space alters rapidly: topophilia changes to topophobia. Places of perceived safety turn into undescribed spaces of threat and danger. After this encounter his home next to the shore turns into Robinson’s “castle, for so I think I called it ever after this” (RC 153). The discovery of the footprint also brings him literally back to the edge, his fortress on the shore that is, whereas prior to the discovery he increasingly spent time in his “country house” (RC 103), which is located amidst an edenic abundance of fruit. His whole perception of the island spaces is based on projection. An in-between, or a contact, between Robinson and the other, as represented by the footprint, does not exist. Even his later experiences with Friday do not subvert his perceptions. Hayes, Higonnet, and Spurlin argue: Likewise, if Bhabha’s in-between is not found between colonizer and colonized as two discreet categories, but is rather internal to the colonial subject as an embodiment of a subjectivity shared by both colonizer and colonized, this subjectivity is transformed by the colonial encounter. Indeed, there can be no colonizer or colonized prior to colonization, since both are created as subject positions by colonization itself.” (Hayes, Higonnet, and Spurlin 2010: 6)

Robinson himself creates what he finds. He turns the ambiguous signifiers, that is the footprint or the bones on the shore, into colonial reality, upon which he acts accordingly. In doing so, Robinson Crusoe stands in the tradition of real explorers, who equally based

Ambiguity

103

their judgments on second-hand knowledge.12 The fusion of real and imagined space has the following effect: “The resulting formation – half topology, half metaphor – is inscribed as an emotive ordering or coded geography” (Shields 1991: 265). This coded geography comes with a certain set of rights Robinson Crusoe assumes for himself. Robinson himself is aware of the inconsistencies of his deductions and the realities they are based on. Upon trying to identify the source of the footprint Robinson himself comes to a similar conclusion: “All this seemed inconsistent with the thing itself” (RC 153). The semiotic openness leaves it to Robinson and the reader alike to solve the question of the footprint’s origin. In Robinson’s case it brings forth the greatest fears and anxieties. Robinson, filled with threat and fear, closes in on the truth; however, he misses the real core of his problems: “it came to my mind one day that all this might be a mere chimera of my own” (RC 156). He allows himself, however, only to doubt his senses, he doesn’t question his perception. It is interesting to note that for him the reality of the footprint itself is easier to denounce than his interpretation thereof, an interpretation, that is, that only allows him to feel endangered. Then again, Crusoe is reflective enough to realize that fear “deprives them [men] of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief” (RC 157).13 These fears are semiotic constructions of the savage as the cannibalistic other, productions of his native Western semiosphere. These pre-fabricated cultural concepts Robinson brought to his island, not

























































12

This does not imply that real space underlying Robinson Crusoe’s perception does not influence his perception thereof. In the first place the island is for him a marker of alterity, yet what he encounters basically reinforms his expectations. Tom Betteridge’s following argument on the colonial conquest may as well be applied here: “It was not nowhere the Europeans found in the Americas. What they found was their own desires” (Betteridge 2007: 9).

13

The mutineers, who arrive on the island, are likewise deluded by what they encounter, “telling one another they were gotten into an enchanted island; that either there were inhabitants in it, and they should all be murdered, or else there were devils and spirits in it, and they should be all carried away and devoured” (RC 260). Crusoe’s winning the fight against the mutineers is equally based on fantasy and pretence winning over rational observation: “Though this was all fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect” (RC 262). It is ironic of course that Robinson is ultimately saved by the fictional projections on the shore which repeatedly deluded him.

104

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

unlike the tools he saved from the sinking ship. With their help he creates and builds his new miniature world, physically in the form of the cave, his clothes, etc., and psychologically they manifest in his expectations of the other. Ultimately, Robinson Crusoe is anything but a travelogue, fictional or not. Other cultures, other places, hardly play a role. The focus of the narrative is of course Robinson himself, and his culture. Anything else entering this closed semiosphere is nothing but a threat to the cultural semiotics that created his semiosphere in the first place. This is also true in the case of Lord of the Flies: the boys are hardly interested in their surroundings, apart from treating them as a playground. Neither is the narrator bothered with presenting the island and its shores as potentially dangerous places: drinking-water is quickly discovered, as are places to sleep. The possibility that some of the fruit on this exotic island is potentially poisonous is never touched on. For the boys the island is never a real place. The island is rather a Neverland, which they assume they know already from the colonial adventure literature they have read, such as “Treasure Island, Swallows and Amazons, and Coral Island” (LotF 34f). The reality of the place is glossed over by the fictions of their childhood. Ralph has to force himself “to believe in the reality of the island” (LotF 10). The boys live in a second-order representation, a fictional space rather than a real space. In addition they lack the linguistic means to describe what they see, which relates to Marvin Chlada’s statement: “Heterotopien trocknen das Sprechen aus. [Heterotopias dry out communication.]” (Chlada 2005: 285). The landscape is mostly perceived in the form of tropical language. The plants look like “candles. Candle bushes. Candle buds” (LotF 286), the coconuts are “skull-like” (LotF 288), a rock formation on the beach is likened to a “pink cake [with] icing” (LotF 289). This impossibility of communicating their surroundings affects their social relationships as well: “Piggy saw the smile and misinterpreted it as friendliness” (LotF 297). They only see what they want to see. This liminal state between reality and imagination is supported by the natural setting itself: “Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. Piggy discounted all this learnedly as a ‘mirage’; and […] they grew accustomed to these mysteries and ignored them” (LotF 298).

Ambiguity

105

Yet this does not mean that the realities which are producing the mirages and are misperceived and misconstrued are not active in the linguistic discourses. The reality of the spaces they inhabit is still a driving force. However, it is linguistically dislocated into the subconscious. Ultimately, the boys are not living a life free from fear and anger. The fear especially is an elemental aspect of the narrative. However, it is in the realm of the unconscious where their fear and their impossibility to signify their surroundings are connected, only to reappear as nightmares and phantasms. Waking and dream, reality and pretence are combined inseparably and reappear in the form of the imagined “snake thing […] in the woods” (LotF 299) The snake, of course, is the time-honoured signifier of upsetting existing epistemic convictions, be it in Paradise Lost, Heart of Darkness, The Island of Dr Moreau, or Lord of the Flies. The fears of the boys are represented by this symbol that is then repeatedly transferred to concrete entities or events. Not only do they dream of it, at night they “talk and scream. The littluns, even some of the others. As if […] the beastie, the beastie or the snake thing, was real” (LotF 305). When the boys set parts of the jungle on fire “tall swathes of creepers rose for a moment into view […] The little boys screamed at them. ‘Snakes! Snakes! Look at the Snakes!’” (LotF 301) And the corpse of the dead parachutist turns into another signifier upon which they can project their fears. Sam and Eric believe they have encountered in the dead pilot a “beast” with “eyes”, “teeth”, and “claws” (LotF 302). For Jack these fears culminate in a persecution complex, he feels “as if you’re not hunting, but – being hunted, as if something’s behind you all the time in the jungle” (LotF 303). There are, however, various attempts to counter the fears and bring them to the fore. In Lord of the Flies the suppressed emotions break out in the end: “but then the lamentation rose out of him, loud and sustained as the conch. […] A spring had been tapped, far beyond the reach of authority or even physical intimidation” (LotF 306). This motif of language therapy, the moment when the unspeakable finally finds a language, is reminiscent of the Intended in Heart of Darkness who “talked as thirsty men drink” (HoD 75). And in The Beach Richard and his friends have a similar experience once they live the island: “We talked a lot […] we opened our mouths and never shut them.” This process of speaking, however, is still beyond purely rational thought: it is empty in the sense that its purpose is not to signify cer-

106

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

tain aspects of experience: “The funny thing is, I can’t really remember what we talked about. Maybe we talked about everything, maybe we talked about nothing” (HoD 307). 2.4 The Nostalgic Shore in Alex Garland’s The Beach The extent of this appropriation of foreign shores is to be encountered in Alex Garland’s novel The Beach set in Thailand.14 Thailand hardly enters either the protagonists’ perception or their language. Its function is merely metonymic by referring to South-East Asia in general. Thai culture is presented, if at all, as a contact zone where the indigenous culture caters for the needs of international travellers. This silencing is not, as I would argue, an unintended side-effect of the novel or an omission for the sake of suspense. In the perception of the depicted travellers in the story the country and its cultures are increasingly neglected. The Khao San Road in Bangkok is the initial hub for arriving and departing travellers. It is an intermediate zone between West and East where the Western tourists can find everything they miss. This space is described as a “decompression chamber” (Beach 5), an almost virtual space that helps the travellers to adapt themselves slowly to the foreign surroundings. This road is depicted as a mimicry of the West, with its bootlegged products. To eat the backpackers can order cheeseburgers or banana pancakes, and vintage video games such as Space Invaders offer the entertainment. This road is a liminal “halfway house between East and West” (Beach 5). The original identity of this space is hidden: “The other has collapsed into the same; difference and diversity do not even challenge or threaten” (Bowen 2007: 48). The language of the Thai population is hardly ever mentioned, and when it is, Richard, the main protagonist, “couldn’t understand what [they were] saying to each other” (Beach 11). The patois of the cleaning lady in Richard’s hostel, e.g., is a hybrid, a “union of Thai crone and hippy jargon” (Beach 14). In the end both groups, tourists and locals, hardly register each other’s presence. Communication does not go beyond capitalistic exchange. This space

























































14

Parts of this sub-chapter are based on ideas in my ‘Examensarbeit’ Utopian Beaches, Universität Würzburg, 2009.

Ambiguity

107

is ultimately anything but a contact zone. Contact between the cultures is kept to a minimum. Nor is there any curiosity to be found on either side. Richard remarks on a Thai he observes: “I suppose a pale face would once have held some interest for him, but not now” (Beach 30). Even at the novel’s end, when the group is fleeing from their beach on a self-made float, the reaction of the Thais that pick them up is minimal: “a raised eyebrow was the full extent of their reaction. We were just another bunch of weird farang, doing the weird kind of things that farang do” (Beach 438). This dissolution of difference and of any signification culminates in Richard’s perception of gender-images that oppose his heteronormative expectations and blend the restrictive elements of male and female gender attributes. Richard states: “Thais, or South East Asians in general make eerily convincing transvestites. […] I saw a particularly stunning transvestite […] the only thing to betray his gender was his gold lamé dress – a bit too showy” (Beach 51). His subsuming all South East Asians in a de-gendered, class-less group does not support his argument that they would make convincing transvestites. His statement rather shows his inability to look beyond the surface and to describe distinctively. Only at first sight does Richard’s conclusion sound like that of an open-minded person, who is not unsettled by the erasure of binary gender rules. In the end, however, his statement illustrates his unifying and totalizing gaze rather than anything else. He might not be blatantly xenophobic or misogynistic, but he still is utterly ignorant and prone to stereotyping. That these stereotypes are not reserved for non-Westerners is illustrated by his perception of his French travel-partner Étienne: “I could see him in a few years’ time, a couple of stones heavier, a glass of Ricard in one hand and a boule in the other” (Beach 18). In Richard the reader finds an utterly self-obsessed character with a disregard for the spaces and cultures around him. Richard’s being prone to stereotypical reasoning is coupled to a superficiality that verges on the cynical. He tries to make up for a lack of character with unique experiences. He admits that he wanted to see “extreme poverty [to] appear worldly and interesting” (Beach 164). And the death of Duffy, one of the founders of the beach community, in the hostel where he resides, does not affect him either: “Also I didn’t care much about the guy’s death. I saw it as, well, Thailand’s an exotic country with drugs and AIDS and a bit of danger, and if .

108

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Daffy Duck got caught up, then it was his look-out” (Beach 17). This statement illustrates Richard’s being grounded in a very colonial perspective which perceives the foreign, less developed land as a cesspool of lawlessness and diseases. And by laughing these off as a “bit of danger” (ibid.) Richard stresses his assumed mental and physical superiority: only those strong in mind and body are able to cope with the regressive and infectious nature of a country such as Thailand. This perspective is not only reminiscent of the manager of the Central Station in Heart of Darkness, but the display of physical and psychological superiority was and is a powerful aspect of colonial ideology. The same relentlessly indifferent gaze is to be found in the beach-community as a whole. The group forms a semiosphere that is fostered by the erasing of all differences on the inside: the life on the beach, the sun, and the salt water erase to a certain degree bodily differences and thus support the group’s cohesion. Richard describes the team responsible for fishing as being “[n]eutralized by wet hair and dark skin, each of the six swimmers looked like a carbon copy of the other” (Beach 104). At this point in the story, Richard has just arrived at the beach, and the swimmers’ similarity still serves to illustrate his being not yet fully integrated. Two days earlier he had regarded himself in the mirror and realized: “Being around lots of tanned skin I’d assumed I was also tanned, but the ghost in the mirror corrected me” (Beach 38). The longer Richard lives in the beach community, the more he appreciates the beach itself, which initially he did not find special. His identity changes analogous to his looks. Seeing himself weeks later in a mirror elicits the following remark: “Shock was right. The person who gazed back at me over the sink was a stranger” (Beach 171). Any alterity inside the group is also erased. Any form of discursive transgression is unwanted. The common language is English and linguistic differences are neglected by Richard’s first-person narration. As a newcomer to the utopian community he still refers to linguistic markers of identity, such as Gregorio’s “soft latin lisp” (Beach 105) which the novel transcribes as follows: “I am very pleathed to meet you” (Beach 105). As the narrative progresses Richard stops mentioning this difference. The same happens with the strong dialect of the group’s cook, nicknamed Unhygienix: “Donta pausa on thata platforma” (Beach 141). This linguistic marker of individuality is referred to only once. Placed in brackets, the novel explains: “(I’m

Ambiguity

109

abandoning his Italian accent from now on. You’ll just have to imagine it.)” (Beach 141). At the normative centre of this semiosphere, national differences do not count either. They are only mentioned when the coherence of the group is disturbed by quarrels or fighting. Only then, e.g., is Jesse from New Zealand called a “Kiwi cunt” (Beach 286). Apart from that the group mostly defines itself, in the tradition of Colonial Empires, in opposition to the other, and to the outside. Initially, there is no explicit ideology, and Richard complains about a lack thereof: “I think I was expecting an … ideology or something. A purpose” (Beach 96). But he quickly understands that the common ideology he is missing is really represented by the beach as a spatial divider delineating inside and the outside. The group is inside, and the “world is outside the beach” (Beach 144). Richard quickly learns to detest everything that lies outside this particular border space: “It was the beach and the world, I decided coldly. My beach where you could walk into a conversation at any time between anybody, and the world, where you couldn’t” (Beach 177). The beach as a border is thus representing an ideological line, and this line extends to the group members’ names as well: “[S]econd names felt connected to the world, maybe because they were a link to family and home, so they were never used or asked” (Beach 317). Yet, ultimately this avoidance of difference and the suppression of transgressive discourse initiate the demise of the utopian reality, or better illustrate the weak fundament this utopia is built upon. With increasing coherence in the group the outside becomes more and more threatening. One of Richard’s trips to the mainland turns into an overwhelming experience. He says: “I must have heard twenty different accents and languages. Most I didn’t understand, but they all sounded like threats” (Beach 178). As in Lord of the Flies the space Richard moves and lives in is a cultural, or to be precise a pop-cultural, projection. His experiences are constantly related and compared to videogames, music, and movies. “[T]he world he inhabits is a simulation” (Bowen 2007: 46). And the sources of this simulation are mostly movies on the Vietnam War, whose vocabulary seeps into his language: “Fragging. Bagging. Klicks. Grunts. Gooks. Charlie. MIA. KIA. LZ. DMZ. FNG.” (Beach 86) Computer games such as Capcom’s Streetfighter (Beach 110),

110

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Mega Man, or Space Invaders are means to enable Richard to understand human behaviour. By judging how people react when their video-game character dies he believes he is able to deduce how “people react just before they really do die” (Beach 110). To Richard an individual and his or her video-game avatar are one. Reality and fiction increasingly merge. According to Victor Alneng the “building blocks of these everyday-dreams are large-scale repertoires of images and narratives provided by what Appadurai has labelled ‘mediascapes’, which blur the boundaries between the realistic and the fictional” (Alneng 2002: 464). His imagination is not influenced anymore by English colonial fictions, as was that of the boys in Lord of the Flies, but is fuelled by international texts, such as U.S. food and movies, and Japanese video games. The boundaries of national cultures are blurred with the rise of international consumerism. The ethnographical realities at hand are overwritten and neglected by the protagonists. Where colonialism actively conquers and changes the semiospheres of different cultures, globalisation and globalized tourism result in a slightly different response: the cultures that want to attract tourists adapt parts of their own cultural identity to that of the desired touristic groups. The agency that causes them to change may, at first sight, appear to be on the side of the hosts. Yet, ultimately, masstourism is the continuation of old power-relations. The coloniser (tourist) demands that the colonised (host) perform certain acts of mimicry and simulation. Only then is the tourist willing to exchange money for the experience of toned-down, westernized culture. In The Beach Richard and his friends are worse and go one step further in evading the local cultures. Mass-tourism, if one were arguing in favour of this institution, leaves exchange value for the cultural subordination it demands of its host. The self-proclaimed travellers, however, are mere parasites. The group found their pristine hideout in a natural reserve which is a no-go area for the Thai community and tourists alike. By living on an island that is not only off the tourist track but is also unrepresentative of Thai culture in general, they present themselves in the tradition of the colonizer of old. They claim a pristine part of the island and its beach for themselves and shield it from the outside. While they perceive their autarkic life as counter-culture, they steal in a double sense. Not only do they occupy land, but they withhold any exchange value. They are taking without giving anything back. In the words of Michel Serres:

Ambiguity

111

“There is no exchange, nor will there be one. Abuse appears before use” (Serres 2007: 7).15 In consequence the beach community is unable to create an ‘other space,’ a space that truly would stand in opposition to the leisure-industries they intend to escape. Henri Lefebvre reads the beaches as such spaces of leisure and he asserts that the wish to “constitute a vast ‘counter-space’ […] is a complete illusion” (Lefebvre 1991: 383). For Lefebvre ‘leisure’ and the spaces related to that cultural practice are “both an assimilative and an assimilated part of the ‘system’ (mode of production)” (ibid.). This does not mean that the beach community in Garland’s novel actually replicates or participates in the capitalistic system from which they are fleeing. But by refusing any contact at all they erase any possible contact zone inside the foreign culture they are visiting. None of the protagonists ever reflects on the fact that their international community includes neither a single Thai member nor any other of Asian origin. Yet they assume the right to inhabit and use the Thai island as they feel fit. Even in the beach-community’s negative opposition to the leisure and tourist industry it still participates in the transformation of leisure “into a victory of neocapitalism and an extension of bourgeois hegemony to the whole of space” (Lefebvre 1991: 383). Where Marlow’s narrative silences the Africans in Heart of Darkness, Richard not only refuses to give the Thai population a voice, but totally erases Thai culture from his gaze. In the end, Marlow’s lament that there “was not a blank space any more” (HoD 8) is ironic, considering that to the reductionist European gaze, unable to look beyond the surface, everything remains a blank space. The sailors, travellers, shipwrecks, and journalists from Prospero and Robin-

























































15

In the end the beach-community is only one part of the parasitic cascade. The group benefits from the drug-farmers’ shielding of the isle. The farmers themselves are parasites in relation to the government which keeps this specific part of the sea as a natural reserve. While never stated explicitly the drugfarmers remain unbothered due to the potential bribes they are paying to yet another subject in the parasitic chain. This set of infinite parasitical relations indicates why the group’s attempt to exclude the outside world has to remain futile: as parasites they are an essential part of everything. The parasitic cascade dissolves the dichotomy inside/outside. Serres argues: “The parasited one parasites the parasites” (Serres 2007: 13).

112

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

son to Marlow and Richard, are hardly interested in the realities at hand: self-obsession is their main occupation. Chlada argues: Wer das Andere erfahren will, muss sich also auf die Reise begeben. Dies aber bedeutet, sich gleichsam von dem Bedürfnis nach Theorie, wie vom allgemeinem Diskurs eines Systems zu verabschieden, von dem man genug hat.” (Chlada 2005: 45) [Anyone who wants to experience the other, has to go on a voyage. This means, however, to distance oneself from the desire for theory as well as the discourse of the system one is fed up with. (my translation)]

But rather than welcoming the difference the travel experience in Thailand provides, the opposite happens. In The Beach differences are gradually erased. For Richard the Khao San Road is “backpacker land” (Beach 5) and feels like home. There are hardly any differences discernible, as is illustrated by the food: “All those things- dog, lizard, frog, snake. They always taste like chicken” (Beach 57). To Richard and his peers, however, their beach does not turn into a contact zone: it is merely a “DMZ” – a demilitarized zone, and the weapon of choice is of a symbolical nature. The Thailand in The Beach is remodelled according to the touristic imagery presented by magazines, movies, and other media that create, fuel, and fulfil the escapist desires of the West. The escaping tourist, however, is only interested in simulacra of otherness, not the real Thailand.16 The kind of tourism presented in The Beach is colonialism driven by individual desire, the longing for a pristine reserve unspoiled by locals and fel-

























































16

This is of course the great irony in The Beach. As much as the beach community wants to identify as travellers, at the end they always remain tourists, in the worst case. They are the opposite of what Jean-Didier Urbain describes: “A sign of the times, in the lineage of nineteenth-century discoverers of shorelines, twentieth-century ethnologists, and 1960s utopians, our vacationer thus plays at integration and participatory observation more than he does at transforming the world. If he is a demiurge, he is a gentle one. He is attentive to local life, which he admires and to which he adapts his own; he wants especially to avoid modifying his natural equilibrium. Hence his rejection of hotels, luxury ghettos, vacation-villages, and other clubs: in short, all the seaside vacation enclaves that separate visitors from natives, that alter sites, remain ignorant of local customs, and degrade the environment” (Urbain 2003: 19).

Ambiguity

113

low countrymen alike. The bible of colonial tourism is The Lonely Planet, which by directing the masses to unspoiled spaces is integrating these into the touristic conquest. This hunt for the pristine, prelapsarian locale is the spatialization of Lacanian jouissance: the moment a traveller or tourist enters this Garden of Eden, the place is overwritten. As argued by Lefebvre, as “an extension of dominated space, leisure spaces are arranged at once functionally and hierarchically. […] space thus controlled and managed constrains in specific ways, imposing its own rituals and gestures (such as tanning), discursive forms (what should be said or not said), and even models and modulations in space” (Lefebvre 1991: 384). These implementations of leisure into space are performed by the beach-community. Yet this implementation results in an increasing neglect to deal with everything outside the beach and their culturally constructed filter-bubbles. The outside, however, cannot be excluded. Richard himself is the one who entered “the black box or the closed system” (Serres 2007: 209). According to Michel Serres, such an entrance yields obvious results: From this point on, he can only destroy the existing equilibrium or increase an already formed distance. He introduces a new asymmetry, a new flow, another capture. He disorganizes the box; he transforms it; it is something else when he leaves. He analyzes, he catalyzes, and sometimes he paralyzes. (Serres 2007: 209f)

The community in The Beach fails because they vainly attempt to eradicate all difference. The outside world beyond the beach is too far away to hold up its dangerous, yet unifying, connotations. The more the group forgets this outside, the more they are looking for differences among themselves. Richard realizes that “in an all-blue world, colour doesn’t exist. […] If something seems strange, you question it; but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange” (Beach 116). Once the group directs the focus on itself the former thought that connected them, namely their aversion to the outside world, vanishes. Richard states this in the form of a metaphor, related to the room of his childhood: “Glow stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear” (Beach 63). At the moment when the group loses sight of their common goal the processes of othering are applied to the group itself and initiate its demise. The group’s founder and leader, Sal, assumes and executes the power to decide what is good for the utopian community and

114

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

what is a danger, and she uses this power very distinctively: “She had the American habit of frequently using one’s name. It had the strange effect of being both disarmingly familiar and unnaturally forced” (Beach 93). This force, however, quickly leaves the semiotic realm, when Sal forces Richard to kill Karl. The Swede is severely wounded by a shark and barely survives, yet he is strong enough to live on for an extended period of time. He is caught in between life and death. The beach-community is faced with the decision how to deal with his injury: bringing him to a hospital on the mainland would bring the community’s existence to the attention of the local authorities. This, consequently, would result in their eviction from the natural reserve they are illegally staying in. Leaving him on the island would result in a certain death, yet would guarantee the future existence of their community, which up to this point was quite utopian. They decide for the latter. The dying Swede is transferred into the forest and out of sight. By neither actively helping nor killing him, the power of the majority forces him to remain in this terrible state in between life and death. On a long shot this liminal stage does not promise an elevated position afterwards for the liminal persona. Rather, the liminal stage is misused to maintain the status quo of the society and its perception of itself. This intention, ultimately, backfires, since the liminality of Karl is transferred to the community in total. The brutality is not supported by everybody, the social fabric is fractured and the unity is increasingly hard to keep up. This shark attack on the beach represents an intrusion of the real world into the community’s makeshift one. And what is worse, the shark’s unexpected attack represents an outside that cannot be controlled. In a way the shark’s bite represents an infection of the reality that in the form of Karl’s delirious pain is slowly spreading through the community. This only serves to show that the otherness the beach community is fighting represents what they ultimately escaped from: uncontrollable reality. Karl’s pain is a metonymic reminder of the pain outside their domain; his pain also demands a contact with the outside world, since only a hospital can save his life. Thus the wound marks Karl as somebody whose presence at the beach threatens the fabric of their utopian society, and at the same time his pain makes obvious the fragile fabric of their utopian society. Sal feels the only way to deal with this symbol of their utopia’s vulnerability is to have Karl, who is

Ambiguity

115

one outsider, killed by Richard, who is increasingly transforming into an outsider himself. According to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Béla Grunberger this brutal fight against otherness is an essential element of utopias: Das Fatale an jeder Utopie, die das Ideal in völliger Radikalität verwirklichen wolle, liege daran, dass es eines ungeheurlichen Masses an Gewalttätigkeit bedarf, um diesen als gut vorgestellten Zustand zu bewirken. Alles, was anders ist, muß vorher ausgemerzt werden, Unterschiede darf es in der idealen Welt nicht mehr geben. (cited in Raguse 1999: n.p.) [The fatality of any utopia that intends to realize its ideal in a radical fashion lies in the immense violence required to realize this idealized state. Everything that is different has to be eradicated first. Differences must not exist in this ideal world. (my translation)]

The beach utopia quickly divides into various sub-groups, into members and outsiders, the powerful and the powerless. Everybody who threatens actively or passively the utopian ideals is marginalised, silenced, and faces serious repercussions. The heterotopia turns into a camp, the individual freedoms are taken over by rigid rules and regulations. As long as the group (mis-)used processes of othering to create a sense of unity and coherence their utopian lifestyle was easy to maintain. After all, everything that was perceived as negative or harmful was located outside their beach. As soon as these processes were applied to their own group, the very mechanism that provided their unified identity turns against them. Since the group has not learned to think beyond binary oppositions, they are unable to effectively job this downturn. This process of differentiation and destruction is metaphorically represented by a milkfish, caught by the group’s fishing unit: the milkfish impaled on a spear attempts to free itself but by doing so is “sliding itself further down the shaft with its effort to get free” (Beach 395). Ultimately, the group’s utopian dream is based on a longing for stasis, a lack of change, and the suspension of time. Especially Richard, who is caught in the mediascapes of his childhood, illustrates that the utopian longing is actually a sort of lived nostalgia. This nostalgia is illustrated by his attempt to connect the signifiers of his past with

116

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

the realities surrounding him.17 He attempts to stop change by denying new experiences and different cultures entry into his semiotic system. Yet transgressive discourse cannot be escaped. A utopia based on a structuralist world-view, where everything and everybody has its fixed place in dichotomous thinking, is a vain attempt. A semiosphere is under constant influx, its normative core may be stable in relation to its periphery, but ultimately discourses are in a constant flux, even if the binary signifiers may suggest otherwise. The same holds true for utopian thinking, which I would like to define as the attempt to maintain the semiosphere’s normative core, and which has the following essential attribute: Utopias are “vorübergehend und nicht vollkommen [.], allenfalls im Augenblick ihres Geschehens. Aber in dieser Unvollkommenheit stellen sie doch gleichnishaft die phantasierte paradisische Erfüllung dar. Sie sind symbolische Erfüllungen.” (Raguse 1999: n.p.) [Utopias are “temporary and not perfect […], with exception of the moment when they are happening. But they allegorically represent in this very imperfection the imagined paradisiacal fulfilment. They are symbolic fulfilments. (my translation)]

The utopia in The Beach is grounded in the hope of conserving the perfect moment at the perfect place. It is essentially nostalgic and refuses every kind of change and differentiation.18 This utopia is

























































17

In his study The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class Dean MacCannell identifies this nostalgia as an essential characteristic of tourism in particular and modern societies in general: “Modern society, only partly disengaged from industrial structures, is especially vulnerable to overthrow from within through nostalgia, sentimentality and other tendencies to regress to a previous state, a ‘Golden Age,’ which retrospectively always appears to have been more orderly or normal” (MacCannell 1999: 82). John Hatcher adds: “James Buzard and others have shown that genuine travel is always displaced in the past, bathed in the mellow light of nostalgia” (Hatcher 1999: 132).

18

A major difference between many beach narratives to utopias in general and their spatial presentation in particular is the fact that the shorelines are evolving in contrast to the static spaces of many utopias/dystopias. Atlantis, Paradise, Utopia, Ozeania are places that stand in a reciprocal relationship of power and production to the societies that live there. The societies and their rules produce the space, the space vice versa produces the societies and its structures. Think of Utopia with its capital in the middle, the subdivision of towns and villages, the precise set-up of the towns itself. The society is, in the sense of the world, governed by, through and in space. Dystopias bring this

Ambiguity

117

“bathed in the yellow light of nostalgia.” (Hatcher 1999: 132) But at a space of constant liminality and transgression, a spatialized contact zone, such a fixed state is impossible to obtain: “Suffice it to say that, like all travellers, from imperial adventurers to package tourists, Richard ultimately destroys the very thing he seeks” (Hatcher 1999: 142). The stay on the shores of Neverland is only temporary and in “real life Peter Pan always grows up” (Island 381). In The Beach Richard is one of the few characters that begin to realize the futility of the search for a perfect beach, that is an immutable place and state. He is aware, however, that despite its temporal limitations, the perfect utopia just reappears in a different form and different space: ‘It would be sad to be bored of Eden, no? If you are bored of Eden, what is left?’ [Françoise asks Richard. His answer is:] ‘Eden?’ (Beach 145)

These processes of re-writing and over-writing the realities at hand and the constructivist nature of the travellers explain why the utopian state is only of a short duration. A specific turning point from utopia to dystopia, however, is hardly to be found. The process of signification is gradual. The harder the communities try to maintain their utopias, the more they fight alterity and difference. The spaces increasingly turn from heterotopias to camps, utopias to dystopias, and freedom to submission.
























































































































form of spatial control to the fore, and visualize this kind of control through space. The beach narratives are processual utopias, they are constantly changing, the borders and their connotations are shifting, the parcellation of space is in constant flux. As will be shown below, these societies do reach a state they assume to be perfect and they try to fix that synchronic realization of utopia by means of the spaces they produce. So where static utopias, as I would like to call them, represent a never-ending and, thus, time-less space, transformative utopias are constantly changing. This spatial representation resembles the spatial concepts Deleuze & Guattari refer to as “smooth space” and “striated spaces” (cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1987).




3 Liminality It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with one another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us. (John Maxwell Coetzee, Foe: 37) Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection. (Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between”: 14)

In John Keats’s sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” (Keats 1816: 38) the lyrical voice of the poem describes the feelings of epiphany and bliss experienced when she/he first discovered George Chapman’s translations of Homer’s works. According to Christoph Bode, the poem presents literature in a very spatial form, which the reader is travelling through (Bode 1996: 20). The reading proves to be a revelation; it is a moment when something imagined is finally experienced at first hand. It is a moment when one kind of experience is altered, expanded and transformed into a different state by means of encountering a deeper experience. One of the main spatial metaphors is implicitly expressed by the simile comparing the reader of Chapman’s Homer to Cortez. Keats’s poem is, of course, not a historically accurate document. After all Hernán Cortéz was chosen over Vasco Balboa as the subject of the poem, who was supposedly the first European to see the Pacific at the end of a long, excruciating voyage. Keats describes this contact in the form of various similes which are constructed spatially and represented by Cortez’s elevated position. Cortez is standing between the Pacific in front of him and the plains of Panama and his men behind him. It is on a hill, at the edge of the continent, that Keats places Cortez, when he sets eyes on the sublime vastness of the Pacific Ocean and experiences at first-hand what he has only dreamed of:

120

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific – and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise – Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (Keats 1816: 33)

Cortez may not be standing on the shore itself when he takes in the vista of the Pacific in front of him. Still the spatial imagery separates the space into three entities: Cortez standing on the “peak”, his men behind him, and the Pacific ahead of him. The spatial imagery as presented through Cortez’s gaze is reduced to sea and land with him right in the middle. It is at this very moment that Cortez is turned into an outsider, more precisely, into a figure of the third. Being the first European to see the Pacific, its sublime vastness petrifies him and at the same time this experience sets him apart from his peers. He “star’d” at the Pacific and this spectacular sight fixes him to this very spot and renders him motionless and speechless, “silent.” Time and space are momentarily suspended. His experience is impossible to mediate in language. “[A]ll his men” get an impression that this is a special moment for their leader they sense that something important is going on: while Cortez’s gaze is directed straight at the Ocean ahead of him, his men can only partially share his excitement. They are unaware of what is going on and look “at each other with a wild surmise”. Yet the paradox of the poem, according to Bode, is that the experience Keats intends to present, is, ultimately, impossible to represent and cannot be put into words (cf. Bode 1996: 23). The sublime resists representation; only by means of tropical language is an approximation possible. Their impression of their leader’s sublime experience, however, is only of a second order. They read what is going on in Cortez’s behaviour: his body language, his fixed stare at a place they can’t see themselves, and his silence hint at the incommunicable. Cortez’s body turns into a messenger of sorts. His unique experience transforms him into an outsider, while at the same time he is the connection between two spaces and states: before and after the epiphany. While for him there is no going back, while there is no way to erase this experience, his men could decide against having the same experience. They might be content to stay where they are. So could the readers of Keats’s poem: they could be content with sharing the second-hand experience of how it is to read Chapman’s translation of Homer according to the poem’s voice. They could also decide to follow Cortez, that is the

Liminality

121

voice, and look into Chapman’s translation for themselves. The spatial metaphor of an experiencing subject standing between land and sea at the moment of altering epistemic insights is a repeated trope in the beach-narratives. The beach figures as a contact zone between spatial locales, cultures, concepts, and discourses. The moment Keats tries to present is a moment of transition, namely the very second when a subject’s identity changes, the moment when a new experience alters the pre-established mindset. It is a fleeting moment when old and new stand side by side and the vast impact of the new renders obsolete the experiences of the old. This is the moment of synthesis when two concepts fuse and something else is created. To return to the spatial metaphors of the poem: the elevation of the epiphany, or rather the transition, is represented by the peak in Panama, the old is the land through which Cortez and his men have fought their way, the new is the Pacific. And Cortez is placed right on the liminal line, spatially and temporally; he is presented as right between land and sea, past and future. Cortez is not standing literally on a shore. Nonetheless, it is this very element of a contact between two cultures, entities, and psychological states that the beach narratives often explore. This moment in between time is presented as a liminal state. Yet what makes beach narratives special is that this very moment of the contact, and the nature of the contact as such, are foregrounded. The shore poses as a contact zone where the description of the contact is temporarily drawn out the narratives focus on the very transgression itself, rather than the result of it. Here on this shore different groups and individuals encounter each other. Each group or individual represents a culture and a variety of discourses of its own, and these discourses, at least in the context of beach and island narratives, are often pinned against each other. So what the shore as a liminal zone presents is in the form of a spatial representation the contact between two discourses. This contact, however, is not necessarily represented as a clash of cultures; the binaries are often upheld and confirmed, yet the depiction of discursive transgression located inbetween the binary opposites is of interest and the focus of this chapter. The type of contact itself may often be a colonial one, but is not necessarily restricted to a colonial encounter. Jane Austen’s Persua-

122

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

sion (1818), Charles Dickens’s “The Tuggses at Ramsgate” (1836), James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1926), John Banville’s The Sea (2005) are not concerned with that symbolic domain. The fact, however, that most of the narratives here are (post)colonial does require an extended analysis of the discursive contacts on the colonial shores, which will follow below with the focus on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The beach is used as a literary space that displays various kinds of contacts and discourses as the following overview shows. Individuals meet other individuals, such as Robinson and Friday. Groups encounter other groups, e.g. the sailors in The Isle of Pines meet the Pines on the beach. On the beach a protagonist can look for himself or herself in the form of her or his past, like Max Morden in The Sea. Other protagonists are creating the future of their society, as is Snowman’s responsibility in Oryx and Crake. The kids in Lord of the Flies discover on the island their darker, uncontrollably violent sides, as do Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. On the one hand, the contact between cultures can be first hand, and presented as part of the narrative’s reality. King Horn literally fights off the Saracens on his native shores. Robinson builds a relationship with Friday. Charles Edward Pendrick in The Island of Dr Moreau discovers Dr Moreau’s hybrid creations. On the other hand, the contact can be a mere mental projection. In particular voyages along the shorelines of beaches and rivers are presented as the contact of one culture with another. While Robinson is sailing along the African coast he dreads the cannibals on land. While Marlow is on his voyage up the Congo River, the sounds and visions behind the vegetative screen procure different images of the cultures lying beyond. This may not be a real contact with a different culture. Yet these imaginary phantasms lay bare the protagonists’ perceptions thereof. In a way they prepare for the real contact in a double sense: for one thing the reader is primed on what to expect, the tension is slowly building up. In addition, these pre-fabricated expectations trigger pre-conditioned behaviour. The fact that Robinson, Kurtz, and the boys in Lord of the Flies expect to find the wild, the savage, and the cannibal, only results in their treating the humans they do find according to their expectations, as will be elaborated below. Consequently, the voyage along or towards the shore and the perception thereof brings to the fore the protagonists’ cultural templates and scripts which were indoctrinated by their own culture. The semantic template of the cannibal as ‘black,

Liminality

123

terrifying man’ is imprecise enough to be applied to what in reality is a wide variety of individual human beings. Whoever is encountered on or along the shores, when this encounter happens, and whether it is real or imagined, staged or accidental, in all cases two apparently mutually exclusive discourses are presented. And these discourses are related to concepts of identity and the power structures that enable, foster, and propagate them. The term, repeatedly used so far, for the beach as an intermediate space between two cultures and the discourses they represent is ‘contact zone.’ This term was coined and conceptualised by Mary Louise Pratt in her study Imperial Eyes. Pratt describes, as already quoted, the concept of the ‘contact zone’ as follows: One coinage that recurs throughout this book is the term ‘contact zone,’ which I use to refer to the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. […] ‘Contact zone’ in my discussion is often synonymous with ‘colonial frontier.’ But while the latter term is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is frontier only with respect to Europe), ‘contact zone’ is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term ‘contact,’ I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. (Pratt 1992: 6f)

Since many of the narratives in this study have a colonial or postcolonial background I would like to adopt this term for a better understanding of beaches and shorelines. Such a space can be found in King Horn, Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island, or Heart of Darkness. I will argue, however, that such contacts, if not in the colonial or postcolonial domain, are still prevalent in many other beach-narratives. The contact of “trajectories” (ibid.) and the foregrounding of “interactive, improvisational dimensions of [.] encounters” (ibid.) hold true for other stories as well. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost the fallen angels are banished to the lake of hell; it is on the shore, however, that they deduce their plans for their future from their experiences of the past. In a way it is here, at this turning point, where they have to reflect on their prior actions. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a

124

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Young Man it is on the shore that Stephen Dedalus chooses between two life-styles and decides to live as an artist. On the beaches the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies come into contact with and live out their darker sides. Max Morden in John Banville’s The Sea encounters his past as well as the aspects of his life he has ignored up to that point. So the interactive dimension of the contact zone, as proposed by Pratt for colonial and postcolonial literature, I would like to apply to beach narratives in general. As has been argued, this is the space where two or more cultures and the discourses they represent and produce in the first place meet, interact, and for the most part change. While the notion of the contact zone is helpful on a microlevel of analysis, it nonetheless adheres to a potentially reductionist notion of two absolutely oppositional concepts clashing, even if these are understood to be brought forth by “radically asymmetrical relations of power” (ibid.). At the same time, the concept of the contact zone too easily recalls the discursive dichotomies attached to the opposition of periphery and centre,1 even if regarded from a critical perspective. Michael Frank argues that this concept might lead to an “einseitigen – und tendenziell harmonisierenden Betrachtungsweise [onesided – and potentially harmonizing perspective (my translation)]” (Frank 2006: 10). The earlier example of John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Richard II shows that this contact including the alteration of discourses is not always wanted, but is more often dreaded and to be avoided. Whenever a system is intended to be perfect it quickly turns into a system of exclusion, a space with fortified borders and powerful hegemonic discourses that try to resist outside influences. Yet every space of governance and every system of thought have their boundaries where 1

The idea of England and London as a cultural centre that stands in opposition to the Empire’s periphery has of course been ridiculed long before the decline of the Empire. In the context of colonial imagery Ben Jonson’s “On the famous Voyage” is a notable example. Jonson guides the reader on a colonial voyage right into the heart of London, where dirt and decay prevail. According to Tom Betteridge, “Jonson mocks in this passage the tendency of modern travellers to use humanist tropes and figures to explain what they encountered on their travels. […] In particular, Jonson mocks the desire to name and map, to interpret and know, that lies at the heart of early modern travel and which motivates its endless production of borders” (Betteridge 2007: 11).

Liminality

125

they encounter and meet other, maybe oppositional, ideologies. Michael Frank calls this fear of the other “kulturelle Einflussangst [anxiety of influence]” (Frank 2006), a term he borrows from Harold Bloom, who himself used it in the context of poetry. The causes of this anxiety of influence, Frank argues, can be found in “diskursiven Grenzziehungen [the creation of discursive boundaries (my translation)]” (Frank 2006: 16). Frank further distinguishes between “Invasionsangst [fear of invasion]” and “anxiety of influence”: Während die Invasionsangst das Eindringen des Anderen in Europa (zum Beispiel in Form von ethnischen Minderheiten) betrifft, richtet sich die Ein-flussangst auf die befürchtete Verwandlung und Entfremdung des Eigenen außerhalb von Europa, was meist eine genau umgekehrte Ausgangs-konstellation impliziert: Ein einzelner Europäer oder eine kleine Gruppe von Europäern sieht sich in isolierter Lage einer zahlenmäßigen Dominanz des Anderen ausgesetzt. (Frank 2006: 16) [While the fear of invasion is concerned with the invasion of the other into Europe, e.g. in the form of ethnic minorities, the anxiety of influence is directed at the fear of one’s identity being transformed or estranged outside of Europe. This implies an inverse constellation: a single European or a small group of Europeans perceives itself in an isolated situation and being outnumbered by the other. (my translation)]

In particular postcolonial theory and border studies have extensively shown how this contest in the contact zone, whether real or imagined, helped to shape the perception of self and other, and an (mis-) understanding of one’s own culture. The underlying Manichean Allegory (cf. JanMohammed 1985) resulted in highly binary, dichotomous cultural concepts. Michel Serres indicates this process of othering as follows: “He is on the other bank [rive], the rival is. He is our common enemy. Our collective is the expulsion of the stranger, of the enemy, of the parasite. The laws of hospitality become laws of hostilty” (Serres 2007: 56). Even while reflecting on these oftenpropagandistic processes, one easily falls into the trap of arguing against dichotomous thinking using the very concepts one is attempting to refute and resolve. How does this study attempt to avoid the trap of binary argumentation? In particular the shorelines and the beaches are spaces that, as has been argued, only too easily spark binary imaginations. Firstly,

126

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

I will attempt to rethink the concept of transgression, rather than perceiving it as a repeated act of crossing boundaries, be they spatial or normative. I am going to read discursive transgression, with Michel Foucault, as a repeated and infinite act of signification and deconstruction. Secondly, this study will read the seashores and the adjacent discursive spaces with Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere, which allows for an understanding of (cultural) spaces as more fluid, and progressively changing, as opposed to a static and rather oppositional understanding of space. In the following chapter, however, I will identify liminal personae as being intrinsically linked to the transformative ambiguity of beach- and border spaces. I argue that this very liminality serves as the prerequisite for possible transformation in the first place. 3.1 Liminal Shores Transgression counters and partially deconstructs existing discourses, re-arranges them, or alters the perception thereof. This consequently affects and is reflected by the characters staying on or close to the shore. These characters are often liminal figures that are betwixt and between different states. Beach narratives repeatedly present characters being turned into liminal personae since their liminality is, I would claim, essential for their ensuing transformations. In order to change they are required to leave their old status, and only then can these characters obtain a new status. The concept of liminality allows for a better understanding of the causes and effects of their ‘stateless state’ and as such highlights the narrative and conceptual structure of the beach as a literary setting. The shorelines are a time-honoured setting for indeterminacy, transgression, and transformation. As mentioned in the introduction, the goal of this study is not merely to illustrate the existence of liminality. Such an approach would verge on the descriptive and will not yield insights beyond pattern recognition. I am more concerned with explaining and theorizing the transformative and liminal nature of transgressive thought in relation to its spatial representation. Liminality cannot be separated from transgressive thought. Both are reciprocally connected and influence each other. The focus on liminality allows, however, for a different angle on this relation-

Liminality

127

ship and leads right into the following chapters: to understand the fluidity of beach discourses and Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere alike, liminality and transgression are effective pretexts to argue for such a fluid rather than a static understanding of space. The concluding chapter illustrates how transgression and liminality relate to socio-political systems as a means of maintaining and securing the systems’ hegemonic powers rather than subverting them. In this chapter I will analyze the nature of shorelines as a setting of liminality. The beach is, firstly, a space of geographical and geological liminality, a space that produces and subverts borders, frontiers, and marginality. Secondly, the beach is a setting for staging liminality in the protagonists’ psychological constitution as well as in their socio-political situation. This aspect turns the setting into an important narrative force. The beaches and shorelines embody the stage for rites of transgression, transition and transformation. In consequence liminal personae abound. One element shared by all narratives in this study that directly leads to the prevalence of liminality and transgression is their being grounded in moments of existential crisis. The protagonists are detached from their previous lives; they are stripped of the status they held in their society of origin and arrive on the shore as ‘liminal personae.’ These subjects the anthropologist Victor Turner refers to as “neophytes” (Turner 1987: 8). The pre-existing boundaries, the frames of their existence prior to the catastrophe, are shattered, the rights attached to their social status dissolved. At the same time they are freed from responsibilities and duties. This nullification of rights and obligations is repeatedly represented by means of exile or shipwreck, the ship being the time-honoured metaphor for society and, as argued by Paul Gilroy, “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (Gilroy 1993: 4).2 2

In his article on whalemen in Coastal Africa Felix Schürman analyses the relationship between ships and beaches. He argues that “a ships’ crew was no miniature model of these societies. Rather, it was a specific community formed at sea that followed its own logic. In the same way, a coastal place was not necessarily representative of the hinterland. In the Atlantic world for example, from the sixteenth century on, some coastal communities shared more similarities with coastal societies on different continents than with neighboring societies” (Schürrmann 2012: 33).

128

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero, the rightful ruler of Milan, has been overthrown by his brother. The natural order symbolized by the chain of being as understood by Early Modern society (cf. Tillyard 1959, Lovejoy 2001) is in a state of tempestuous turmoil. Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost is likewise presented as a shipwrecked sailor who has just escaped death (cf. Zwierlein 2002). His attempted usurpation left behind a formerly united universe, now divided into heaven and hell. Flying towards Eden to initiate the fall of man he has to cross the realm of chaos. He finishes this dangerous voyage like a “weather beaten Vessel” (PL 2.1043). Robinson Crusoe is intentionally leaving the “middle state” (RC 9) his father advised him to accept as his determined social position. His trespassing of the boundaries set by providence is repeatedly punished. Robinson is shipwrecked twice, is enslaved once, and barely survives each of these catastrophes. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies the children flee a world engulfed in atomic warfare and their airship crashes into the centre of an island. In Aldous Huxley’s Island Will Farnaby’s sailboat is too small a vessel to resist a storm and he barely makes it to the coast. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake the main protagonist’s separation from society is more drastic: Jimmy’s world is annihilated by a virus which was intentionally designed for this purpose by his friend Crake. Max Morden’s crisis in John Banville’s The Sea is of a traumatic rather than an apocalyptic nature. Nonetheless, the impact of his wife’s death proves strong enough for him to suspend the orderly routines of daily life. Richard in Alex Garland’s The Beach also desires to escape his society of origin and finds his way to the secret, hidden shore in Thailand. He reaches the beach one leap of faith at a time. In comparison, all these crises causing the characters’ separation from their communities are of a different nature. In addition the agency of the characters involved differs drastically; while Prospero never intended to leave Milan, Crusoe certainly wanted to escape his stifling family, the Tuggses are only too happy to leave London for the beach, and Snowman realizes that reaching the shore with the Crakers is his only chance to survive. Yet all characters have in common what I would like to call a liminal rupture. Prior to their arrival on the distant shores the narratives literally or figuratively stress a break with society. They experience a shock decisive enough to put their existing rules on hold. Yet as opposed to ritual liminality these

Liminality

129

ruptures do come unexpectedly and unintentionally and they do not serve a social function of any sort. Perceived from an extradiegetic level, however, when reading the respective narratives as the cultural production they are, they might be regarded as part of a lore spanning different times, texts, and genres. The presented catastrophes and the way the protagonists are presented could be read as a form of ritualistic, that is culturally embedded stock-narrative. These narrative meta-structures have been sketched repeatedly (cf. Campbell 2003, Cawelti 2006), the concept of liminality being an essential characteristic of these texts. While Victor Turner regards liminality as a social ritual and thus looks at it from an anthropological perspective, Elsbree Langdon relates liminality specifically to narration. She hints at the interrelatedness of fictional and non-fictional liminality and argues: Cultural rites and narratives have varied ways of creating liminality – by isolating a single initiate, grouping a small band of initiates together, or gathering up a group of loners and setting them on the road to Oz or aboard the Pequod, to mention but a few. (Langdon 1991: 18)

The protagonists in beach narratives certainly belong to this category. They are isolated and are either stranded on the shore against their will or have decided by themselves to go there. This leads to the following questions: Why is the beach the first goal of mobility? What is to be found there? And what do the beaches represent? The various crises the protagonists have experienced lead to a nullification of all existing categories in their previous lives. All the regulations and laws that governed their existence are eradicated. The protagonists are not dead, yet often have hardly survived; they are not at home, but have not yet arrived; the societies they come from do not exist any more or do not extend the reach of their law far enough for it to apply in this new space to which the beaches are synecdochically connected. The old order is out of reach, a new order has yet to be established. This is where the utopian element comes into play. The fundamental force behind utopian thought and practices, the utopian re-construction of a society starting from the tabula rasa of a point zero, is, I would argue, liminality, that is the very suspension of order, regularity, and status.

130

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Every aspect of the ‘beached protagonists’ – their bodies, societies, and language – is destabilized and reduced to an existence right on the border, neither here nor there, betwixt and between. The only dichotomy in place, the most basic at the moment of survival, is that of life/death. All other existing discourses and their rules are re-set and need to be re-evaluated, re-established, and re-constructed. The beach as a space is as undefined as the situation the protagonists are in. Theirs is a stateless-state. They left their former position and a future status is not yet in sight. They are caught in a state devoid of the multitude of definitions, categorisations, and concepts their prior existence held. This situation transforms them into liminal personae, the shore being the spatial analogy. So whether these characters arrive at the shore intentionally or not, the very moment they enter this space they are turned into neophytes. They are caught in between the dichotomies life/death, order/chaos, culture/nature, and status/absence of status. The protagonists are also presented amidst the dichotomy past/present. Temporarily they are located amidst a time-change between their unrecoverable past and an unforeseeable future. The process of time, the consecutive order of events and their causal relation is a necessary element of narrative structures. Beach narratives are special in that they focus on this very transitional moment in time. They foreground the very moment of change, a moment that shuts off the past and opens up an infinity of possible futures. The consecutive nature of time as presented in narratives is brought to a halt. The causal connection to the past, present, and future is put on hold, and the future is thus freed from any causal determinations infringed upon by this very past. The metaphor of the shipwreck represents the death of the preexisting society and its rules and expectations. The arrival on the liminal shore provides the characters with the possibility to free themselves from any deterministic obligations inflicted upon them by their culture of origin. The future is potentially unwritten and existing structures of order are put on hold. Prospero has lost his rightful place in the chain of being, and even after his re-instatement the existing structure will not be the same again. Robinson is not following the ways that, according to his father’s interpretation of providence, are laid out for him. Marlow in Heart of Darkness enters a space where any pre-existing order is put on hold. The boys in Lord of the Flies

Liminality

131

step out of the English education system and abandon the existing restraints of human ethics and morals. In his study of transitional rituals, Arnold van Gennep “borrowed ‘limen,’ the Latin word for ‘threshold’” (Alexander 1991: 17) to contextualise systemic processes of transition. In this study the beach as liminal space is understood to represent that very ‘threshold,’ a space in-between two different states often oppositional in nature. The beach is not only a liminal space in the geographical and geological sense. More importantly, it poses as the setting for individuals and societies in transition. The transitional elements thus encompass a broad range of different symbolic domains: the narratives analyzed in this study represent this vast network of symbolic domains as deeply interconnected. These texts illustrate Stallybrass’ and White’s argument, as quoted already in the introduction. They proclaim that high/low opposition in each of our four symbolic domains – psychic forms, the human body, geographical space and the social order [are connected in such a way that] transgressing the rules of hierarchy and order in any one of the domains may have major consequences in the others. (Stallybrass and White 1986: 3)

Stallybrass and White point out two elements that are essential in the context of liminality and transgression: firstly they acknowledge the existence of a pre-established symbolic matrix of binary oppositions; secondly they stress the interrelated nature of the various symbolic domains. Alterations in one domain affect every other domain, often in unpredictable ways. The changes occur against a discursive background-matrix represented by the existing dichotomies at work. When encompassing the various symbolic domains from space to language, the term state, naturally, tends to be imprecise. I will use the definition of ‘state’ by Victor Turner, who argues [by] ‘state’ I mean here ‘a relatively fixed or stable condition’ and would include in its meaning such social constancies as legal status, profession, office or calling, rank or degree. […] The term ‘state’ may also be applied to ecological conditions, or to the physical, mental or emotional condition in which a person or group may be found at a particular time. (Turner 1987: 4)

The number and types of such ‘states’ in relationship to the literary beach are, as argued above, manifold, and encompass the eco-

132

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

logical (sea/land; wasted/pristine; dangerous/safe), physical (healthy/ sick; intact/fragmented), and psychological (deviant/adapted; queered/ hetero-normative). That the various connotations related to these terms are, firstly, social constructions, and secondly, heavily subjective markers of hegemonic powers, goes without saying. Nonetheless, this symbolic matrix makes the creation of the liminal personae possible in the first place. Without Robinson’s concept of providence, it would hardly be possible to understand his resistance to a pre-determined path and the liminal state resulting therefrom. Kurtz’s regression into a state without rules and order gains importance in the light of the assumed civility of the colonising nations. While this study is analysing liminality and liminal states as the in-between of binary opposite states, it is not doing so with the assumption that the constructions of these binaries are in any way neutral and detached from their respective ideologies. Consequently, the liminal ground as such is not a neutral one; however, it is one where the fabrication of dichotomies and binary thinking is likewise being illustrated and contested. In addition the liminal state is not necessarily a chance for the protagonists to free themselves from the shackles of binary categorisation. In some examples, such as The Tempest, the deliberate confinement of characters in a liminal state is an act of executing hegemonic power rather than a subversion thereof, as will be shown below. While there are many instances that allow reading liminality as a counter-discourse, this is not the rule. Distinctions have to and will be made accordingly. Nonetheless, liminality as such is one of the most powerful narrative elements in the texts analysed in this study. The play with liminalities and dynamics of indirection is manifested in and played out on a space that is able to signify this liminality and transformation. As Hubert Zapf argues, the beach is posited in literature as a transformative space from early on: “From the beginnings of literature in mythology, the beach has been connoted as a space of transformation and metamorphosis, a space where different elements of water, earth, air and fire meet in interaction of sea, land, wind, and sun as a generative principle of life” (Zapf 2009: n.p.). While the island setting seems to be an ideal space for laying out the contemporary understanding of such dichotomies as sub-

Liminality

133

ject/other, culture/nature, insider/outsider, centre/periphery, etc., the beach as third space refuses such binary significations. As a place of transformation it is a signifier of doubts rather than convictions. As a third space it represents a floating signifier that constantly changes and re-represents the discourses at the centre of the respective text. The beach not only houses various figures of the third, but can also be read as a spatial figure of the third itself that initiates liminality, as Albrecht Koschorke argues: Wenn von der Figur des Dritten gesprochen wird, dann ist – dies sollte deutlich geworden sein – ‘Figur’ nicht vorrangig in einem personalen Sinn zu verstehen. Zwar mögen sich Figuren des Dritten in literarischen Helden inkorporieren, aber noch grundsätzlicher geht es dabei um ein ‘liminales Spiel auf der Schwelle’, eine Dynamik der Indirektheit innerhalb kognitiver, affektiver und sozialer Strukturen. (Koschorke 2010: 18) [Speaking of a figure of the third does not necessarily entail that this figure has to be understood in the sense of a person. Literary protagonists may incorporate such figures of the third. But more important in that respect is a ‘liminal play’, a dynamic that avoids clear directions inside of cognitive, affective, and social structures. (my translation)]

This ‘liminal play’ is essential for the progression and the very existence of systems. Beach narratives do not restrict themselves to presenting merely a geographical liminal space. The liminality can be encountered in the protagonists, their identities, societies and bodily representations, all of which are intertwined. The liminal personae not only represent this openness by means of their language, their bodies and their inability to be placed in the pre-existing structure. Like the shore, the liminal subject refuses categorisation and cannot be fully integrated into the existing system: “Indeterminacy lies at the heart of liminality” (Alexander 1991: 19). In the following, I will read the liminal in relation to the exertion of power. Rituals themselves are, of course, related to and based on hegemonic power-structures: especially in the case of rites of transition the ritual is intended to elevate the liminal persona from one state to another. Ritual is thus a mode of social mobility embedded in prescribed terms. The pre-existing status of an individual is extinguished, and after spending a certain amount of time in the limbo of statuslessness, the subject is re-inscribed with a newer, different, if not

134

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

a higher status. This way the teenager is introduced into society as a grown-up, the pauper is installed as a king, and the criminal is reintroduced into society. As part of a ritual, liminality is a way to introduce the character(s) arriving on the shore into their new society. This is exemplified, for example, in Huxley’s Island. Here the main protagonist, William Farnaby, is kept for the whole length of the novel in the status of a liminal persona. While in this state he is indoctrinated into the rules of the island society. At the end of this extended indoctrination, by means of a ritual he is incorporated into the society. Similarly in Lord of the Flies, once the boys split up in two groups, Jack’s tribe of hunters performs rites of initiation by means of dancing and wearing masks, thus clearly demarcating the insiders and the outsiders. In The Beach Richard and his two French friends are also subdued to a phase of statuslessness. Again, it is only after a lengthy phase of (re-) education that they are incorporated into the beach-society. The liminal state initiates the re-evaluation of the existing status quo and offers the possibility for changes and transitions. As argued by Victor Turner “[l]iminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection.” (Turner 1987: 14, emphasis in the original) The transgressive moment that is the exploration of the internal space of dichotomous discourse illuminates the fabric of the existing hegemonic situation. According to Alexander, “Turner is of the opinion that society is most self-conscious during its liminal phases […], since disruption of the norm can give greater insight into the norm than direct perception” (Alexander 1991: 32).

3.2 The Liminal Shore in Shakespeare’s The Tempest Liminality is an essential element in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. While the beach is not the main setting of the play, it nonetheless plays an important role in connection with various instances of characters being betwixt-and-between different states. In the following analysis, various realizations of liminality regarding Prospero, Ferdinand, Caliban and Ariel shall be illustrated. The Tempest is especially fruitful for an analysis of liminality since it is one of the quintessential island narratives in the English language. Its themes of pow-

Liminality

135

er, subordination, colonialism, exile, utopianism, amongst others, are constantly recurring and referred to. The beach does not figure as the most prominent setting. Still many metaphors and other means of figurative language concerning liminality refer to this locale. As a literal space it serves as the point of entrance for the shipwrecked sailors and noblemen to the island. It is on the beach that the king’s ship and its crew are hidden. On the beach Ferdinand mourns his father whom he assumes to have drowned. As such the beach is an implicit space demarcating the sea, which represents death, nature, chaos, and the island, which represents life, culture, order. In addition, the beach in The Tempest outlines another important liminality, namely that of reality and fiction: “Hell is empty, / And all the devils are here” (Tempest 1.2.213f). The great irony, or even cruelty, lies in the fact that the sea, the archetype of death, danger, hell and chaos, is never a real threat to the drowning sailors. What they experience is a spectacle of a tempest “nigh shore” (Tempest 1.2.216) they see their worst imaginations of the sea put into reality. At the same time the sailors are always guarded by an observant Ariel, the agent of this impressive illusion, who assures Prospero that “Not a hair perished; / On their sustaining garments not a blemish, / But fresher than before” (Tempest 1.2.217-19). In The Tempest the ritual nature of liminality is most evident in respect to Prospero’s treatment of Ferdinand. Here the beach figures as a frontier that can only be crossed after an invitation from the island’s ruler Prospero. Ariel not only brings the sailors towards the shore, he also leads Ferdinand “unto these yellow sands” (Tempest 1.2.376). The conjuring of spirits in the form of watchdogs expresses at the same time the exclusive nature of the island, which not everybody is allowed to enter: “Hark, hark! Bow-wow, The watch dogs bark, bow-wow” (Tempest 1.2.383-84). Ferdinand’s being placed onshore is only the first step of his liminal transition; the second step is a ritual by means of which he is elevated to a higher position. The ritual processes of including neophytes in the island society mirror the rites of transition described by Victor Turner. In The Tempest such a rite of transition is Ferdinand’s elevation from prince to become the duke of Milan and Naples, as well as from being unwed to being husband of Miranda. This empowerment of Ferdinand is part of Prospero’s plan, who executes his designs in the form of a transi-

136

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

tional ritual which can be read alongside the structure of ritual liminality, as identified by Arnold Van Gennep. Turner elaborates Van Gennep’s tri-partite ritual structure as follows: “Van Gennep has shown that all rites of passage or ‘transition’ are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation” (Turner 1969: 94). In addition to these terms, Van Gennep “with primary reference to spatial transitions, [also] employed the terms preliminal, liminal, and postliminal” (Turner 1969: 166). Ferdinand as part of Prospero’s schemes has to complete all of these three stages without knowing the intentions behind them. “The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual or group” (Turner 1969: 94). Ariel executes Prospero’s order and separates Ferdinand from the group he came with. Ferdinand wakes up on the shore alone, grieving the assumed death of his father. Ariel refers to the dichotomy of death/life, when he sings to Ferdinand of his father’s, Alonso’s, “sea-change” (Tempest 1.2.401). In Ariel’s song Alonso is also a liminal character in between humanity and nature, who is presented as changing into something “strange” (ibid.). In death the former ruler of Naples “doth [not] fade” but turns into nature, namely “coral” and “pearls” (Tempest 1.2.397-402). The representative of culture and politics is, supposedly, transforming into his symbolic opposite, that is nature, while in reality he and his fellows “three hours since / Were wrecked upon this shore” (Tempest 5.1.135). In the second stage of the ritual, “during the intervening ‘liminal’ period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner 1969: 94f). Turner lists twenty-six dichotomies the liminal subject could be entangled within during this second stage (cf. Turner 1969: 106), yet he adds that the “list could be considerably lengthened if we were to widen the span of liminal situations considered” (Turner 1969: 107). Ferdinand’s liminal situation represents the suspension of several of these dualistic terms. His liminal identity is given the following attributes: “Transition”, “Anonymity”, “Absence of Property”, “Sexual Continence”, “Absence of rank”, “Humility”, and “Total obedience” (Turner 1969: 106).

Liminality

137

All of these liminal attributes apply to Ferdinand. He is, to argue with Victor Turner, a liminal entity: “[l]iminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (Turner 1969: 95). Not only is he in the middle of a transition from being prince towards becoming a duke, but in this situation he lacks the powers and rights of his rank in Milan. Yet he is unaware and not in control of events. Prospero has absolute power over him and Ferdinand is not strong enough to resist. Prospero first takes away his Freedom: “I’ll manacle thy neck and feet together” (Tempest 1.2.462) and mostly addresses him in imperative form. At the same time, Prospero turns Ferdinand into an anonymous person by pretending to know neither his name nor his origin: “How? The best? / What wert thou if the King of Naples heard thee?” (Tempest 1.2.432f) Thus Ferdinand is stripped of his rank and name while being in a state of servility and is reduced to a state of utter weakness, as opposed to the expected vigour and strength of his youth: “My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up” (Tempest 1.2.487). The absence of rank and total obedience are represented by Ferdinand’s having to fulfil lowly chores, e.g. carrying firewood. He “must remove / Some thousand of these logs and pile them up” (Tempest 3.1.16). The nature of this work likens Ferdinand to Caliban, who is usually responsible for this kind of work. Miranda also understands the déclassé nature of Ferdinand’s task. According to him “[m]y sweet mistress / Weeps when she sees me work and says such baseness / Had never like executor” (Tempest 3.1.11-13). Even when working for Prospero on the island, Ferdinand is symbolically tied to the beach that represents the line between life and death, freedom and slavery. Prospero threatens him with an indigestible diet from the very sea where Ferdinand assumes his father to have drowned: “Sea water shalt thou drink; thy food shall be / The fresh-brook mussels” (Tempest 1.2.462-63). An additional element of Ferdinand’s liminal status is his sexual continence: Ferdinand is clearly attracted to Miranda, who is more than sympathetic to his advances. Yet Prospero, considering the goal of his scheme, stops the flirting to increase the mutual attraction between Ferdinand and Miranda. The combination of these attributes is a test of Ferdinand’s character and is intended to lead him to a sense of humility. Prospero himself admits to Ferdinand: “All thy vexations /

138

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Were but my trials of thy love, and thou / hast strangely stood the test” (Tempest 3.3.5-7). “In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others” (Turner 1969: 94f). Ferdinand’s liminal stage ends with his entering a higher state. After a short period of powerlessness and being reduced to the state of a working pauper Prince Ferdinand is granted the hand of Miranda. He leaves his status as a prince and takes on the position of a duke. Additionally, rather than governing one dukedom he is installed as the duke of both Naples and Milan. The liminal ritual represents the power of society, in this specific case Prospero’s power, to break and make subjects, to decrease and elevate their status, to take individuals out of societal structures and to re-install them on a higher level. If applied justly, the hegemonic power expressed through rites of transition by weakening and silencing the subject comes with the promise of increased power after the completion of the ritual. Thus liminality not only refers to the binary opposite states wherein the liminal subject is placed. Liminality is also a recurring signifier of the powers that discursively create these dichotomies and are able to suspend them. Liminality is not always a state the subjects embrace actively. Often liminality is uncalled for. Elsbree Langdon argues that liminality can also be “unchosen, unwanted, unexpected, more notable for the ways it isolates, desolates, at times terrorizes” (Langdon 1991: 20). This kind of liminal state finds its spatial expression in the instalment of the camp, to employ Giorgio Agamben’s concept. The camp is a space where any pre-existing individual rights are put on an indefinite halt; the subject enclosed within the camp loses any rights attached to the various categories he belongs to. Her or his status as a human is re-categorised into the status of an animal and existing rights attached to nationhood are kept on hold. This process of encampment and infinite liminalisation on the beach as a means of subjugation and the reasons for it will be analysed in detail in the chapter on the camp below. However, I would like to refer to two instances of this relation between liminality and power in the context of The Tempest.

Liminality

139

Prospero, with the help of Ariel3 who executes his orders, has the very powers to suspend existing rules and place somebody in a state of liminality. Ferdinand, while initially being clueless about Prospero’s intentions, benefits from these powers. Prospero, however, also uses this power to misuse and suppress individuals, especially Caliban. One of the oldest discussions concerning The Tempest is in regard to the ontological status of Caliban. Is he a human, an animal, or a monster? Ultimately “transgressions of gender, territorial boundaries, sexual preference, family and group norms are transcoded into the ‘grotesque body’” (Stallybrass and White 1986: 24). Caliban is the focus of creation of the grotesque body, he is turned into the scapegoat upon which the various transgressive elements of Prospero’s rule are projected. To Prospero and his peers the ontological status of Caliban does not matter. They construct Caliban as a figure of the third, as somebody that is neither fully human nor inhuman. Prospero describes him as a “freckled whelp, hag-born” and as being “not honoured with / A human shape” (Tempest 1.2.283f). Trinculo also wonders: “What have we here, a man or a fish?” (Tempest 2.2.24f) Additionally, he refers to Calbian as a “dead mooncalf” (Tempest 2.2.109). Stallybrass and White argue that transgression is symbolically transferred to the “grotesque body:” The grotesque body, as Bakhtin makes clear, has its discursive norms too: impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitancy, clamour, decentred or eccentric arrangements, a focus upon gaps, orifices and symbolic filth (what Mary Douglas calls ‘matter out of place’), physical needs and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, materiality and parody. (Stallybrass and White 1986: 23)

Caliban is aligned with these very discursive norms. Miranda calls him a “villain” (Tempest 1.2.310), while the impurity and dirt4 3

Prospero’s dependence on Ariel and Caliban relates to Serres’s description of “The Master”. He says: “In fact, the master is afraid; he lives as if he is hunted; he lies down and hides. He sends out emissaries, sends lieutenants to fight in his place” (Serres 2007: 58).

4

Interestingly the symbol of the dirt undergoes an important symbolic reformulation in the case of Césaire’s A Tempest. Gonzalo’s utopia is here very practically minded. He identifies an abundance of guano on the island, which as he explains “is the name for bird droppings […] and it is by far the best fertilizer known […] if wisely exploited, [we] will be richer than Egypt with its

140

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

are referred to by Prospero who addresses Caliban as “[t]hou earth” (Tempest 1.2.314). The ‘matter out of place’ is also indicated by the description of Caliban as “poisonous”, “filth” (Tempest 1.2.320, 347). The element of the grotesque body Prospero alludes to by his feeling deceived by Caliban, who, according to him, is “capable of all ill” (Tempest 1.2.362). The “pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’” are the reason for Prospero’s feeling tricked by Caliban, who did “seek to violate / The honour” of Miranda (Tempest 1.2.336). That Caliban not only is symbolically constructed in the form of a grotesque body but also exhibits this form quite literally becomes evident when his perspective is regarded. The dirt and filthiness are necessarily a result of the work he has to execute for Prospero, as well as his being “confined into this rock” (Tempest 1.2.362). His enslavement and violent treatment leads to a “focus upon gaps, orifices” and “matter out of place.” Prospero’s punishment leaves Caliban bitten and with “pricks at [his] footfall” (Tempest 2.2.14). Caliban’s body is tortured and wounded which leads to him saying: “Sometime am I / all wound” (Tempest 2.2.12f). The most common perspective recognises this as an act of othering, and as such it is related to the field of power-relations and its effects on the colonising subject, who has the power to create this image of the other in the first place. What is different, though, is the way this othering is being performed. I would argue against a kind of othering that results from binary thinking. Caliban is not just the other in the sense that he represents the complete opposite of Prospero and Miranda. If he were presented throughout the play as a purely oppositional character, as one who is just vile, uncultured, and most imNile” (Césaire 29). The symbol of “dried bird shit” subverts the connotations of dirt and turns it into a signifier of potential power and riches. At the same time this short scene illustrates how an Empire will exploit anything and in doing so is very flexible in its process of categorizing what is and is not ‘dirt’ in the negative sense. The symbol of Guano is also recurring in Coetzee’s Foe where it is employed in a quite ironic way: the island of Robinson is as infertile as his utopian imaginations, yet the potential fertilizer does abound on the rocky shores of the island where “the rocks were white with their [the birds] droppings” (Coetzee 1986: 8). This only goes to support the idea that the single most infertile place is Robinson’s imagination. In consequence the space he creates is as dead and unchanging as himself. The potential fertilizers abound literally and figuratively, yet he is unwilling to initiate any change and progress.

Liminality

141

portantly, inhuman, this would grant him some defining features, he would be conceptualised, and thus be placed clearly in the system of power. Yet the kind of othering to be seen in The Tempest is what I would like to call liminal othering. Caliban is not endowed with a status that clearly defines him as an antagonistic character; rather, he is presented with a status that lacks any clear definition that would allow him to be conceptualised. According to Victor Turner, the “neophyte in liminality must be a tabula rasa, a blank slate, on which is inscribed the knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to the new status” (Turner 1969: 103). Yet, as has been argued, Caliban cannot expect any elevation to a new state. As opposed to Ariel, who is promised freedom, and Ferdinand, who is turned into a Duke, Caliban is held infinitely in this liminal state. He may be a “blank slate” (ibid.), yet it is not wisdom or other positive features that are inscribed on him. He is denied any kind of clear definition and categorisation. Goodman argues: Both Ariel and Caliban are here constrained to behave in particular ways that serve Prospero’s utopian commonwealth, though they themselves are inscribed as Other and thus denied its benefits. Utopias traditionally promise to fulfil the needs of their citizens, but such freedom often comes at the cost of strict conformity and a hierarchical system which does not offer liberation at all. (Goodman 2003: 6f)

This absence has often been read as a problem for the interpretation. As has been argued above, Caliban is described at times as having animalistic features, such as his fish-like smell. At other times, he is indeed described as very human. Caliban’s language can be synoptic, syntactically incoherent, and use the lowest of registers. At the same time, Shakespeare has Caliban recite one of the most beautiful and evocative soliloquies of the whole play: “This isle is full of noises” refers to the diversity on the island. Caliban warns of the misleading nature of first impressions and suggests that one must look beyond the surface. In the end, Caliban might be talking about himself as much as about the island. As opposed to Sebastian and Trinculo, he is aware of the discrepancy between things and their appearance. He is also aware of the pitfalls of signification in general: he has to be, since he is the greatest victim of naming and signification in the play.

142

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

So rather than approaching these seemingly discrepant descriptions as a problem for the analysis of the text, one should read this lack of definition, paradoxically, as the definition itself. Caliban is not the other in the sense that he is a singularly oppositional character to everything that is presented as good and decent. Sebastian and Trinculo take that role: they are the oppositional other with their plans of taking over the island and murdering Prospero to achieve this goal. Both are beyond redemption. They may be presented as entertaining and funny characters, yet they are beyond any help. Caliban’s being turned into the other is more complicated and more nuanced: he is othered by being caught in an everlasting liminal stage. Caliban is being represented as ambiguous rather than with any defining features, which in itself is an act of symbolic violence. Prospero, e.g., describes him “as disproportioned in his manners / As in his shape” (Tempest 5.1.304), and as a “demi-devil” (Tempest 5.1.272), which is an inversion of John of Gaunt’s depiction of England as “demi-paradise” (Richard II 2.1.42) Caliban is rendered powerless by not having a specific status and a related set of rights, moral or legal. His lack of such a clear classification allows Prospero to treat him any way he feels fit. This reading, as has to be stressed, is not apologetic concerning the power Prospero exercises over Caliban. Rather the opposite is the case. The political processes one encounters in Prospero’s treatment of Caliban are, as has been said, not a form of othering in the sense of creating an absolutely oppositional status for Caliban. It is rather that very refusal to grant him an ontological status that is the fundament of Prospero’s (body-)politics. This I would like to read with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine”, as proposed in his study The Open (cf. Agamben 2004), which “is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human” (Agamben 2004: 29) In that respect the anthropological machine resembles the beach-setting’s discursive nature. Both are preoccupied with the space in-between nature/culture, animality/ humanity. Rather than assigning or being assigned to a mutually exclusive category both illustrate the constant fluctuation in-between them both. In the case of the anthropological machine, however, the political nature of this process becomes more obvious. Caliban is located in the margin, yet this is not the kind of marginal space that would allow

Liminality

143

him to create a space of resistance and counter-hegemonic action. That marginality can be read in two ways is illustrated by bell hooks’ following statement: “I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between the marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance – as location of radical openness and possibility” (hooks 1996: 55).5 One dividing line representing the dichotomy animal/human is language, which “instead was presupposed as the identifying characteristic of the human: language” (Agamben 2004: 34). Prospero executes his power in the first place by teaching Caliban his language. To Prospero and Miranda this was an act of transforming an animal to a human: When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. (Tempest 1.2.356-58)

Once Caliban learns to speak and his “purposes” oppose Prospero’s own, he is conceptually turned back into an animal. And Miranda presents him as a member of an essentially “vile race” (ibid.). The anthropological machine allows Prospero to treat Caliban any way he deems fit. He can regard him as a rational human being, as represented by his ability to speak (“Though thou didst learn” [ibid.]) or as a dehumanized being and as nothing more than an automaton mechanicum. Why does Prospero stress the importance of language so much, almost overtly? Having taught Miranda as he did Caliban he might be aware of the fact that language and the culture it represents is not “a natural given already inherent in the psychophysical structure of man […] it is, rather, a historical production which, as such, can be properly assigned neither to man nor to animal” (Agamben 2004: 36). Once Prospero realizes that Caliban attempts to use the language to resist 5

Edward Soja “finds hooks’s radical openness and chosen marginality a powerful antidote to the narrowed and aggressive centrisms and essentialisms that have deflected most modernist movements based on gender, race, and class into hostile and competitive binary battlegrounds of woman versus man, black versus white, labor versus capital” (Soja 1996: 13).

144

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

him, to develop counter-strategies, he quickly denounces language as an elemental trait of being human. He rather falls back on an essentialist view of Caliban’s stemming from a “vile race”. The irony lies namely in the fact that language is the smallest divider between Prospero, who uses language to procure “charms” (Tempest ‘Epilogue’), and Caliban and his mother Sycorax, who use(d) langue “to curse” (Tempest 1.2.365). All three of them try employing language to change the realities on the island. Their charms, curses, spells, and projections are metaphorically shaking up the relation of signifiers and signified: language is being re-written to create something new. It is by means of language that Prospero turns Caliban, in his own perspective, from an animal into a human and back into a beast. This is Prospero’s most powerful curse, representing the liminality of Caliban’s status in regard to the body politics on the shore. Here one finds what Giorgio Agamben terms “the anthropological machine of the moderns. As we have seen, it functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human” (Agamben 2004: 37). In The Tempest this is the perpetual process Caliban is afflicted with, which posits him in an eternal liminal and subdued position. He is caught in a space of exception and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself – only a bare life. (Agamben 2004: 28)

If Caliban, representing the colonised subject, were left with any features defined simply as the purely opposite of Prospero’s, to adopt the colonizing perspective, he would retain the chance to subvert and counter these inscriptions. He might also be able to construct for himself a third space in the sense of Homi Bhabha. This would allow him to gain back power over his own identity construction. But in order to subvert or re-create an existing image, one needs a definition and a status to start from. Prospero exercises his absolute power over Caliban by withholding any status or rank and by keeping him in a liminal state forever. This is not to say that Caliban does not have any identity prior to the one inscribed upon him by Prospero. But this identity is

Liminality

145

erased by the liminal state he is forced into. Caliban is rendered dangerous by a lack of definition and a coherent status. Victor Turner refers to Mary Douglas who “recently argued, that which cannot be clearly classified in terms of traditional criteria of classification, or falls between classificatory boundaries, is almost everywhere regarded as ‘polluting’ and ‘dangerous’” (Turner 1969: 108). This treatment of Caliban allows Prospero to maintain his position as a parasite in Michel Serres’s terms. He maintains his power over Caliban and benefits from his work: He who likes to command can do so, but on one condition: the eyes of the producers, of the energetic and the strong have to be poked out. Those who have energy necessarily cannot have information; thus, those with information can do without energy. [...] The blind man and the paralytic [...] began with symbiosis, but that did not last very long. The parasite came back. (Serres 2007: 37)

The relationship between Prospero and Caliban had indeed begun in the form of this symbiosis illustrated by the allegory of the blind and the paralytic. Prospero (the paralytic) depends on Caliban’s knowledge of the isle, his power and energy. Caliban (the supposedly blind) learns language, representing information, in turn. Yet this educational act is misused by Prospero to foster the parasitic relationship he established. To return to the relation of the beach setting and figures of the third this chapter on liminality in The Tempest will conclude by illustrating the connection between the beach as liminal space and the trickster. One character is especially associated with this transformative space in-between and is likewise calibrated as a go-between, who is neither here nor there. Ariel is a quintessential figure of the third in The Tempest. As early as 1839 Hermann Ulrici aligned the figure of the trickster with Ariel who is “evidently the fly-wheel which, urged on by a higher power, puts the whole machinery in motion” (Ulrici 2010: 199). The isle in The Tempest he locates on the boundary where two opposing planes of perception and two realities meet, namely “the ideal boundary where the airy kingdom of the land of wonders and mystery looks into the reality of every-day life, and conversely is looked at by it” (Ulrici 2010: 190). Whenever the beach is mentioned, with very few exceptions it is related to him: Ariel is the one who causes the tempest, yet saves everybody by bringing them onshore. At

146

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

the same time he also creates the cruel fiction of drowning. He is a trickster connecting all spaces of the play as well as reality and fictions. Prospero calls Ariel his “tricksy spirit” (Tempest 5.1.227), and with Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban Ariel “played the jack” (Tempest 4.1.197f), “jack” being a word the OED lists as “trickster” (Oxford English Dictionary). Ariel is the liminal nexus of everything that happens. Just as the beach setting defies definition, Ariel cannot be characterized. Rather he is defined by an assortment of characteristics that do not allow him to be put into fixed categories; Ariel forces a polythetic classification rather than the application of mutually exclusive attributes. Ariel and the beach are both figures that refuse classification by means of defining classes merely by means of common attributes. Yet such a notion would imply that “a finite sense can be given to the prospect of ‘all’ the ways there are of classifying things, whereas the truth instead is that the description of reality is in principle inexhaustible” (Needham 1975: 349). Where this lack of classification is used to enslave Caliban, Ariel’s mutability is the very source of his power and importance for Prospero. Whereas Caliban is refused any humanity, which is taken as a justification for enslaving him, Ariel’s subordination to Prospero is based on a contract, whose fulfilment will grant Ariel freedom. Not without coincidence does Prospero send Ariel forth “to the elements / be free” (Tempest 5.1.318), since as will be argued below, he is not merely restricted to the element air, but rather is related to all four elements. Where Caliban’s enslavement results from his being categorized as not human, Ariel’s servitude is the result of a deal that includes two parties, Prospero and Ariel. That this deal is backed and enforced by the former powers, and thus still illustrates a clear hierarchy rather than a symmetrical relationship, goes without saying. Caliban and Ariel are both presented as hybrids. But whereas Caliban’s hybridisation between man-animal is of a restricting nature, Ariel encompasses various categories, which allow him endless transformations. Returning to the aspect of spatial realisations it becomes obvious that he is the single character that is at home on land, on the beach and on the sea. His powers seem to grow stronger the further he is away from the land and Prospero, but he is nonetheless powerful in all three spaces. With these maritime attributes he is not unlike the

Liminality

147

witches in Macbeth, as will be shown in the chapter on “Transgression.” He may not be the same in kind, but Ariel has the power to shape-shift deliberately into a being of the sea, as Prospero’s order indicates: “Go make thyself like a nymph o’th’ sea” (Tempest 1.2.302). His name does hint at his relation to one specific element, namely air, yet he is able to incorporate all four elements. Without wanting to downplay the importance of a prevalence of connotations associated with air, one could still argue that air is not his prime defining element. Being the trickster he is, he can take the form of everything, and is as such likened to the beach as a setting. As already quoted above, Zapf argues as follows: “From the beginnings of literature in mythology, the beach has been connoted as a place of transformation and metamorphosis, a place where different elements of water, earth, air and fire meet in interaction of sea, land, wind, and sun as a generative principle of life”. Ariel, the “spirit” (Tempest 1.2.193) himself offers to Prospero his service of using four of the elements, not just the air, “be’t to fly / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / on the curled clouds. To thy strong bidding, task / Ariel and all his quality” (Tempest, 1.2.190-92). This quotation refers to air, water and fire. Another statement by Ariel relates him to earth: immediately after Prospero sets him free Ariel’s initial idea of freedom is to live “[u]nder the blossom that hangs on the bough” (Tempest 5.1.103) and enjoy his freedom more earthbound than airborne. Like the beach, Ariel carries connotations of the four elements and incorporates all of them, without being restricted to a single one. As a trickster, Ariel can take any form; in a way he incorporates the paradox of constructive chaos. His depiction reminds one of John Milton’s presentation of chaos in Paradise Lost. In both cases it takes a higher power to order and structure these multi-elemental entities. It is in God’s and Prospero’s hands to categorise the chaos, to put everything into his, her or its place. Ariel resembles chaos prior to its being formed into a coherent entity. In Paradise Lost this state is described as a wild abyss (The womb of nature and perhaps her grave) Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain

148

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville His dark materials to create more worlds. (PL 2.910-16)

John Milton’s God builds a world out of this multi-elemental chaos, a first order creation. Prospero unleashes chaos to create a second order, to start a second cycle of creation. He sends Ariel, the metaphor of the four elements, to cause havoc, to “burn”, to play with “flame”, to “make his [Neptun’s] bold waves tremble”, to conjure wind and storms alongside “lightning” and “thunderclaps”. This tempestuous destruction is the first act of recreating the order that has been turned upside down when Prospero and Miranda were exiled. Ariel functions as Prospero’s harbinger and agent of revenge. Without Ariel the old hierarchies could not be recreated. As a liminal figure Ariel knows no boundaries, he can incorporate everything and can at least in the form of illusions create everything. The only thing that binds him to Prospero is the contract they sealed. Ariel and the beach are the agents of change that play a major role in the transformation of Prospero’s exile into a re-establishment of the old order. If liminality and transgression are agents of change and transition, their absence represents the end of necessary systemic progress. Where Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a play of constant transformation, Aimé Césaire’s rewrite A Tempest portrays a system without any middle-ground, a society where liminality and transgressive thought have been erased. Thus any possibility for change and utopian imagination is stifled.6 Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest is, according to Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, an archetypical postcolonial text [that] not only ‘rereads’ and ‘rewrites’ Shakespeare’s The Tempest but also expresses one of the most fundamental concerns of postcolonial literature: the effects of place and

6




This is reminiscent of Gonzalo’s utopian imagination in The Tempest. His proclaimed utopia is a negation of being, of life, of movement: eight times Gonzalo uses the negative “no/not/none” in ten lines. Gonzalo’s utopia is an inverted genesis and regressive phantasy, rather than progression: “no traffic” implies no markets, no “magistrates” ends the need for governmental structures, “no letters” implies no schools and universities, and so forth. His utopia is existence nullified, change undone, and a presentation of the chain of being collapsing into nothingness.

Liminality

149

displacement on both the colonizer’s and the colonized’s sense of identity. (Willoquet-Maricondi 1996: 47)

In A Tempest as opposed to The Tempest, as might be expected, the connection between individual and spaces is radically different. Concerning the liminality of characters Césaire inverts the roles of Ariel and Caliban in terms of their relation to liminality. Ariel may still be responsible for bringing on the tempest, in the view of Prospero; however, he is discredited by his ability to emphasise: “It’s always like that with you intellectuals! Who cares! What interests me is not your moods, but your deeds” (Césaire 16). Where Shakespeare’s Ariel argues that his “affections / Would become tender […] were I human” (Tempest 5.1.19) Césaire’s protagonist does have human feelings: “It was a real pity to see that great ship go down, so full of life” (Césaire 16). This Ariel is also a liminal persona, yet longs for an end to this fluent state. His unwillingness to perform Prospero’s orders makes him long for a life of stasis and immobility. The idea of never having been freed from the pine is for Ariel rather positively connoted: “After all, I might have turned into a real tree in the end” (Césaire 16). “What this passage seems to dramatize is the colonizer’s role in alienating the Self from the Place. Prospero’s ‘freeing’ of Ariel is a form of symbolic displacement” (Willoquet-Maricondi 1996: 53). Ariel’s wish to remain caught in the tree also represents his wish for immobility and stasis. While in Shakespeare’s The Tempest it is Caliban who is afflicted with such a symbolic displacement, Césaire places Ariel in this position. Shakespeare’s Ariel is rather powerful and his power springs from his extreme mobility and his connection to various spaces, such as the shore. Césaire’s Ariel, who at one point is also appearing in the manifestation of a “sea-nymph” (Césaire 20), is tired of this very mobility; he rather prefers to turn into a tree “set in the living earth!” (Césaire 16). The beach for him is a space of regression and vanishing rather than a space of empowerment. For Ariel the beach signifies a freedom of action and thought: “Sandy seashore, deep blue sky, cares will vanish…so can I…” (Césaire 21). But whereas the beach in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a space of transformation, the beach in A Tempest is only a reminder of repetition, which means for Ariel endless subordination to Prospero’s rule: “Waters move, the ocean flows, nothing comes and nothing goes…Strange days are upon us…”

150

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

(Césaire 22) The endless beating of the waves on the shore represents for Ariel Prospero’s infinite rule over him. Yet his attribution of the days as “strange” (ibid.) shows that he is aware of other possibilities and better days. Césaire confronts the reader of A Tempest with a rule and a dominance that cannot be changed. The situation is presented as one of a constantly repeating history that in the end leaves Prospero, the coloniser, and Caliban, the colonised, both on the island. Both are caught in an eternal struggle for power, leaving both confined. Freedom will not be achieved for either one. Antonio comes closest to this insight, as a comment on the lack of vision and powerlessness on the part of the leaders around him shows. To express his contempt he uses yet another beach metaphor: “Look at those leeches, those slugs! Wallowing in their slime and their snot: idiots, slime – they’re like beached jellyfish” (Césaire 32). The simile comparing them to beached jellyfish illustrates the displacement of the characters from one domain into another, that is a space where they are not at home, and ultimately powerless. Willoquet-Maricondi identifies these relentless repetitions of history on the island as one of the main questions the play is dealing with, arguing that The ending of the play – the way it departs from its precursor and fails to offer a definite resolution of the conflict between colonizer and colonized – seems to invite us to consider, first, whether a pre-colonial reality is recoverable and, secondly, whether mutual cross-cultural understanding is achievable. (Willoquet-Maricondi 1996: 48)

Yet the play is not merely a presentation of a bleak reality. In A Tempest, Ariel’s liminality still allows him to see the world from different perspectives. In the end he is the only character who ever attempts to present a utopian thought that appropriates Gonzalo’s utopian musings in The Tempest. Whereas Gonzalo’s utopia in The Tempest is directed at an unrecoverable past, Ariel’s utopia in A Tempest is situated in the future: I’ve often had this inspiring, uplifting dream that one day Prospero, you, me, we would all three set out, like brothers, to build a wonderful world, each one contributing his own special thing: patience, vitality, love, willpower too, and rigor, not to mention the dreams without which mankind would perish. (Césaire 27)

Liminality

151

This is the play’s only moment when Ariel tries to establish an alternate vision counteracting the ossified binaries at hand. Ariel’s vision is not tied to Prospero’s and Caliban’s attempts at dominating the isle and each other. Only here does Ariel attempt to take a position of the third, an alternative possibility. But due to the realities at hand such a position cannot last. Prospero denounces Ariel, as mentioned above, as an “intellectual” (Césaire 16). Caliban also feels that Ariel’s utopianism is an illusion: “You don’t understand a thing about Prospero” (Césaire 27). Caliban’s goal is not directed at a commonly shared future, for him it is “better death than humiliation and injustice” (Césaire 28). Ferdinand himself gets an idea of the island’s utopian possibilities, only to denounce them right away: “I might have been Ulysses on Nausicaa’s isle. […] I see I have come ashore on the Barbary Coast […]” (Césaire 23) In his view the shores of the island represent degradation and a lack of culture. Like Ariel he hints at the utopian possibilities by comparing his first impression upon landing on the shore to arriving at Scheria – “Nausicaa’s isle” (ibid.) Yet Prospero and Caliban are stuck in their binary dichotomies and thus nullify Ariel as a figure of the third. According to James Arnold, “Césaire’s sharply defined opposition of Caliban, Nature’s ally and grateful son, to Prospero, the antagonist of Nature, must be seen as another important modification of a basic theme in Shakespeare.” (Arnold 1978: 247) When Prospero mocks “Caliban as a dialectician!” (Césaire 61) he is ignorant of his own role in this dialectic historymaking both are involved in. This, however, does not mean that there are no attempts, besides Ariel’s, to establish a situation of the third. Caliban himself tries to escape Prospero’s dominion by having his name changed. Caliban tells Prospero: “Call me X. That would be best. Like a man without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name has been stolen. Uhuru” (Césaire 20). Caliban tries to turn himself into a figure of the third, opposing the identity assigned to him by Prospero as a means to vanish completely, not only to regain his former identity. But that does not work either, because his negative double and alter-ego is Prospero, and both are caught in a struggle. Césaire presents what Marie Louise Pratt identifies as essential attributes of contact zones: “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or

152

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (Pratt 1992: 6).7 All the characteristics can be found in A Tempest: the relationship between Prospero and Caliban is highly asymmetrical, and everything that could change this situation, such as Prospero’s knowledge and magic, will not be shared. Hence Caliban accuses him that “[a]ll your science you keep for yourself alone, shut up in those big books” (Césaire 17). The situation comes to a standstill when Eshu shortly appears. He is the sole trickster in the play, the only protagonist with the potential to change the situation, if only temporarily. Eshu the African trickster God appears in an appropriation of the masque in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He, the African “God to my friends, the Devil to my enemies” (Césaire 47), bursts in amid the goddesses Juno and Ceres, even if “no one invited me” (Césaire 48). “Eshu is an ambiguous figure who defies binary oppositions. […] He represents African spirituality’s rootedness in experimental reality” (WilloquetMaricondi 1996: 57). Eshu also represents a figure of the third that cannot be silenced, and cannot be ignored. He describes, in song, his ability to “make a mess out of order and vice-versa” (Césaire 49). His creating chaos out of order is represented by his song, which defies formal structures and employs various levels of sexual innuendo and mischief. According to Sam Vasquez, “[t]he semi-deity makes a messout of the order one would typically expect of a recognizable ‘Western’ song. While asserting a complex individual, Césaire introduces an ever fracturing form as analogous to the figure’s attempts to disrupt static ideologies” (Vasquez 2005: 191). The trickster god causes Prospero to step out of his binary world-view, if only for a short time, and makes him realise the following: “Power! Power! Alas! All this will one day fade, like foam, like a cloud, like all the world” (Césaire 50). But this intrusion of a third perspective does not last long. In effect this insight leads only to more violence and hardened positions on Prospero’s side: “There is nothing to understand. There is a punishment to be meted out. I will not compromise with evil” (Césaire 50). Prospero’s way of binary thinking is so hardened that no additional idea or information will lead to a 7

This notion of the beach as a contact zone is especially present in the work of Greg Dening, who equally defines the beach as such a space of exchange (cf. Dening 1978, 2004).

Liminality

153

change in his behaviour or thoughts, or alter his perspective: transgression is impossible. To argue with Michel Serres: “We are buried within ourselves; we send out signals, gestures, and sounds indefinitely and uselessly. No one listens to anyone else. Everyone speaks; no one hears; direct or reciprocal communication is blocked” (Serres 2007: 121). Ariel’s metaphor for this inescapable entanglement in dichotomist thinking is again related to the shore as: “The waves make a waterline…Nothing is, all is becoming” (Césaire 68). In its metaphorical content this statement recalls Michel Foucault’s and Jacques Derrida’s discussion of transgressive thought, as quoted above. While constantly changing, everything remains in its place. The beach serves as an image of utmost immobility, which figures as a barrier nobody can escape from and nobody can get past. Miranda’s question posed to Ferdinand is really a question to all protagonists: “Is our island a prison or a hermitage?” (Césaire 13). In a way their island is both: for one thing the beach represents the colonial dialectic at work, which imprisons Prospero and Caliban. This colonial mindset, which Prospero and Caliban want to answer only with violence, also turns the island into a hermitage. The island as hermitage is a metaphor for an epistemic mindset that excludes other possibilities and new ways to rethink and reshape an existing situation into something different. And the hermits, being Prospero and Caliban, only circle around each other. Their navel-gazing is presented in the play when Caliban lies on a river bank, another binary divider: “Yesterday, even, when I was lying by the stream on my belly lapping at the mussy water […]” (Césaire 18). While “looking in the stagnant pool which stares back at me” he expects to see his mother, yet all he sees is himself. This obsession with his reflection in a pool of water while lying on the shore is reminiscent of Eve’s reaction immediately after her creation. Just like Caliban she falls in love with what she sees in the pool. She recalls: Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love. There I had fixed Mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire Had not a voice thus warned me: “What thou seest, What there thou sees, fair creature, is thyself: With thee it came and goes. (PL 4.463-69)

154

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The obsession of both with their mirror image symbolises the lack of dialogical thought and discourse. Both are so focussed on their self that they mistake it for somebody else. Rather than initiating progress through transgressive discourse they are obsessed with the stagnant image of themselves. Where Shakespeare’s trickster Ariel is elemental in solving the conflicts at hand and essential for the ensuing happy end, Césaire’s tricksters are helpless. The situations at hand cannot be solved, the participants are entangled in eternity. The play presents a lack of ‘border-thinking’ as understood by Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova. Border-thinking is the ability to think from the border, that is to escape an understanding based on a pre-supposed idea of discourses being mutually exclusive. Such a perspective from the middle-ground is required for a progression of any sort: “However, when border thinking does not emerge, the alternatives are competition, assimilation, or resistance without a vision of the future” (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006: 212). As this discussion shows, instead of merely reading liminality in connection with ritual, liminality and the liminal state can be realised in various forms. While the literary beaches and shores, based on their ambiguous nature, can represent liminality, the various types of liminalities correspond with different spatial realisations of literary beaches and shores. “Representing the ‘subjunctive mood’ […] liminality creates a framework within which participants can experiment with the familiar elements of normative social life, reconfiguring them in novel ways and discovering new arrangements and possibilities” (Alexander 1991: 18). At the same time liminality as a means of achieving a utopian state is represented by heterotopian spaces, whereas liminality resulting in dystopian states is represented by spaces such as the camp and its panoptic structures. These spaces are not mutually exclusive, their production and reformulation is fluid and in constant flux as the analysis of the beach as semiosphere will show. The beach in its totality is inscribed by various different realisations of liminality.

Liminality

155

3.3 Peripheral Shorelines: Beaches and Semiospheres Discussing literary spaces in alignment with concepts of liminality and the transgression of discourses incurs the danger of replicating the binary structure upon which the said discourses are established. Merely switching the perspective does not lead to the dissolution of binary constructs. Albrecht Koschorke argues that all theoretical applications that intend to deconstruct hegemonic discourses share this problem: nämlich dass die Umwertung innerhalb von Dichotomien dem dichotomischen Schema niemals vollständig entkommt. (Man könnte sagen, dies ist das strukturalistische Erbe, das der Poststrukturalismus im Namen trägt und nicht zu überwinden vermag.) Wer von Identität auf Alterität umstellt, bleibt, und sei es in einer begrifflich noch so kunstfertigen Weise, im Bannkreis ein negativen Fixierung auf Identität. (Koschorke 2012: 27) [The re-evaluation of in-between existing dichotomies never escapes the said dichotomies. (One could argue that this represents the heritage of structuralism which post-structuralism carries in its name and is unable to overcome.) Whoever switches from identity to alterity, however skilful the terminological rebranding, has to remain in a negative relation to the concept of identity. (my translation)]

Koschorke adds that concepts such as hybridity, heterotopia, and third space are potentially afflicted with such theoretical shortcomings. Important as they are in illustrating the influence and construction of hegemonic thought, all of these approaches still remain grounded in binary thinking. Consequently, Koschorke argues: “Solchen Verhältnissen ist weder mit begrifflichen Dichotomien noch mit einer abstrakten Dekonstruktion solcher Dichotomien beizukommen. Sie erfordern eine Theoriesprache, die nicht in schematischen Gegensätzen, sondern Graduierungen, genauer: in Abweichungsbandbreiten denkt” (Koschorke 2012: 29). [Such concepts cannot be countered, neither with dichotomies nor with abstract deconstructions thereof. What is required is a theoretic language that does not think in schematic oppositions but in graduations, to be more exact in gradual distinctions.] An effective way to read literary spaces in alignment with their discourses as a more fluid and processual system of thought is provided by Yuri Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. This theory of cul-

156

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

tural semiotics describes the symbolic grammar of cultures in a theoretical language that is already spatial. Lotman presents a map of cultures based on the notion of a normative centre and peripheral borderregions that reciprocally encounter and influence each other. The importance of Lotman’s theory lies in its inherent fluidity and gradual nature. Rather than arguing for a highly formalized and algorithmic understanding of these processes Lotman’s concept is able to comprehend and integrate ambiguities and notions of indirection rather than overriding these by fixing them in firmly assigned spots. This focus on gradual changes rather than binary oppositions is related to and can be integrated with Michel Serres’s concept of the parasite, which equally argues against the restrictive nature of dichotomous thinking: Exclusion, inclusion? Thesis or antithesis? The answer is a spectrum, a band, a continuum. We will no longer answer with a simple yes or no to such questions of sides. Inside or outside? Between yes and no, between zero and one, an infinite number of values appear, and thus an infinite number of answers. Mathematicians call this new rigor “fuzzy”: fuzzy subsets, fuzzy topology. [...] While waiting for it, we seemed to be playing piano with boxing gloves on, in our world of stiff logic with our broad concepts. (Serres 2007: 57)

How then, is this concept of the semiosphere helpful for the study of the beach as a discursive space? The semiosphere is not only highly spatial in a literal as well as a figurative way. The concept of the semiosphere effectively combines space and discourse, and helps to understand the beaches and shorelines as such discursive spaces. In addition the concept of the semiospheres consisting of a normative centre and a periphery is not as structuralistic as it may appear at first sight. In particular, Lotman’s later and revised model of the semiosphere, which will be employed here, replaces his earlier model based on oppositional spaces that in turn represented oppositional discourses. The latest version of the semiosphere stresses the existence of gradual changes, permeability, and the importance of communicative failure in the creation of cultures. Ill-communication is not, in his view, a negligible side-effect but an elemental agent. This notion of discursive failure as a fundamental source of discourse in the first place ties in with the aforementioned understanding of noise, as proposed by Michel Serres. In consequence, both Serres and Lotman

Liminality

157

stress the constant changes and transformations of a culture’s semiotic strata. These changes are initiated inside the peripheral boundaries. From there they permeate and permutate towards the semiosphere’s centre. The beaches as discussed in the narratives analysed present these boundaries where existing discourses and identities fray and dissolve. Lotman is as concerned with the semiosphere’s borders as he is with its centre: “But the hottest spots for semioticizing processes are the boundaries of the semiosphere. The notion of the boundary is an ambivalent one: it both separates and unites” (Lotman 1990: 137). This statement relates to the ambiguous notion of the beach, as argued above. It is these boundary-regions of space and discourse which this chapter is concerned with. Beach-spaces illustrate the dynamic nature of discourses and their respective semiospheres. Boguslaw Zylko proposes: “if we follow the semiospheric approach, culture takes the shape of a heterogeneous whole bustling with multiple rhythms of development and transient dominants” (Zylko 2001: 400). After an introduction to Lotman’s concept, this chapter will analyse the shorelines in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as such border areas of cultures. Yuri Lotman understands the semiosphere as follows: semiosphere, which we shall define as the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has prior existence and is in constant interaction with languages. (Lotman 1990: 123)

The semiosphere thus represents the binding space for different symbolic forms of cultural languages. This “constant interaction” with other languages will be read as a transgressive act, which, as I argued in the chapter above, is an essential element of figures of the third and thirdness in general. Initially, Lotman proposes two main units of a semiosphere, the semiosphere’s centre and its periphery. These are not stable and fixed entities. Neither are the cultural ideologies these spheres signify presented as unchangeable, nor is the direction of influence perceived as mono-directional. While the mutual influence of centre and periphery is not symmetrical it certainly is reciprocal. However, the speed and extent of change and transformations is greater at the semiosphere’s boundaries, since here different semiospheres meet, overlap, and mu-

158

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

tually influence each other. The beach, as a contact zone, is an evocative metaphorical representation of this semiotic contact. This contact may be temporary or infinite, but, most importantly, the periphery represents the ever-changing nature of cultures in general and their hegemonic discourse in particular: the boundaries of semiotic spaces “however clearly defined these are in the language’s grammatical selfdescription, in the reality of semiosis are eroded and full of transitional forms” (Lotman 1990: 124). This erosion and the existence of transitional forms represents hegemonic ideologies as what they really are: the endless process of creating meaning and identity as proposed in the discussion of Robinson Crusoe’s two discourses above. Lotman continues to argue that, The space which in one system of coding is a single person, may in another system be the place where several semiotic subjects are in conflict. Because the semiotic space is transacted by numerous boundaries, each message that moves across it must be many times translated and transformed, and the process of generating new information thereby snowballs. (Lotman 1990: 140)

It is on the boundaries that cultures integrate their other. These boundaries are manifold and are created by individual and communal identities that in turn are interrelated but may, however, in certain aspects differ. Robinson Crusoe’s father, e.g., clearly demarcates the boundaries set for his son along the lines of his understanding of the importance of the middle station of life. England’s imperial culture increasingly erodes these firm boundaries by offering incentives for leaving one’s supposedly predetermined state and increasingly introducing a meritocratic model. These individual boundaries are human constructions and change quickly, as illustrated by Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In no time at all the boys trespass the most elemental norms, culminating in the deaths of Simon and Piggy and the intended homicide of Ralph. The dissolution of these cultural boundaries, however, need not be of such a negative nature. Huxley’s ambiguous-utopia Island is mostly concerned with illustrating how Will Farnaby’s psychological boundaries are being slowly eroded by means of reeducation. Step by step, lesson after lesson, his cynicism gives way to the utopian idealism that is required in order to live within the island’s society. It is almost ironic, however, that once his mental defences are completely let down and he has embraced this new utopian way of

Liminality

159

life, the island’s geographical defences are likewise broken down. Once Will Farnaby finishes the Moshka-ritual, Colonel Dipa invades the island’s shores by means of military force. At this point the utopian society, which represents a semiosphere of its own, is facing major transformations as a result of this invasion from its peripheral shores. The capitalistic, revenue-driven outside world overpowers the autarkic, reclusive society to integrate the island’s resources and culture into its own semiotic system, of which the economic domain is the driving power. “The boundary […] is the place where what is ‘external’ is transformed into what is ‘internal’, it is a filtering membrane which so transforms foreign texts that they become part of the semiosphere’s internal semiotics while still retaining their own characteristics” (Lotman 1990: 136f). The more these foreign semiotics are integrated, the closer they move towards a semiosphere’s normative centre. It is important to note, however, that this spatial understanding of the semiosphere with a normative centre and a periphery must not be read as two singular, and internally coherent, structures. Each semiosphere carries in itself other semiospheres, e.g. that of subcultures, that stand in constant semiotic exchange with each other. Even a coherent semiosphere as presented by Thomas More in Utopia that is very concerned with shielding its periphery from the outside world and is based on a highly regulated socio-political system has its own semiotic subgroups. The governmental structure in Utopia ensures that religious freedom is allowed, and one statement by Raphael relates to the structure of the semiospheres in this respect: “There be divers kinds of religions not only in sundry parts of the island, but also in divers places of every city. Some worship for God the sun, some the moon, some other of the planets” (Utopia 106f). As he explains, there are a wide variety of religious groups to be found in Utopia, so that in that respect the community is heterogeneous. If every religion is regarded as a specific sub-set of the semiosphere it is important to point out that the larger political and economic discourses, which are more homogeneous in nature, still contain within them different subcultures. These are not to be found in spatially separated sub-groups, but right next to each other. Robinson Crusoe, who considers himself “absolute lord and lawgiver” (RC 236) on his island, also finds it remarkable to identify

160

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

three different religions in his very own semiosphere: “My man Friday was a Protestant, his father was a pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist” (ibid.). Robinson is very aware that for an effective governance of his utopian community not all discourses need to be aligned. He understands that a certain variety even of opposing sub-cultures is necessary to maintain the whole, and consequently he “allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions” (ibid.). In this chapter I will analyze the shorelines and their respective discourses in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The analysis of the shores in Heart of Darkness shall illustrate the co-existence of various semiospheres and their spatial representation. The spatial representation, however, allows a focus on the boundaries and the discursive processes that occur there: The notion of the boundary separating the internal space of the semiosphere from the external is just a rough primary distinction. In fact, the entire space of the semiosphere is transected by boundaries of different levels, boundaries of different languages and even of texts, and the internal space of each of these sub-semiospheres has its own semiotic ‘I’ which is realized as the relationship of any language, group of texts, separate text to a metastructural space which describes them, always bearing in mind that languages and texts are hierarchically disposed on different levels. These sectional boundaries which run through the semiosphere create a multi-level system. (Lotman 1990: 138)

Lotman adds that while the semiosphere may be composed of “conflicting structures, it none the less is also marked by individuation. Its self-description implies a first person pronoun. One of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation is the boundary, and the boundary can be defined as the outer limit of a first-person form” (Lotman 1990: 131).

Liminality

161

3.4 Semiospheres in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness In Heart of Darkness the connection between space and power is a central element. Entering and leaving these spaces is an essential motif. Already the space of narration, that is the Nelly sitting on the water of the Thames, is placed as much outside the spaces of the narrated events as is the heterodiegetic narrator in relation to the intradiegetic narrator Marlow. Thus the narration itself is intersected with different narratological boundaries: Marlow’s account may be the dominant voice of the novel, but it remains filtered through the extradiegetic narrator’s perception. This creates in a sense a double perspective on the various spaces Heart of Darkness presents: London, the capital of the company, the boats and ships, the different stations in the Congo, the Congo River that connects these and most important for this study the endless river shore.8 These riverbanks I would like to read as an essential element for the gradually changing perception of the semiospheres in the novel. The riverbanks are presented as a highly symbolic space, which Joseph Conrad employs repeatedly. Yannick Le Boulicaut argues: Riverbanks, mud flats, shores, and sandbanks belong to a complex literary topology Conrad was fond of. These territories give birth to a real narrative strategy, the shores of language, of races, cultures, and genders being as important as the literal shores serving descriptive purposes. Conrad was always strongly attracted by basic symbolic patterns, and shores offered the novelist, who had just left a maritime career, a great variety of overlapping images, metaphors, and allegories.” (Le Boulicaut 2005: 233)

In the following, I will analyze the spatial set-up of Heart of Darkness as a cluster of intrinsically related semiospheres all of which are lined up on the shores of the river Thames and the Congo River. Marlow’s river-journey will be read as a voyage towards the periphery of the Company’s semiosphere, which in turn represents a voyage towards the margins of Western consciousness and self-proclaimed rationality and sanity. As this analysis intends to show, the semiospherical ap8




For a comparison of Joseph Conrad’s personal experiences in Africa with those described in Heart of Darkness cf. White and Finston (2010).

162

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

proach undermines a reductionist view of the constructivist dichotomy that is centre-periphery. The rivers and their shores illustrate the relational aspects of the semiosphere’s centre and periphery, in terms of the direction in which goods and weapons flow. This flow, of goods, information, and ultimately culture, is as elemental to the novel’s set-up as is the temporal aspect. Allen MacDuffie finds that “one of the novel’s preoccupations – appropriate for a story set on a river – is tracing the direction in which things flow” (MacDuffie 2009: 83). These things are all constitutive elements of the semiosphere’s culture and symbolic representations thereof. Their exchange heavily affects the various subsemiospheres and influences the respective cultural languages. The journey on the river I will read as the peripheral space where the different languages may not necessarily dissolve but where they become increasingly hard to decipher and understand for Marlow. This deconstruction of space and languages is supported by the Congo River symbolising a fluid and multi-layered understanding of time, which is in itself a proto-modernist depiction of space-time as will be illustrated below. Applying Lotman’s concept to a colonial context requires some terminological clarification, especially when it comes to the relation between normative centre and the semiosphere’s periphery. The strength of Lotman’s concept, especially in relation to colonialism, is its denunciation of the semiosphere’s centre and periphery being two absolute binaries. Rather the opposite, Lotman stresses the transgressive discourse in-between these two extreme points. This allows the perception of an Empire’s production of the other as an ongoing process rather than a given and absolute symbolic production. Lotman’s theory helps to illustrate the diachronic aspect of socio-political and racial propaganda, rather than focussing on the synchronic results thereof. Mary Louise Pratt describes the colonial enterprise as follows: “The (lettered, male, European) eye that held the system could familiarize (‘naturalize’) new sites/sights immediately upon contact, by incorporating them into the language of the system. The differences of the distance factored themselves out of the picture” (Pratt 1992: 31). This description goes hand in hand with Lotman’s understanding of the semiosphere as a cultural system where the normative centre at-

Liminality

163

tempts to incorporate or exclude the differences on the peripheries. At first sight, Heart of Darkness, at least on the textual level, represents the very impossibility of this incorporation of alterity into the existing hegemonic “language of the system” (ibid.). Conrad’s novel illustrates the incommensurable nature of the periphery in relation to the semiosphere’s normative centre. At the same time, Heart of Darkness, while being highly critical of the colonial realities it describes, is nonetheless an essential text in the description and incorporation of these peripheries. The following statement by Pratt yet again hints at Lotman’s understanding of the centre trying to incorporate the periphery: While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis – beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and represent its peripheries and its others continually to itself. Travel writing, among other institutions, is heavily organized in the service of that imperative. So, one might add, is much of European literary history. (Pratt 1992: 6)

While it is true that the colonised is mostly rendered speechless and not given any voice in Heart of Darkness Conrad does provide an inverted gaze from colonised to coloniser. These are only glimpses and are presented from the semiosphere of the local population. Applying the concept of the semiosphere to the spaces in the novel makes it clear that one culture’s periphery is, of course, another culture’s normative centre. Perceived from the Congo the company’s capital is the periphery. While Heart of Darkness presents the Congo as a peripheral space from Marlow’s liminal perspective, it fails to present the Congo as the normative centre under siege from an African’s point of view. There are only glimpses that illustrate the colonial invasion from this perspective: “the outraged law like the bursting shells had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea” (HoD 16). This is an aspect where Lotman’s concept when applied too uncritically falls short and only replicates the rendering mute of the powerless semiosphere. While the strength of the semiosphere lies in its fluid and gradual understanding of nature, its focus on spatial metaphoric still leaves too implicit the direction of cultural space. The theory’s application to texts that do not give the colonised subjects a voice of their own basically mutes and blots out their semi-

164

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

osphere completely. So when analysing the interaction of two seemingly different semiospheres, that is coloniser and colonised, the danger remains of not acknowledging the peripheral semiosphere which is presented not only as a colonialist construction but also an essential part of the colonial semiosphere’s centre. The representation of an Empire’s supposed semiotic weakness and disintegration is ultimately another indicator of its ideological power. A semiosphere requires a powerful voice in the first place to describe its proposed weaknesses. Lotman’s theory is concerned with a semiosphere that is strong enough to either exclude or incorporate the peripheries. It is not as concerned with cultures that are completely taken over, and thus turned speechless, by other cultures. The other perspective remains an implication. When analysing the riverbanks as presented in Heart of Darkness the understanding of the narrated periphery as being actually a semiotic act of the normative centre has to be kept in mind. The centre and the periphery in Heart of Darkness are connected by the descriptions of the rivers, the Thames and the Congo. So before analyzing the various parts of the semiosphere I will explicate the function of the river shores. These introduce a temporal element that allows the narrator to present various temporal layers in one single given space. Comparing the liminality of beaches to the liminality of riverbanks one can find interesting differences concerning the conceptualisation of space and time. At first sight the differences seem quite blatant and unremarkable. Both divide water and land. But whereas the beaches contain a mass of land, upon which the focus of the narrative lies, the riverbanks contain a mass of floating water. Whereas the beach of a new continent or island is presented as a spatial entry point, the locus where people arrive or leave, the river shores are often depicted as temporal rather than spatial contact zones. Where the island narratives present stories that seem to be taken out of time and history, as mentioned above, the river narratives stress historicity and the causal links to the past and future.9 9

Where Joseph Conrad presents the Thames and the Congo River as inherently antagonistic to each other, Neil Gunn, author of Highland River, fuses the concepts into one single space, the Highland River. The journey along the shores of the Highland River is the leading metaphor for individuation and history in the novel of the same title. As in Heart of Darkness the river is a mirror of the subject’s, here Kenn’s, coming of age as well as his remembering his childhood.

Liminality

165

While Robinson Crusoe is cast ashore and has the chance to create something new, the river-journey of Neil Gunn’s protagonist Kenn in Highland River (1991) is presented as a voyage into the past. So are the journeys along the river shores in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Michael Crichton’s rewrite Jurassic Park. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns the river-journey into a coming-of-age transition into adulthood. The voyage along the chocolate river in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a cruise into a twisted childhood paradise.10 American author Kurt Vonnegut uses the combination of the river and time in his novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969) in the form of an implicit metaphor: “And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much of it was mine to keep” (Vonnegut 1969: 9). The island is often presented as a space where history is about to be made, societies founded and new laws and norms implemented and contested. In this sense literary islands are often spaces of utopian possibility and directed at the future. The river and its banks are of an inverted order in their partial occupation with the past and times gone by. The riverbanks contain a space that invites reflection on former societies, acts as a reminder of forgotten laws and rites, and is directed towards the past. The islands contain a space where memories are about to be

10

Roald Dahl’s imagery of the river journey does evoke several of the timehonoured tropes related to the river-journey, such as the fog, the mystery, the alterity: “A steamy mist was rising up now from the great warm chocolate river, and out of the mist there appeared suddenly a most fantastic boat” (Dahl 1964: 81). At a time when most of the world had been discovered and the Empire and its exotic dominions were mostly a nostalgic memory, Dahl transplants such a foreign, mysterious place, with inaccessible vegetation, strange indigenous peoples (the Oompa-Loompas) into the heart of a “great town” (Dahl 1964: 4) in England. This space shares all the characteristics of a utopia, it is spatially secluded, entrance is restricted and requires rites of transition, and ultimately it is also a site of panoptic punishment that punishes and excludes everybody who is deemed unfit to stay there. In the case of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the outcasts are ironically those who are afflicted with negative character-traits that are caused by the factory in the first place: greed, gluttony, and lack of modesty. Yet, ironically, by placing this wild, natural heart at the centre of the factory the cause of the presented social maladies that are presented turned into the remedy. In doing so, the novel picks up an old colonial theme: only those strong enough to resist the temptations of this foreign place are allowed to ultimately govern and dominate it.

166

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

made, the river shores enclose the river in which these memories are contained. Another important spatial distinction reflected in these two oppositional spaces is centred on the question of mobility. Beach narratives present transitions from mobility to extreme immobility. River narratives on the other hand stress the importance of constant mobility, whether through space or time, and as a result, of character and individuality. Depending on the respective understanding of history and the nature of time the rivers and their banks are signifiers of memory. Riverbanks and beaches share, however, their focus on transition and the re-formation of identity. Both, however, employ a different temporal perspective. The riverbanks are transgressive spaces in the sense that they are not only presented as the in-between of two discourses and cultures of the narrative’s present. On the river-shores the past, the present, and the future intertwine and overlap. The transgressive element they add is of a temporal nature. This does not exclude the depiction of contacts between different cultures: however, the focus lies also on the contact with one’s own culture. The river-journeys are often represented as experiences of temporal liminality, where past, present, and possible futures co-exist. Gillian Mary Hanson argues: “The river follows a lateral pattern that represents a form of communication between past and present” (Hanson 2006: 5). She adds, that “[f]rom ancient times to the present day, the river has been used as a symbol for knowledge and history through which we may gain an understanding of our own condition” (Hanson 2006: 11). Conrad’s temporal focus in his river narrative is reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott’s metaphor in Waverley. In Waverly the movement on the river and the backward look on to its banks result in an awareness of progress and a change of time. The political and economical effects of these changes have been traced by Lord Selkirk with great precision and accuracy. But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has nevertheless been gradual; and, like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have been drifted. (Scott 1985: 492)

Liminality

167

Scott’s simile of travelling on the river and measuring the progress with the visual aid of the shore is connected to making sense of history, and is a communal act related to nationhood, rather than individuality. Also, his spatial metaphor presents the reader with a rather linear and straightforward movement that is “gradual” (ibid.) and hence funded on a teleological understanding of history. The journey on the “smooth” river is not per se perceived as threatening to mind and body. History is presented as a consistent and unfaltering voyage along the shore, rather than a transgressive, interruptive process. Joseph Conrad’s depiction of shore-voyages is often quite the opposite. In Heart of Darkness the voyage on the river is directed backwards towards the source of the Congo River. History, civilisation, and mental stability are regressing the closer Marlow comes there. The process is one of de-individuation and regression. The effect is not necessarily an objective presentation but a highly fragmented and subjective account. Yannick Le Boulicaut argues that for border-line writers such as Conrad realism is not the point, shores rather fall under the category of the mythic or allegoric themes as found in The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Inferno. Shores are limits, borders, frontiers to be discovered and conquered, thresholds to new worlds, polysemic fields to be opened by the reader. […] To put it in a nutshell, the shore is a micro-universe of its own, with its own rules, its own rhythm, and its own time. (Le Boulicaut 2005: 233f)

That this ‘micro-universe’ is really a ‘universe of the mind’, that is the result of a mental and constructivist act, is reflected in a statement by Marlow: “The mind of man is capable of everything – because everything is in it, all of the past as well as all of the future” (HoD 36). The riverbanks are perceived as spaces of deep-time that store various layers of history, like the human mind: From the soft primeval mud which inevitably calls for creation and decay to the sand which symbolizes the transformation of the mineral world into its tiniest particles and the measuring of time in ancient civilizations – the tiny grains of sand in an hourglass – Conrad played with contradictory or at least shifting symbolic elements and weaved his typical web of intricate ironic images. (Le Boulicaut 2005: 236)

One of these “ironic images” is the repeated image of the Congo River as a snake. This simile is for one thing certainly based on an

168

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

iconic similarity: “But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land” (HoD 8). And later Marlow repeats: “And the river was there – fascinating – deadly – like a snake” (HoD 10). I would like to combine this image of the river-as-snake with another classical representation of a snake in connection with time, namely that of the Ouroboros. The Ouroboros is the snake that bites its own tail, thus devouring and giving birth to itself at the same time. This image represents the cyclic and ever-repeating structure of history. The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines the self-devouring snake as follows: “The Ouroboros expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation” (Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘Ouroboros’). At the same time the Ouroboros represents the connection of the self with some primordial form of existence.11 The river, however, illustrated as an uncurled snake, replaces a circular and repetitive understanding of time with a linear and teleological understanding of time. For Marlow moving up the Congo River is experienced as going back in time, and the narrator’s depiction of the river is also heavily embedded in this perception of deep-time. Yet these voyages are not strictly linear, but rather present deep time as different layers of time existing at the same moment. Everything Marlow perceives on the shores, or as coming from beyond the riverbanks is related to a past long gone and yet still existing in the present. Additionally, Marlow’s perception of the Congo River and its surroundings is increasingly located in images of the past, and the future hardly comes up. To Marlow, the river’s water looks “as though an ichthyosaurus had been taking a bath of glitter in the great river” (HoD 30). He believes he can smell “primeval mud” 11




The shores of islands might be aptly described by using the metaphor of the Ouroboros: they do have a beginning and an end, yet walking on the island’s beaches is a potentially infinite activity. This spatial loop of infinity is accentuated and repeated by the element of cyclical events. Re-creation follows upon re-creation follows upon re-creation. Deleuze argues: “It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion” (ibid.).

Liminality

169

(HoD 26) and perceives himself to be a wanderer “on prehistoric earth” (HoD 35). This perception stands in strong opposition, e.g., to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. In this novel a group of adventurers is looking for a land hidden on a plateau in South America that was long forgotten and untouched by outside influences. This land represents a semiosphere whose peripheral boundaries for centuries did not allow access. While this space, however, is hidden and securely placed inland, and hardly allows anybody to enter, the riverbanks in Heart of Darkness are presented as permeable, fragmented, and open. Whereas Doyle’s middle-brow version represents the act of entering the lost worlds as a conscious, planned, and cultured decision, Conrad presents an old world that enters the supposedly culturised subject without his or her permission. In Doyle the coloniser enters the space, in Conrad the space enters the coloniser and changes and transports him backwards in time: Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once – somewhere – far away – in another existence perhaps. (HoD 33f)

The shore does not promise safety and security; neither does it provide conceptual stability. “A beach offers no protection; it is nothing but a thin fragile limit, a narrow frontier between (apparent) law and (apparent) disorder, between civilization and wilderness, between reason and witchcraft” (Le Boulicaut 2005: 234). The image of the sand and mud is itself a perfect metaphor for the transitory, shifting, and dangerous nature of the sandy river shores. Steven Connor groups sand and mud into the category “of what may be called quasi-choate matters – among them mist, smoke, dust, snow, sugar, cinders, sleet, soap, syrup, mud, toffee, grit. […] And of all these dishesive matters, sand is surely the most shifting and shifty” (Connor 2010: n.p.). Connor also links sand to the symbolic domain of temporality, which in turn

170

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

fits the river shore’s propensity for temporal representation. Connor argues that “[s]and is not only temporary, it is also the most temporised form of matter. It is the image or allegory of time, shifting, yet unshiftable” (Connor 2010: n.p.).12 Ultimately, the voyage up the river is a voyage back into a semiosphere’s past. Not only do the shorelines represent boundaries between synchronic cultures, more importantly they are temporal boundaries. These, however, as illustrated by Sigmund Freud’s metaphorical illustration of the subconscious, do have their own peripheries, where past and present and future dissolve and are fragmented. These are the temporal storage places of the semiosphere’s normative centre where everything that defies current norms is hidden to be forgotten. The river shores in Heart of Darkness are the spaces where forgetting the sins of the past is rendered impossible. The periphery of the semiosphere brings forth images of times gone by as the river produces bubbles. Marlow recounts: “There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the form of an unrestful and noisy dream remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants and water and silence” (HoD 34). Heart of Darkness is as much about the fear of devolution, a voyage to the past, as it is concerned with the very impossibility of forgetting and suppressing unwanted memories. As quoted above Le Boulicaut argues that shores rather fall into the category of the mythic or allegoric themes as found in The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, The Inferno” (Le Boulicaut 2005: 233f). In its refusal to allow the travelling subject to forget the past, the Congo River actually does resemble in its mythical function one of the rivers 12

In that respect Connor applies what Michel Serres calls a “Logic of the Fuzzy” (Serres 2007: 56). Lawrence R. Schehr, the translator of Serres’s Parasite, explains his translation of flou into fuzzy, as follows: “Flou means ‘nebulous,’ ‘blurry,’ ‘fuzzy,’ ‘cloudy,’ and so forth. I have chosen fuzzy as a translation because of the use of the word in mathematics in the term ‘fuzzy set’” (Schehr in Serres 2007: 56). In that regard the shore is an exemplary fuzzy space combining fog, sand, and clouds. According to Alain Corbin, “the shore [...] became the locus of horror [...] accidents were often caused by the blind progress of a ‘shroud of fog’ that accompanied the tide. It was no longer navigation, but the route along the dangerous and shifting strand, that represented an adventure heavy with symbolism” (Corbin 1994: 246).

Liminality

171

presented by John Milton in Paradise Lost. The river’s name is Lethe, and John Milton describes the river as follows: Farr off from these a slow and silent stream, Lethe the river of oblivion rolls Her wat’ry labyrinth whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets, Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. 586 (PL 2.582-86) And wish and struggle as they pass to reach The tempting stream with one small drop to lose In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe All in one moment, and so near the brink. But fate withstands and to oppose th' attempt Medusa with gorgonian terror guards The ford and of itself the water flies All taste of living wight as once it fled The lip of Tantalus. (PL 2.606-14)

Lethe, “the river of oblivion”, one of hell’s rivers, is presented as a space of utmost paradoxes. Lethe contains a special kind of water that grants everybody who drinks thereof the bliss of oblivion, and thus there is granted a clean start by means of forgetting the past. As such the river itself is not yet, as argued above, a container of history. However, the fallen angels standing on the shores of Lethe, who are only too willing to forget, and who long for the eradication of their own personal painful histories by means of this powerful water, are not allowed to drink thereof. For one thing, this river is defended by “Medusa with gorgonian terror.” Medusa, whom James Dougal Fleming reads as a “metanarrative sign” (Fleming 2002: 1025), and who has the ability to turn human beings into stone, implies an even greater punishment. Those who want to drink to forget are not only unable to do so but they are fixed forever in their woeful state. At the same time, this shore represents the inversion of all the shores analysed so far. Rather than being a space of change, it is the opposite, which might be explained by regarding Milton’s hell as the inverted topographies of Paradise Lost’s cosmos. Secondly, Lethe’s waters are retreating from anybody moving towards the riverbanks intending to drink thereof. The movement of the waters likens the fallen angels to “Tantalus” whose reaching for

172

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

fruit and water is never rewarded with success. Lethe is an ironical space that carries the promise of forgetting, yet the inaccessibility of even “one small drop” at the same time forces memories and history upon its surroundings. While the river’s water is an endless, unceasing stream in constant motion, its riverbanks are spotted with the fallen angels’ memories. Their individual synchronic experiences form a common narrative that is to be the fundament of their newly founded society in hell. This depiction is, of course, grounded in the epistemic background and ideologies. Milton’s cosmos in Paradise Lost is on the one hand filled with nothing less than the history of the world as narrated by Raphael from creation until revelation. God’s being the source and driving force behind all history is beautifully referred to by means of his use of time in his speech: he constantly switches the tenses in his monologue, thus indicating in his transhistorical state that he knows what happened, is happening, and will happen. But this history is not a history of progress on the side of angels and humans. Both are put in place to enact the kind of history God envisions, and don’t change the history at hand. Satan’s revolt is the first act of making history outside of God’s planning. Still, the cosmos remains a highly deterministic one, based on providence and the temporal as represented by the chain of being: the movement is vertical rather than horizontal, since the important mobility is the crossing of liminalities upwards and downwards. Horizontal metaphors, which represent personal history, in a cosmos that is mostly concerned with the afterlife are unimportant. Enduring one’s personal history is regarded as a punishment. The rivers Lethe and the Congo are both spaces that are very much related to their historical pasts and which in addition force the subjects travelling along the river shores to deal with these past times. The shores represent not only the boundaries between cultures but also between different periods of time. The subject’s past unexpectedly reappears, as perceived by Marlow, as “an unrestful and noisy dream” (HoD 34). This alignment of semiotic space and the past narratives that shaped it is one that highly resembles the contemporary image of the subconscious. It comes as no surprise that Sigmund Freud employs in his ‘Rome analogy’ a similar concept of deep space and deep time. Like the rivers his analogy represents a “psycho-archeology” in which he

Liminality

173

asks his readers “to consider Rome as a physical entity, from its earliest beginnings as a fenced settlement on the Palatine through all its many transformations until the present day” (cited in Schorske 2006: 8). Freud continues: Imagine that all the buildings known to the archaeologist and the historian stand simultaneously in the same urban space with their modern survivors or successors: ‘On the Piazza of the Pantheon,’ Freud explains, ‘we should find not only the Pantheon of today as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site also Agrippa's original edifice; indeed, the same piece of ground would support Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built.’ Freud wishes us to struggle with this multifaceted vision of the simultaneity of the non contemporaneous, the Eternal City that is the totality of its undiminished pasts. (With eyes trained by Picasso and the Cubists, it is easier for us to visualize than for him.) (cited in Schorske 2006: 8f)

I would like to argue that Conrad’s representation of the river-shores in Heart of Darkness predates Freud’s imagery as seen in Civilization and Its Discontents as published in 1930. Both grapple with the problem of how to represent linguistically something that cannot be presented at all,13 how to put into a diachronic narrative presentation multi-layered processes of semiotic and hence psychological fragmentation. Conrad’s river shore is the individual analogue to Freud’s presentation of Rome as a cultural consciousness.14 13

This conundrum relates to John Keats’s “On looking into Chapman’s Homer” and Robert Hass’s “Envy of other Peoples Poems.” Both likewise try to articulate something which cannot be articulated. For an extended analysis please see the conclusion.

14

The aforementioned modernist novel Highland River by Neil Gunn, uses, as does Heart of Darkness, this Freudian metaphor in relation to the river and the journey along its shores. It is no coincidence that this spatial metaphor is found right at the middle of the novel, the very point where two perspectives meet: the perspective of Kenn the younger, who is looking towards the future, and Kenn the older, who is looking back at his childhood and youth. The “tongue of land between the streams rose abruptly to a promontory on which the ruins of a broch indicated sufficiently the nature of the structure” (Highland River 118). This historical building whose “room now [was] as intact as it had been at the height of the Roman Empire” (Highland River 118) signifies as a historic building transcending the times, the weight of history itself “pressing down on these overlapping stones” (Gunn, 118). For Kenn this place is still alive, the past is absolutely present: “From more than two thousand years back time’s fingers could touch them in less than an instant”

174

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

This aspect of presenting various layers of time and space influences the novel as a whole and adds to its anti-mimetic nature. The river and its shores being trans-temporal spaces connect the various semiospheres in Heart of Darkness and line them up like beads on a string. Marlow’s narrative is presented as a voyage from the company’s normative centre up the Congo River, towards the final station, Kurtz’s dominion placed on the periphery of, if not outside, the company’s semiosphere. The uncle of the Central Station’s manager describes the intended relation between the various stations as follows: “Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things, a centre for trade of course but also for humanising, improving, instructing” (HoD 32). That this intention results in the opposite is easily discernible when following Marlow towards the semiosphere’s periphery. The novel’s initial semiosphere is a ship lying in the harbour of London, in a moment of ebb. It is here the narrating-I recollects the events of the experiencing-I, and during the quiet evening on the boat ‘Nelly,’ he asks his listeners what it must feel like to leave to go to the periphery of one’s culture. That Marlow is an unusual character is stated early on: he was “a seaman, but he was a wanderer too” (HoD 5). His being a wanderer makes him perceptible to a semiosphere’s different parts and the periphery’s influence. As opposed to Marlow (Highland River 199). Freud’s metaphor is mirrored in Kenn’s perception of this space as time. Kenn, with the analytical gaze of a future physician, has “occasionally had an impression of very nearly visualising the fourth dimension” (Highland River 119). This ability, which he himself denounces as “abstruse and, if one likes, absurd” (Highland River 119) allows Kenn to see this place differently, in its spatial-temporal wholeness. He notices a knoll which “must from very early times have been a religious centre of importance” (Highland River 119). He also realizes that “Druids in the heyday of the Broch may have sacrificed on this very tor-and possibly over a longer period than Christians have broken bread” (Highland River 120). What by means of chronological storytelling has to be told in succession is really to be understood as an overlapping vision of diachronic time presenting itself in a single synchronic spot in Kenn’s mind: “He may well turn round startled as Druid and Christian and Viking draw nigh” (Highland River 120). As in Freud’s extended metaphor Gunn’s depiction of the broch, the tributary and the high knoll is a history of the peoples that build, inhabited and turned this single place into a variety of spaces. In so doing Neil Gunn references Joseph Conrad’s representation of the river shore upon which diachronic histories are merging into a single synchronic temporal-spatial order.

Liminality

175

the average seaman is described as a universe/semiosphere of his own: “Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship – and so is their country – the sea” (ibid.). The narrator paints the average seaman ironically as a quite ignorant character. While facing remote regions and different cultures he remains oblivious to any alterity. The ships are their mobile semiospheres which are shielded against the outside influence, and one “ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same” (ibid.). Even at the spaces where land and sea, as well as different cultures, meet these contacts are met not with interest but with a “slightly disdainful ignorance” (ibid.). The “foreign shores” are of no interest at all, a “casual spree on the shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent” (ibid.). As for Robinson, as illustrated above, single signifiers are sufficient for the creation of whole worldviews, and these worldviews typically reassure the convictions held by their semiosphere’s normative centre. “But Marlow was not typical” (ibid.), he is presented as an exemplary character who is able to open himself to the semiosphere’s alterity. And his experiences in the periphery certainly did change him as indicated by his subsequent statement: “I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me personally” (HoD 7). This allows him, e.g., to empathise with the Romans invading England. Marlow wants his listeners to understand how every normative element of one’s home ceases to exist in such a peripheral space. To exemplify this experience he wonders aloud how a Roman soldier must have felt travelling up the Thames. According to Marlow, the Romans may be colonizing the English Isle, but they are too far away from their semiosphere’s centre for it to be called a home: Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine – what d'ye call 'em? – trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north […] Imagine him here – the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina – and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, – precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. (HoD 6)

Marlow’s short account of the Roman invasion transforms the centre of England into the periphery of the Roman Empire. Marlow

176

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

and his listeners, relaxing in the sunset, are contrasted with a Roman commander, for whom the shorelines of the Thames represent “the very end of the world” (ibid.), where everything that signifies his own semiosphere, e.g. the “Falernian wine” (ibid.), is out of reach. Still, the commander is extending the boundaries of his semiosphere. And the river represents this boundary. Boguslaw Zylko argues in the context of Lotman’s conception of culture that The boundary we are discussing is usually abstract, though sometimes it may exist in real space. For example, the Roman Empire emphasized its difference, which distinguished it from the “barbarian” world. In this case the boundary both connected and divided. The boundary connected because it allowed exchange between both spheres of semiosis; it divided because it stressed the Empire’s difference from the rest of the world. And the rest played the role of disorganized chaotic surroundings, even a kind of anticulture. (Zylko 2001: 388f)

The Roman commander and his crew extend the border; to be precise it is the movement of his ship and its floating along the British riverbanks that signifies the extension of the borders. The commander delivers the norms, represented by “stores, or orders, or what you like”, from the centre of the Roman Empire up to the north of Europe. The Roman is so far north that the periphery feels like a strange place, rather than an elemental part of his Empire: “The periphery of the semiosphere can be described as any place where the codified grammar of the center begins to fray, where it is felt as something foreign and imposed rather than ‘my own’” (Bolton 2006: 326). The commander has to live, as has the “decent young citizen in a toga […] in the midst of the incomprehensible” (HoD 6). The integration of this other, foreign, deadly place with its “incomprehensible” (ibid.) cultural grammar is a slow process and “[t]here's no initiation either into such mysteries” (ibid.). It is ironic of course that Marlow denounces the Romans’ arrival on the English shores as a mere act of “robbery with violence” (HoD 7) lacking, as opposed to the British Empire, an “idea at the back of it” (ibid.) The irony lies not only in the fact that he is a member of the biggest Empire of his time. More ironic is the fact that Marlow frowns upon the invasion of another semiosphere, without even acknowledging the cultural exchange of language that occurred at its periphery. Lotman argues “The boundary […] is the place where what

Liminality

177

is ‘external’ is transformed into what is ‘internal’, it is a filtering membrane which so transforms foreign texts that they become part of the semiosphere’s internal semiotics while still retaining their own characteristics” (Lotman 1990: 136f). The Roman invasion also equals a foreign text that slowly became part of England’s and thus Marlow’s “internal semiotics”. In the very illustration in which Marlow describes the Roman conquest he uses an abundance of words that etymologically originated in Latin: the first sentence quoted above is already rooted in Latin etymology: “Imagine”, “commander”, “trireme”, “in”, “Mediterranean” (ibid.) are words that are based in the Roman Empire’s language. This sentence alone represents the net of power the Roman semiosphere threw out across British culture. According to Jonathan Bolton, Yuri Lotman’s theory suggests “just how difficult it is to throw a net of power over any complex reality; nets of power are nets of meaning, and they will always settle on to the contours of the reality they are trying to contain, themselves becoming misshapen or tangled in the process” (Bolton 2006: 329). While this is certainly true, and there are many examples in Heart of Darkness that attest to this difficulty, the example above shows how extensive and deeply ingrained in the language of a different culture this net of power can become. Even almost 2000 years after the Roman general Aulus Plautius set foot on the English shore, not to mention Julius Caesar’s forays in 55 and 54 BC, the cultural influences, which include not only linguistic influences, do live on. Without intending to turn this analysis into a biographical reading, it is also interesting to note that Joseph Conrad’s language itself illustrates the contact of at least two semiospheres. As Ian Watt points out: Conrad’s English is full of reminders of Polish and French (cf. Watt 1979). I will read the spaces of Heart of Darkness, that is the capital and the stations, as separate semiospheres with distinctive cultures and specific discourses that organize them while remaining related in other aspects. All of the sub-semiospheres are embedded in the main semiosphere, as represented by the Company’s reach. While these semiospheres do represent individual traits, they are still connected and related to each other. If the company’s colonial empire, as presented on the map in the company’s waiting room, represents the macrocosm, the ship upon which Marlow, the managers and crew move towards Kurtz’s station represents a microcosm of this very semiosphere. The framing semiosphere, representing the company, is orga-

178

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

nized into concentric spaces. According to Bolton, “[t]he semiosphere, then, might be more accurately described as being organized around a number of competing centers – it is transacted in all directions by ‘boundary’ regions where codified systems felt to be foreign, at odds with lived experience and ‘local’ semiotic codes” (Bolton 2006: 326).15 Conrad presents such a cultural and spatial construct; its two outermost points incorporate at the same time the absolute centre and the absolute periphery. For the company the normative centre is the capital where it resides: the outermost, peripheral ring comprises Kurtz’s Inner Station, inside of which are embedded the Central and Outer Stations. The Outer Station signified for Marlow “the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience” (HoD 7). Space and discourse culminate in the periphery as represented by the terms “navigation” and “experience.” The periphery had its influence as “it seemed to throw a kind of light” “into my thoughts” (ibid.). In this spatial structure the axis capital-Inner Station can of course be easily inverted. This would turn the Inner Station into the normative centre of the semiosphere governed by Kurtz. Thus the Inner Station is the capital’s spatial double. I would like to argue that the following statement of Lotman’s is true not only for characters but also for spaces: “The most obvious result of unwinding cyclical texts into linear ones is the appearance of character doubles” (Lotman 1990: 154). The spaces in Heart of Darkness are as deliberately sketched out as those in Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The geographical structure resembles a logical and argumentative one. Where the Inner Station is the double of the capital, the Congo River is the double of the Thames and Kurtz’s “wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” (HoD 60) is the double of his “Intended” (HoD 48). Marlow, I would argue, is the figure of the third whose being inbetween allows him to travel along the shores without ever being fully integrated into the respective discourses. He is a character like Robin-

15

The necessity for this rearrangement of connotations concerning the proposed dichotomy center-periphery becomes obvious when regarding socio-spatial processes like suburbanization with the middle-classes moving to their personal utopian spaces on the margins of the metropolitan and/or industrialized areas (cf. Fishman 1987).

Liminality

179

son Crusoe, who is able to balance different discourses at the same time. The centre of the Company’s semiosphere is implicitly located in the city of Brussels, which is never explicitly named. “In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre” (HoD 9). Marlow again employs this image upon his return, when he “found [him]self back at the sepulchral city resenting the sight of the people hurrying through the streets” (HoD 70) who “trespassed upon my thoughts” (ibid.). The metaphor of the sepulchre is of a binary nature: for one thing it signifies life vs. death, present vs. past, outside vs. inside, white vs. black. It serves as a clear divider while hinting at the moral ambiguity of the Company’s enterprise. The description of the town as being dead, where “grass [was] sprouting between the stones” (HoD 10) is likened to the Company’s former employee Fresleven, who was left dead in Africa, with “grass growing through the ribs” (HoD 9). Both town space and body are representatives of culture, yet both are being taken over by nature. When Marlow gazes at the map in the waiting room and announces that he is going “[d]ead in the centre” (HoD 10) this statement is somewhat ambiguous. For one thing this statement expresses a spatial movement towards the centre of the Congo. Additionally, the Company’s office represents a semiosphere that is “dead in the centre” in a figurative sense. The company’s lack of morals and of any regard for humankind is mirrored by the atrocities performed in its name in the Congo. There is no middle ground, and no ambiguity in their hegemonic discourse. The semiosphere’s normative centre has hardened to a degree that allows it to be considered as dead. Thus the office is a metaphorical space that combines a supposedly positive outside with a dead inside, such as the images of the “sepulchre”. The spatial centre of the town, if only in terms of size, are the Company’s offices, which were the “biggest thing in town and everybody I met was full of it” (HoD 9). The office is as the semiosphere’s centre the normative core, the “sanctuary” (HoD 10), where the Company’s power is concentrated. The normative power is illustrated by the two secretaries “guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool” (HoD 11). Their being likened to the Greek Fates relates to the semiosphere in the following way: it is here in the middle of concentric spaces where absolute power is executed. This absoluteness of power is illustrated by the older secretary, who “seemed to know all

180

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

about them and about me too” (HoD 11). The secretary is aware of what the orders mean to those sent to the periphery of the empire. She knows what is going to happen to the company’s new employees. At the centre of this semiosphere is the “sanctuary” (HoD 10), that is the General Manager’s office. This office continues the concentrically represented spheres and has a “heavy writing-desk squatted in the middle” (HoD 10). From here the manager, nameless and powerful, runs the colonies. From this desk orders, rules, and regulations are sent forth towards the periphery. Towards this desk the flow of information, goods, and money is directed, in order to increase and support the power of this normative centre. The importance of incoming information for a semiosphere is illustrated by the anger of one of the company’s employees. The nameless manager requests Kurtz’s papers upon Marlow’s return from the Congo: “He became darkly menacing at last and with much heat argued that the Company had the right to every bit of information about its ‘territories’” (HoD 71). Marlow denies him the papers and the information and thus keeps the peripheries’ borders open and permeable. Increasing information on the peripheries would result in increased control and incorporation into the semiosphere. In addition Marlow’s “visit to the Doctor” (HoD 11) represents the bio-political power of the company. The company tests whether mind and body fit the semiosphere’s normative centre. The first semiosphere I want to analyze in relation to the shore and the capital is the Outer Station. Located at the periphery, the spatial representation of the Outer Station represents the incorporation of this other space into the Company’s system of order. Marlow first realizes: “They were building a railway”. (HoD 15) The railway visualizes the spatial transformation of the African continent according to the image of its new European rulers. As opposed to the treacherous river(s) and the indefinable shores the binary rails are the fastest way to advance the rule of the semiosphere. That this spatial transformation is a mere signifier of power is illustrated by the unnecessary detonations. Marlow observes: “The cliff was not in the way of anything, but this objectless blasting was all the work going on” (HoD 15). At this point the narrative aligns the Company’s behaviour with that of the French “man-of-war anchored off the coast” (HoD 14). This war-ship is presented in a similarly senseless undertaking: “there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. […] Nothing could happen” (HoD 14). To Marlow this attack on the land from the shore

Liminality

181

has a “touch of insanity in the proceeding” (ibid.). Both the senseless explosions caused by the Company’s workers and the French warships illustrate the incommensurable alterity the colonisers encounter at the periphery of their empires. The shore is represented as the dividing line between both the senselessly bombing Europeans and the cultures that lie beyond the shore’s vegetation. By presenting the senseless and irrational behaviour as coming from the waterside Conrad keeps up the time-honoured dichotomy of the dangerous sea as opposed to the cultured land. The warship, as well as the engineers charged with building the railways, should ideally represent hierarchical order and rational thought: the warship is under military rule and is as such a metonymy of the semiosphere’s normative centre. The warship is supposed to translate the hegemonic order into military action, yet the aimless shelling of the invisible “enemies – hidden out of sight somewhere” (HoD 14) is used by Conrad to illustrate how the periphery subverts the supposed ratio of the semiosphere’s normative centre. The builders of the railroad are also supposed to be guided by the sciences that experienced an unprecedented reputation and, more importantly, influence at the turn of the century: geography, geology, and engineering. They represent the homo faber, rational and forwardlooking. The building of the railroads, as seen in the conquest of the American West, is idealized as the epitome of this rational endeavour of man to dominate nature. It is a task combining various parts of society, from the worker to the engineer and the manager. The builders of the railroad are a community that stands in the symbolic tradition of the ship, representing all of society, combining space and mobility, moving towards a clear teleological goal. Yet, in the case of Heart of Darkness such a goal is nowhere discernible. The senseless blasting of the landscape illustrates the misdirection of all the powers at hand. This enterprise is a process of stagnated mobility. The group of builders is anything but a machine where all the parts work together in perfect unity to create a greater whole. Rather, the builders are metaphorically represented by an “undersized railway truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal” (HoD 15). The machine, a signifier of order, structure, and progress, is turned over. Lying on its back it represents a helpless bug

182

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

frantically moving its feet in the air, caught in an infinite attempt at mobility in a position that represents the very opposite thereof. This image anticipates Kafka’s Verwandlung, signifying the shock of a culture’s insight into its own shortcomings and grotesque misperception of reality, as well as its misplacement in a time and space where it does not belong. All the agents of rationality, as represented by the military and the sciences, are turned over and rendered speechless and powerless. The only two characters able to understand this are outsiders: Marlow and the Swedish Captain (cf. HoD 14) may be affiliated to the company, but they are not integral parts of the Company’s semiosphere. In addition the building of the railway contains temporal imagery and picks up the temporal transgression of the voyage along the river-shores. It signifies a progression or regression in time. The extension of empire by means of the railroad is not merely of a spatial nature. In the historical context the extension of the web of rails across the African continent goes hand in hand with an extension of the world standard time as implemented by the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884. According to Adam Barrows, this “can be understood as a signal moment in the history of modernity” (Barrows 2010: 262). He elaborates that In the same year that the Berlin Conference set the protocols for the division of the African continent among the imperial powers, delegates to the Prime Meridian Conference established a seamless spacetime map that would wed the objectivity of purely scientific expediency to the Berlin Conference’s imperialistic bravado. The standard time system provided a global grid whereby every spatial point on the map could be temporarily fixed in relation to England […]. (Barrows 2010: 262)

Thus every spatial extension of Empire on the periphery fixes London, or Greenwich to be precise, at the spatio-temporal centre of the semiosphere. Consequently, it is not only space that is colonized by the notion and understanding of time itself. Trains, according to Barrows, were one of the most powerful means of extending the web of colonial space, time, and power. “World standard time was driven by the railways, which were, in the 1880s, reaching into the interiors of Africa and South America” (Barrows 2010: 265). That Conrad is not concerned with the successful implementation of this specific grid of heg-

Liminality

183

emonic rule has been discussed above. Rather he presents a setting where space and time as linear indicators of order and succession are dissolving and fragmented into overlapping spatio-temporal layers that inform each other. The Outer Station, like the other semiospheres, is aligned with one character that represents its adherence to values, norms or the lack thereof. In the case of the Outer Station the character that counters the periphery’s irrationality and presents himself as the outpost of progress is the “Company’s chief accountant” (HoD 18). This character represents the Company’s normative rule. His “unexpected elegance” (ibid.) and meticulous appearance is a counterpoint in a place where “everything was in a muddle – heads, things, buildings” (ibid.). The accountant’s placement on the periphery turns him from a rather bland individual living a “sedentary desk-life” (ibid.) into an extravagant and powerful person. While this figure of the bookkeeping clerk is often, especially in middlebrow-literature,16 presented as the epitome of boredom and spatial and mental immobility, his living on the periphery turns him into a “sort of vision” (HoD 18). His bookkeeping turns from a chore into an activity that is elemental for the progress of empire and the maintenance of sanity. The accountant is presented as a modern day Robinson Crusoe, with his parasol, his attempt to educate the natives rather than taking on their wisdom, and most importantly with his rationalising of colonial power and criminal behaviour by his excessive list making. Both Robinson and the accountant are colonisers that replace moral thinking with empirical and positivist thinking. The next space located further up on the periphery of the Company’s reach is the Central Station: Marlow informs his listeners that On the fifteenth day I came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into the Central Station. It was on a back water surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side, and on the three others inclosed by a crazy fence of rushes. A neglected gap was all the gate it had, and the first glance at the place was enough to let you see the flabby devil was running that show. (HoD 20f)

16

See Jonathan Wild: The Rise of the Office-Clerk in Literary Culture: 18801939 (2006).

184

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The Central Station is a space whose only entrance is via a “pretty border of smelly mud” (ibid.) On all the other three sides the station is shielded from the outside by nature, likened to a “crazy fence of rushes” (ibid.). Nature is increasingly taking over culture; it is not mainly the manager’s organisational skills or human work that defines the place. Rather it is nature that is closing in from all sides. Towards the periphery of the company’s semiosphere it is not order or cleanliness (as represented by the accountant) that is of main importance. On the periphery it is closure and stability that is imperative. And the manager of the Central Station is just that: the manager “had no genius for organising, for initiative, or for order even” (HoD 22). He is not somebody concerned with change and creation, rather the opposite: his strength and responsibility are the stabilization of the semiosphere, the shielding of the system from the outside. He is the perfect representative of the normative centre of the company’s semiosphere on the mental and physical level. The manager does not have the capacity to create something new, nor the capacity for critical thinking. He is constantly confirming the semiosphere’s conceptual core: “[h]e originated nothing, he could keep the routine going – that’s all” (HoD 22). This discursive closure is also illustrated by his physical power: “he was never ill. […] Triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself” (HoD 22). That the company’s normative centre is dead has been argued above, in respect to the image of the capital as a “whited sepulchre”. The manager likewise represents a surface without content, he is all sign, the signified is emptied out, and thus resists alteration. At one point a tropical disease “had laid low almost every ‘agent’ in the station” (ibid.) and his sole response to their bodies falling prey to the tropical virus is: “Men who come out here should have no entrails” (ibid.). He represents an impermeable sphere in itself, and whatever enters this closed system does not change anything in its constitution. In a reversal of perspective Marlow represents the company’s station as a spatial intruder and aligns the manager with the surroundings. The manager’s health is never threatened by the surroundings: he is as unaffected by the outside as is the outside by him. Their mutual exclusion is absolute; both are presented as binary opposites that stand in opposition to each other, at the same time they require each other to signify elemental parts of their identity. Marlow describes the surroundings as follows: “And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding

Liminality

185

this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion” (HoD 23). The station on the shore may represent an intermediate, but the manager and the “outside” are the defining signifiers. The manager needs the “invincible” outside, without which he would be nothing or nobody. As stated by Marlow the manager has no education, learning, creativity. The only thing that sets him apart is his stability of health and mind. The manager is presented as one of the few who can maintain some sort of sanity in the face of the transgression occurring on the semiosphere’s periphery. There is nothing to be done except withstanding the outside: after all “the only thing that ever came to them was disease” (HoD 24). As an empty sign, without “entrails”, without ambiguity, he is unaffected by the liminality in this place. For Marlow this transgressive zone is impossible to categorise: “I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life”. (HoD 23) When Marlow asks “Could we handle that dumb thing, or would it handle us?” (HoD 26) he is oblivious of the reciprocal relationship between the place and its visitors. From this station Marlow has to move on and take a steamer up the river. However, “my steamer was at the bottom of the river” (HoD 21). Marlow has to rebuild this steamer, and to do so he is forced to recover the steamer’s parts from the river. “As a matter of fact, I had plenty to do in fishing my command out of the river. I had to set about it the very next day. That, and the repairs when I brought the pieces to the station, took some months” (HoD 21). In all these months Marlow is sleeping on the ship he rebuilds, which itself is located on the riverbank. Marlow deliberately stays at the margin of the Central Station and is not interested in winning the trust of the man living therein. His placing himself on the shore quickly marks him as an outsider, but at the same time it allows Marlow to observe while maintaining his own identity. The steamer, once it is ready to go, is a mobile semiosphere, whose hierarchical structure is vertical rather than horizontal. The map in the company’s office represents a connection of power from the hegemonic and ruling centre, that is the capital in the North, towards its subjugated peripheries, that is the Congo in the South. The steamboat re-builds this power structure on a vertical axis, namely top-down. Marlow as the captain is standing on top and gives the orders, while the lower the ranks, the lower the subjects are placed on

186

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

the ship. Towards the novel’s middle Marlow explicitly describes the set-up of the steamboat, which was exactly like a decked scow. On the deck, there were two little teakwood houses, with doors and windows. The boiler was in the foreend, and the machinery right astern. Over the whole there was a light roof, supported on stanchions. The funnel projected through that roof, and in front of the funnel a small cabin built of light planks served for a pilot-house. It contained a couch, two camp-stools, a loaded MartiniHenry leaning in one corner, a tiny table, and the steering-wheel. (HoD 44)

Marlow “had the Manager on board and three or four pilgrims with their staves – all complete” (HoD 35). The fireman, “an improved specimen […] was there below me” (HoD 36). The “cannibals” (HoD 34) they enlisted are placed at the bottom, and at times on the outside of the boat. Whenever the steamer is stuck on the ground, they are sent off it into the muddy banks where they are “splashing around and pushing” (ibid.). The assertion of this top-down power structure is supported not only by the position of the pilothouse, but also by its containing a “loaded Martini-Henry leaning in the corner” (HoD 44). The power exercised by Marlow is backed up the possibility to punish wrong behaviour or intrusion with death. In this way the boat’s spatial set-up not only represents the power structures of the company’s semiosphere. More importantly this outline replicates the racial and racist taxonomy of the times. The genealogical taxonomy as proposed by Carl von Linné and later by Charles Darwin is aligned with the racist representation of the steamer’s spatial set-up: the white, lettered male on top is presented as the pinnacle of evolution and civilisation, endowed with steering the “ship of progress”, that is society, towards the future. That this perspective is partially held by Marlow is illustrated, e.g., by his description of the fireman on the steamboat. To Marlow the fireman presents himself as nothing but a trained, and thus useful, animal, a dog that can do tricks, without knowing what they mean. According to Marlow “to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs” (HoD 36). The spatial representation of the steamer as a miniature semiosphere that actively transports and pushes the company’s norms and hegemonic rules to the peripheries is supported by the spatial align-

Liminality

187

ment of inside versus outside. The further the ship travels up the river, the farther away it travels from the centre, the more important becomes its function as a normative centre. Suddenly everything on its outside is perceived as peripheral: “However some elements are always set outside. If the inner world reproduces the cosmos, then what is on the other side represents chaos, the anti-world, unstructured chthonic space, inhabited by monsters, infernal powers or people associated with them” (Lotman 1990: 140). The “cosmos”, being the company’s rule, is opposed by “chaos”, the outside world beyond the semiosphere’s dominion. And this outside is to be found along the shores of the Congo River. It is there where the perceived chaos is literally and figuratively attacking the steamboat. Unlike Michel Foucault’s statement that the “ship is the heterotopia par exellence” (Foucault 1986: 27), the steamboat in Heart of Darkness is the very signifier of the hegemonic place. It is the outside, the endless shore, that turns into an ‘other place’, illegible for the passengers on the boat. Whereas the boat is a set of clearly hierarchical and defined spaces, the outside is unwritten. Marlow remarks about his voyage towards the station from where he is supposed to sail on with a boat under his command, that [w]atching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, 'Come and find out.' This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. (HoD 13)

The description of the coast as “featureless, as if still in the making” (ibid.) illustrates the semiosphere’s periphery, which is also not yet inscribed with meaning and signification. That this view only holds true from one perspective, namely that from the inside-out, from the coloniser to the colonised, goes without saying. The place furthest away from the semiosphere’s centre is the Inner Station, a station that is run by Kurtz. This is a semiosphere on the brink of falling apart. The concept of boundaries is helpful when it comes to analysing Marlow’s river cruise along the banks of the Congo towards the Inner Station. Two systems encounter each other and are separated only by the endless shrubbery on the shore. The riverbank serves as a membrane that occasionally allows sound, light, arrows, or people to permeate in both directions. The boundary, which

188

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

is supported by impenetrable fog, is represented as firm. It leads Marlow and his crew to assume what lies beyond, rather than allowing them to confirm their assumptions. Both semiospheres do slightly overlap, but hardly exchange. Yet the closer Marlow comes to Kurtz’s station the more fractured and open the boundaries appear. Suddenly they break apart and Marlow and his crew are being attacked. The attack on the steamer, ordered by Kurtz himself as it later turns out, represents Kurtz trying to shield his semiosphere, his rule, from any outside influences. Marlow himself, all the time, is more of a mediator than a member of any of those spheres. He is in the middle while working for the company he does not support their politics and (lack of) values. At the same time, he is not a supporter of Kurtz and his ruthless regime. He is a wanderer between both worlds; his lack of attachment allows him to survive, whereas everybody around him dies. Shortly before the description of Kurtz’s building Marlow elaborates that Kurtz “had been absent for several months – getting himself adored, I suppose – ” (HoD 57). Kurtz’s deification and apotheosis represents the extent of a closed semiosphere and a dead discourse. Kurtz is not interested at all in any change to the status quo, his being elevated to the level of a god being the ultimate closure of any discourse and related identity-politics. Where discourses in the contact zone are discussions, negotiations, constant re-elaborations of meaning and signification, the individual deified as a god is free from any such discursive influences of opposing ideas, concepts and symbolic constructions. Kurtz as a god is perfectly encapsulated in his own semantic sphere, his word is law, his laws produce the kind of reality he wishes for. To maintain this reality, to hinder any semantic spoilage from the outside entering in, the more he needs to talk. His voice has to drown out any other existing discourses. His spatial contact zone, the camp on the shore, where the managers of the company are constantly arriving with the rules and regulations of this institution, which are, after all, very much opposed to Kurtz’s semiosphere, he leaves and moves towards the inner country, far away from any outside influence. And any outsider entering the inner country and his political and semiotic kingdom is not allowed to speak. Kurtz drowns the visitors in streams of words, as the Russian attests. Heart of Darkness can be read as a tale of de-evolution on side of the colonisers, and, as so of-

Liminality

189

ten, as a tale warning of the horrors within. Yet what brings out these horrors, what opens Pandora’s Box is this absolute self-centredness, the obsession with self. What can be found in the very heart of darkness is not a space on the periphery, it is here that periphery and centre conflate and merge. The heart of darkness is the centre of an empire, whose hegemonic power violently silenced any discourses on its margins and at its centres. What allows Marlow to get this far, to bring Kurtz back on to the ship, is the fact that he is a figure of the third himself, he is the outsider constantly living on the border of existence. The strongest metaphor for the stagnated discourse of Kurtz’s semiosphere is presented by a central space. This space is Kurtz’s encampment close to the shore. Marlow observes the building from the distance and is puzzled by some of its elements: Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way. (HoD 57)

The stakes surrounding Kurtz’s house are covered with severed heads, of which only one is facing outwards. The remaining heads direct their gaze constantly at Kurtz’s house and at him. Whenever Kurtz looks outside he is gazing into the dead eyes of those he has killed and what he perceives are the symbols that represent his power over life and death. The heads are in consequence not a means of deterring and warning outsiders intending to come in. Their inversed gaze represents the self-obsessed nature of the man who is the normative centre of the Outer Station, a man who has the skulls project back his power to “exterminate all the brutes” (HoD 50). The result is a speechlessness and inability to communicate the respective semiospheres. Stephen Skinner, who analyzes elements of apophasis in Heart of Darkness, argues that these texts “seek to stimulate the imagination to move beyond the limits of text, themselves capturing the imaginative power of an effort to encapsulate the

190

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

reflexive frustration of limited language, while drawing readers through their limits and towards the very thing that cannot be expressed” (Skinner 2010: 104).

4 Transgression The tide was coming in and there was only a narrow strip of firm beach between the water and the white, stumbling stuff near the palm terrace. (William Golding, Lord of the Flies: 76) Transgression: The spread of the sea over the land, as evidenced by the deposition of unconformable marine sediments. (“Transgression”, Oxford English Dictionary)

The term transgression, which is derived from the Latin noun “transgressio”, implies the crossing of a border or a limit. In a geological context the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as “[t]he spread of the sea over the land, as evidenced by the deposition of unconformable marine sediments” (OED). In its etymological sense, the OED defines it as “[t]he action of passing over or beyond”. Interestingly the notion of transgression quickly changed from a neutral term, indicating this very “passing over or beyond” (ibid.) into a term with negative connotations: “The action of transgressing or passing beyond the bounds of legality or right; a violation of law, duty, or command; disobedience, trespass, sin” (ibid.). This definition of the term transgression indicates how the border is related to various meanings concerning norms, morals, and laws, and thus to hegemonic discourses. Transgression, in general, refers to stepping over and breaking given laws and norms. The transgressive act is understood as an act against the existing hegemonic order that produced in the first place the norm or rule that is metaphorized in the form of the literary border. As already argued, beaches and shorelines are not merely markers of binary oppositions; this setting achieves more than the mere division of land and sea and the figurative marking of the dichotomous discourses such as culture/nature, life/death, inside/outside, citizen/stranger. This setting represents rather trichotomous boundaries that beg to be transgressed. The inevitable trespassing of these boundaries forms the fundamental telos of these narratives. As the shorelines are trespassed and thus the related norms violated, the narrative is set

192

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

in motion in the first place and transgression is initiated. At the same time the act of trespassing makes the narrative possible in the first place, while the related transgression sets off a number of ensuing events. The trespassing of shorelines can be of a literal or a figurative nature. The former act of trespassing is directly related to the shore: its being crossed in either direction violates existing rules and expectations. In Macbeth the king of Norway is invading Scotland as are the English at the end of the play, Satan in Paradise Lost sneaks into paradise, Robinson Crusoe leaves his home shore and thus violates his father’s expectations, Colonel Dipa in Huxley’s Island invades the utopian isle with military force. Shores are also sites of figurative trespassing related to the crossing of norms: on the shore Robinson Crusoe reads the natives’ actions as cannibalistic acts and in turn he kills many of their community. In Lord of the Flies the beach is the site of Piggy’s and Simon’s murders and the creation of a tyranny. McEwan’s On Chesil Beach turns the beach into a setting where a young couple on their honeymoon is unable to escape the entanglements of a society whose norms concerning sexual behaviour are quickly changing. However, the borders are not only lines to be trespassed or transgressed. The border is a space of itself, a space in-between different discourses. As such the border-space is as elemental in creating these discourses as the hegemonic discourses are in respect to border thinking. Beaches and shores as literary space as well as conceptual metaphor allow for such an additional and elemental perspective. According to Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova this perspective is essential for re-arranging the epistemologies of space and discourses. They argue that the ‘problem’ of the twenty-first century will be not so much to study the life and deeds of the borders, but to think from the borders themselves. That is, dwelling in the borders means re-writing geographic frontiers, imperial/colonial subjectivities and territorial epistemologies. (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006: 214)

If borderlines are more than binary markers, any argument that assumes that the act of trespassing merely supports the binaries has to fall short. If borderlines are spaces of the third, then the effects of the transgressive discourse might reach beyond the conventionally dualistic nature of Western discourse. The beach could then be described as

Transgression

193

“the in-between […] the borderland is not a discreet entity separating two discreet categories; it binds the categories and transforms them analytically in a move that might be described as queering” (Hayes, Higonnet, and Spurlin 2010: 6). In relation to beaches and shores the transgressive subject is more than a protagonist who transgresses once or twice. The transgressive subjects that abound in the cultural imagination of this specific site are the ones that systematically refuse categorisation, and like the shore they evade clear definitions. In their presentation and function they are constantly changing. It is this very understanding of transgression which will inform the following discussion. Rather than merely explicating singular acts of transgression, acts that only confirm the existing status quo, the transgressive subjects on the shore are repeatedly transgressing and thus undermining existing dichotomies rather than confirming them. These subjects are the figures of the third that make visible the middle ground between the binary antipodes. In doing so the transgressive discourse stands in opposition to a history of logical thought which C.W. Spinks Jr summarizes as follows: So from early Greek thought to symbolic logic, from linguistic slot theory to phonetic differences, from information theory to computer codes, from Cartesian and Freudian models of mentality to brain architectonics, and from Saussure to Pierce as the founders of modern semiotics, the binary construct runs like a spoor, marking the trail of the Sign, or at least the trail of the Signer. (Spinks Jr 1991: 55)

To undermine “the binary construct” transgression must not be understood as a singular act of trespassing an existing norm. It is rather an infinitely repeated movement which fulfils discursive and semiotic functions in the narrative construction. In the following analysis I attempt to explain Michel Foucault’s theory of transgression by applying it in the first instance to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. Golding’s construction of the island in general and the beach in particular results in a setting that is for one thing very symbolic. Golding also places the characters in a space that is highly liminal in its spatiality and in regard to the attached discourses. In “Preface to Transgression” Michel Foucault aims to define the nature of the transgressive act. His approach, however, while hardly considering real spaces in relation to transgression, is still deeply

194

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

grounded in spatial metaphors. One of these metaphors is the shore, representing a space of dissolving and transgressive discourse. Foucault uses the shore as an implicit metaphor in his illustration of how the concept of sexuality has arrived at its limits, rather than being freed by discourses of sexual liberation. He argues that sexuality has been carried “to the limit of language, since it traces that line of foam showing just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence” (Foucault 1977: 30). This “limit of language”, the impossibility of speaking “upon the sands of silence”, is at the very heart of his consideration of the (anti-) structure of transgressive acts. In this context Foucault defines transgression as follows: Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line that it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy; trans-gression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable. But this relationship is considerably more complex: these elements are situated in an uncertain context, in certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them. (Foucault 1997: 34)

Words such as “limit”, “narrow zone”, “passage”, “trajectory”, “lines”, and “horizon” signify by means of spatial metaphors social actions, which are themselves incorporated and produced by cultural discourse. Foucault, importantly, identifies the transgressive act not merely as a specific movement across a boundary, or a specific act of breaking an existing norm or law. According to his understanding, transgression includes repeated acts of trespassing, which reconfigures the limits at hand.1 The “trajectory” may start at its “origin”, yet it does not cross the line. Rather it is located “in the line”. In this sense transgression occurs inside the liminal space. Foucault’s idea of transgression is in itself a counter-argument to Hegeli-

























































1

Michel de Certeau argues in this respect: “Boundaries are transportable limits and transportations of limits, they are also metaphorai.” (de Certeau 1984: 129) The shore as a literary representation is consequently not the limit itself. By means of transgressive discourses various representations of limits are produced, deconstructed, and intersected. The boundary is thus a container and the discursive space where limits are produced.

Transgression

195

an or Marxist dialectics, since he disallows transgression the act of discursive synthesis. For Foucault transgression is the constant oscillation in between: it “incessantly crosses and recrosses” the line and has to return to the “uncrossable”. The crossing of the line in the same move confirms and puts into question its validity. The “uncertain context” may be interpreted as the symbolic domain of the third in between the dichotomies of any systems, such as “inside/outside”, “I/other”, “good/evil”. Any attempt to fixate or ossify these uncertainties, that is to keep the dichotomies in their semantic place, has to remain futile: they are “immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them” (ibid.). William Golding’s Lord of the Flies proves a helpful literary example to which the Foucauldian statements above may be applied. One of the main characters who is entangled in the island’s liminal set-up is Ralph. Ralph is not only one of the main protagonists and the initial leader of the stranded and outcast group of boys. More significantly he represents a liminal figure. He is deeply concerned with what is happening to the group on the island: while he contemplates the exceptional existence into which they have been cast he is crossing and re-crossing various concepts of explanation but is never able to fix his observations into a coherent worldview. Ralph is constantly torn between his wish to be a responsible leader and being a kid. This is illustrated when he joins the rest of the group in mocking Piggy, while his position as a leader would require him to stay neutral and to defend him. Secondly, Ralph is unable to make and enforce final decisions. After his election as the group’s first leader he tries to reconcile the existing conflicts on the island by means of dialectical thinking. The attempted synthesis, however, repeatedly escapes him. This becomes obvious after the boys’ first major crisis when Ralph is preparing a meeting. Golding emphasises the situation by metaphorically incorporating into it the transgression of the sea: “The tide was coming in and there was only a narrow strip of firm beach between the water and the white, stumbling stuff near the palm terrace” (LotF 76). As Ralph walks on “the firm strip [because] he needed to think” (ibid.), Golding presents him in a moment of transgressive thinking. He shows Ralph in his attempt to reconcile the two oppositional groups and their respective ideologies that have formed on the island. Yet Ralph is unable to settle on a single thought. In Foucault’s sense of transgression

196

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

he is constantly forced to send his thoughts back and forth and is unable to reach a conclusion. Whenever he closes in on a definition of their problem and feels he is able to articulate his train of thought, it is interrupted: “There must be no mistake about this assembly, no chasing imaginary . . . . He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning he tried again” (ibid.). The breaking-up of his thought process is indicated by an ellipsis. This dissolution of coherent thought recurs on other occasions as well: “Then, at the moment of greatest passion and conviction, that curtain flapped in his head and he forgot what he had been driving at”. (LotF 163) Also at the end, being hunted by Jack’s group, Ralph has problems in focussing: “Most, he was beginning to dread the curtain that might waver in his brain, blacking out the sense of danger, making a simpleton of him” (LotF 198). Ralph is, of course, aware of his problems with taking decisions, but he is also aware that he is right in the process of transforming. This, however, does not remedy the problems he has with finding a solution to the situation he and his peers are in. In Parages Jacques Derrida not only takes up and furthers Michel Foucault’s thought, he also employs the same spatial imagery related to the beach: Parages/Waters/Parts: to this single word [mot] let us entrust what situates, very near or far, the double motion of approach and distance, often the same place/not (pas), singularly divided, older and younger than itself, always other, on the brink of the event, when it arrives and does not arrive, when it happens and does not happen, infinitely distant as the other shore [rive] approaches. For the shore – let us hear the other – appears in disappearing from view. (Derrida 2011: 7)

In paradoxical language Derrida presents the subversive nature of communication, which I would like to link to the concept of transgression.2 His statement of the shore which “appears in disappearing

























































2

René Dietrich understands Derrida’s theory as follows: “For Derrida the shore becomes a cultural and linguistic sign for the impossible joining of oppositions. This is illustrated with the word parages that can refer to both the land and water at the shore, so that in the one word its ‘self’ and its ‘other’ are always in interplay or, in Turner’s terms, the word itself possesses a liminal status of the in-between. Because of the impossibility of ascertaining its status,

Transgression

197

from view” (ibid.) echoes Foucault’s statement of the “certainties which are immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them” (Foucault 1997: 34). Both contemplate the impossibility of fixed and unalterable discourses: discourse is not only open ended, but more importantly discursive thought has to remain inconclusive in its process of making sense of the world. As often as one crosses and re-crosses the existing boundaries, the triangulation of thought continues. This process is represented by Ralph sitting on the shore watching the waves crash in. Wave after wave, Ralph followed the rise and fall until something of the remoteness of the sea numbed his brain. Then gradually the almost infinite size of this water forced itself on his attention. This was the divider, the barrier […] here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the ocean, the miles of division, one was clamped down, one was helpless, one was condemned, one was – (LotF 110f)

Yet again, Ralph is unable to reach a moment of epiphany, and the sentence representing his interior monologue ending with another ellipsis is a signifier of the inconsecutive nature of his thinking. Ultimately, the group as a whole shows the inconclusiveness of transgressive thought in their communication, which is interlaced with interruptions, pauses, unfinished sentences, inconclusive logic, and nonsequiturs. The following non-dialogue is a typical example of their inability to speak: The storm broke. ‘Sit down!’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘Take the conch!’ ‘Sod you!’ ‘Shut up!’ […] ‘We could be sort of . . . .’ Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness. (LotF 89)
























































































































the shore lets itself be approached only by a terminology of negation […]” (Dietrich 2009: 453).

198

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The dialogue in the scene quoted above is reminiscent of contemporary theatre, notably the Absurd Theatre of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of Menace of Harold Pinter. The dissolution of identity is represented by transgressive language and thought. Any sense and order are relocated into the ellipsis and the semiotic emptiness in between signifiers. As mentioned above, Golding puts these presentations of discursive processes into a setting that is highly liminal and counteracts stability of any sort. And Simon is one of the most liminal characters of the novel. The boys perceive Simon as follows: “He’s queer. He’s funny” (LotF 55). His status as an outsider allows him to observe the developing events from a different perspective. Simon, however, is unable to put his realizations into words. To apply Foucault’s theory, Simon’s conceptualisations are “immediately upset so that thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to seize them” (Foucault 1997: 34). As one of the very few characters that is able to pin down the problem of the community, he is, however, incapable of sharing his thoughts with the others. His inability to do so is also supported spatially by his repeated return to a sheltered space in the jungle. This space represents his increasing alienation from the group: “When he was secure in the middle he was in a little cabin screened off from the open space by a few leaves” (Golding 1954: 57). Transgression, however, is not a singular event. The trespassing of the limit is rather a repeated, often infinite, process. As seen in the initial quotation by Foucault above, ‘[f]oam’ perfectly illustrates the nature of liminal activity. Whereas the word ‘line’ implies something static, straightforward, ordered, with an “origin”, “a trajectory”, and a possible end, the representation of the liminal activity as “foam” reveals its truer nature. It is fluent, floating, and ever-changing, it is transparent, yet tangible. Foam signifies the result of the physical contact of water and land, and thus stands metaphorically for the discourse at the margins of discourses, the dichotomies being yoked together only to reappear in different form. Speech and language are unable to stabilize discourse in this zone, on the “sands of silence”: signified by short, synchronic bursts and bubbles, they can indicate the nature of this elusive discourse. ‘Foam’ as a metaphor for the liminal discourse stands in a paradoxical relation to the phonetically similar ‘form.’ On the one hand, language, and in particular literature, tries to represent discourses, by trying to put them into a fixed, structured form. Nonetheless, “thought is ineffectual as soon as it attempts to

Transgression

199

seize them” (Foucault 1977: 34). The foam ever evades formation. Without wanting to get too entangled in Foucault’s play of words it is remarkable nonetheless to see how philosophical and literary language employs the topos of the shore as a trope that represents transformation and change by means of subverting existing forms. This should not lead to the conclusion that the elusiveness and the inconclusive nature of this type of non-discourse, this “foam”, is without importance, or oppositional to the creation of thought. Rather it could be argued that it represents the fundamental principle of the creation of language and meaning. French philosopher Michel Serres refers to this occurrence as noise. Steven D. Brown comments on Serres’s position as follows: “Everything happens at the threshold, Serres surmises. It is this boundary between two systems that is made permeable by the noise-signal interruption” (Brown 2004: 386). So rather than reducing the understanding of binary thinking to a mutually exclusive process, the implementation of a transgressive act introduces an element of the third. To think binary oppositions one also requires a tertiary intermediate. Thus, transgression and the limit are intertwined: The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. (Foucault 1997: 34)

The language of the transgressive subject is inherently and often unconsciously figurative. The liminal subject is unable to find a way to translate her or his liminal experiences into words and sentences. At the same time the language is freed and opposes the existing discourses. According to Roberto Nigro: [t]he language of philosophy has been intertwined with dialectics since its beginning. To speak a language stripped of dialectics means to draw thought back toward the limit of the impossibility of language, toward the limit at which the essence of language is called into question. In a language stripped of dialectics, the philosopher learns that even he or she does not inhabit the whole of his language. Next to himself or herself, he or she discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and of which he or she is not the master or the mistress, one that strives, fails, and falls silent, one that he or she cannot manipulate, the language he or she spoke at one time and that has

200

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville now separated itself from him or her, now gravitating in an increasingly silent space. (Nigro 2005: 656)

The narratives in this study are very much concerned with the unspeakable, the margins of language and, most importantly, with the false security provided by concepts grounded in binary discourses. The seemingly firm oppositions are uprooted and contested. This does not lead to an eradication of dichotomies and the discursive pitfalls symbolic language causes. Yet the focus on transgression rather than trespassing may result in a different perspective, one that is hopefully more nuanced and processual. Transgression is thinking in motion and provides the metaphorical tools for rhizomic theorising instead of a strict adherence to potentially deluding structuralist processes of constructing and reading cultures and identities. Derrida refers to structures as resembling shores as follows: [b]ut all the borders, edges, brinks, from one text to the other, are also shores [rivages], inaccessible shores or inhabitable shores. Not that it – landless landscape, opened onto the absence of the fatherland, seascape, space without territory, without reserved path, without locality – lacks these, but if it takes place, and it must, it will first have to open itself to thought of the earth [terre] as to blazing a path. (Derrida 2011: 7)

4.1 The Shore as a Figure of the Third Not only is the shore as a literary setting itself a figure of the third, but it comes as no surprise that the transgressive, discursive nature it represents is also reflected in various characters that people the shores. I will attempt a classification of different kinds of figures of the third as they appear on the beaches and shorelines. Their ability to both subvert and confirm the binary concepts and cultures they are related to will be illustrated. It might appear to be paradoxical to classify the unclassifiable. A helpful starting point for the discussion is the following statement by Tobias Döring and Claudia Breger: Diese Figuren, die sich im Raum zwischen Kulturen, Sprachen, ‘Sub’Kulturen, Geschlechtern usw. bewegen, spielen höchst ambivalente Rollen: Bilden sie einerseits das Telos didaktischer Modelle, so gefährdet andererseits ihre andauernde Präsenz die Fiktion bruchloser Übertragungen. (Döring and Breger 1998: 2)

Transgression

201

[These protagonists, who are moving in the spaces between cultures, languages, ‘sub’-cultures, genders, etc. play a highly ambiguous game: on the one hand they represent the telos of didactical models, on the other hand their constant presence threatens the fiction of smooth transitions. (my translation)]

While these are often perceived as threatening the utopian systems by challenging the respective rules, it is not necessarily the case that their role is intentionally antagonistic. Whereas in some cases the figures of the third do undermine existing discourses, in other cases they have the function of stabilising systems. Before analysing the figures of the third below, a short elaboration on the position of this analysis in the general structure might be necessary. Why is this analysis positioned in the part on ‘Transgression,’ and not on ‘Ambiguity’ or on ‘Liminality’? After all, figures of the third are highly liminal, as the analysis of Ariel in the context of The Tempest will show. They are also deeply linked to processes of regression: either they are regressing themselves like Satan in Paradise Lost, from Lucifer, ‘the lightbearer,’ to a toad, or they are intentionally de-humanised as a means of punishment and exertion of power. Of all the paradigmatic elements of shore narratives, there is hardly any other as closely related to the structure and function of the beach as are the tricksters. Attributes identified in relation to shorelines and their figurative meaning are transferable to such figures of the third. Positioning this analysis in the context of transgressive discourses hopefully allows for a deeper understanding of their transgressive function, rather than merely identifying figures of the third as liminal personae. With a focus on transgression the respective discourses remain in focus. Figures of the third may be divided into various sub-groups (cf. Döring and Breger). Such possible types are, e.g., the messenger, the trickster, the nursemaid, the translator, the cyborg, the scapegoat, and others. The figure of the third, such as the trickster, “in his rawest form, is pure ambivalence; he is always the border creature who plays at the margin of self, symbol and culture and who echoes the epigenetic ambivalences of any line of demarcation” (Spinks Jr 1991: 177). Consequently, the number and variety of figures of the third in beach and island narratives is high: one encounters messengers such as Hythloday in Utopia or Raphael in Paradise Lost, tricksters such as

202

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Ariel in The Tempest, or the scam-artists in Dickens’s “The Tuggses at Ramsgate”, nursemaids like Rose in Banville’s The Sea, and prophets such as the Russian in Heart of Darkness or Snowman in Oryx and Crake. Even the narrators themselves can be figures of the third, such as Marlow in Heart of Darkness, who is presented as an outsider by the extradiegetic narrator. These figures of the third are liminal figures. However, they differ from the conventional concept in so far as their liminality is not presented as temporal but as infinite. To clarify this notion one must remind oneself of what has been said before: as argued above, many characters are presented as liminal personae because they are in a state of personal crisis, such as Ferdinand in The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Edward Prendick in The Island of Dr Moreau, Ralph in Lord of the Flies, Max Morden in The Sea, etc. The figures of the third previously analysed are presented as being entangled in a continual liminal state. This is part of their nature, or was made part of their nature. Despite their belonging to different sub-groups, such as the messenger, the nursemaid, the trickster, the prophet, etc., they share one common characteristic: as figures of the third they oscillate between two dichotomous discourses and thus they repeatedly transgress from one binary extreme to the other. Thus they – paradoxically enough – confirm and undermine the existing rules and norms at the same time. So oszilliert das ‘Dritte’ stets zwischen den Oppositionen, die es durchkreuzt, und bezeichnet einen Versuch binäre Denkstrukturen zu überwinden, während es doch unweigerlich auf sie bezogen bleibt. [Doing so, the ‘third’ oscillates in between the positions it crosses, it is an attempt to overcome binary epistemologies, while being unable to escape them.] (Döring and Breger 1998: 3)

Their ‘thirdness’ can be part of a specifically assigned task as is the case with Raphael in Paradise Lost, Snowman in Oryx and Crake, or Rose in The Sea. In these cases it is part of the responsibility of the liminal figures to maintain and support the existing system. To do so, however, they have to remain betwixt and between. Raphael and Snowman are both appointed as messengers, and as harbingers they have to bridge a gap of information that represents a threshold that must never be crossed by the addressees, that is Adam and Eve or the Crakers. Rose in The Sea is the Graces’s housemaid, and in this position she is ever-present, yet to a certain degree invisible. That none of

Transgression

203

these figures of the third are able to complete their tasks successfully and that they actually initiate the demise of the utopian systems will be discussed below. Nonetheless, their intermediate position sets them apart in the various beach narratives. Other characters such as Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Simon in Lord of the Flies are presented as the other and as an outsider, and it is never really made explicit whether that is just part of their nature, or whether certain events have turned them into figures of the third. With Marlow there is some indication that his wealth of experiences, which are the result of his extensive voyages, have turned him into an outcast. An additional and more elaborate understanding of such a figure of the third is the parasite, as proposed by Michel Serres (cf. Serres 2007). The theory of the parasite additionally represents a way of illustrating power-structures in socio-political relations. According to Michel Serres the parasite can be a figural representation, such as the mouse feasting on the remainder of a farmer’s dinner. At the same time the farmer is parasitic in the sense that he lives off the produce he steals from the cow and the soil. This chain of parasitism is infinite and undermines an understanding of systems maintaining an equilibrium of some sort. Systems are rather cascades of parasitism and changing power-relations. The importance of Serres’s concept does not lie, however, in his description of singular entities of the third. He certainly does identify such figures of the third, but in the end he is more interested in figurations of the third as a systematic, unstoppable process. For him the parasite is not a protagonist who is singled out or exceptional in any way. Serres proposes that systems are inherently unequal and thus from a dialectical point of view simply unbalanced. With regard to this his concept of the parasite is most encompassing since its illustration of specifically identified agents provides, ultimately, a systemic analysis based on the idea that any belief in binary thinking is actually grounded in the noise and distortions that make this type of thinking possible in the first place. In consequence any system is inherently unstable: “Everything happens as if the following proposition were true: it works because it does not work” (Serres 2007: 13). In their alignment with transgressive discourse the figures of the third are not clearly identifiable as agents of either progression or

204

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

regression, creation or destruction. If they are truly transgressive entities they have to be both. Paul Rudin points out that the trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. (Rudin 1972: xxiii)

The figures of the third, whether illustrated by spaces or characters, do constantly undermine and deconstruct existing discourse. From this destruction, however, springs forth a new creation. It does not matter whether the destruction is intentional or not, aimed directly at certain cultural elements or coincidental. In the very act of subverting the status quo the figure of the third, like the trickster, “is a semiotic generator of forms, languages, cultural concepts and context” (Spinks Jr 1991: 178). 4.2 Fluid Transgressions in Shakespeare’s Macbeth William Shakespeare’s Macbeth quickly comes to mind when thinking of trespassing in the sense of repeated acts of breaking the elemental laws of the community. Macbeth’s regicide and Lady Macbeth’s suicide are only the two most obvious crimes. The question remains how and if at all Macbeth can be read in relation to transformative shores and their realizations. On the literal level, beaches and shorelines only figure implicitly. By means of teichoscopy the play narrates the invasion from Norway in the first act and the invasion from England in the last act. More importantly, Macbeth employs imagery whose metaphorical source domain is related to water and shorelines. In the play there are characters to be found that not only fit the description of transgression as defined above, but who are strongly related to the shore as metaphorical space. The play is likely to be perceived as a ‘land’-play, as opposed to The Tempest or Twelfth Night, yet Shakespeare repeatedly employs the imagery of fluidity as a central theme of the Scottish Play. According to Alain Corbin, the

Transgression

205

shifting immensity of the sea is also a bearer of misfortune. In both Shakespeare’s early and later plays, the tempest at sea, wild beasts, comets, illness, and vice all weave a network of associations, evoking a world in conflict, dominated by disorder. (Corbin 1994: 8)

The metaphorical domain of the seashore as a site of change does exceed its spatial locale. The setting of the shore brings forth a specific group of characters that are not only aligned with its discursive construction but are to be found offshore. Still in their representation these figures of the third always refer to the maritime realm. Like the beach, they are hybrid entities, protagonists of indecision and transgression. In Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3, these beings describe themselves as follows: The Weird Sisters, hand in hand, Posters of the sea and land, Thus do go about, about (Macbeth 1.3.32-34)

The three sisters’ relation to the metaphorical domain of the sea-land divide is rather implicit. Nonetheless, the imagery and its related cultural connotations Shakespeare borrows from that very semantic field. Laura Shamas mentions that “[s]cholars have speculated that another source may have directly influenced the creation of the Weird sisters: a short dramatic poem written in Latin about three sibyls” (Shamas 2007 :13). William Shakespeare likely found his inspiration for the ‘Weird Sisters’ in the Holinshead Chronicles. In the Chronicles, however, the Weird Sisters are originally depicted as potentially being fairies or nymphs, potentially Nereides, living close to the threshold of land and sea: “afterwards the common opinion was that these women were eyther the weird sisters, that is (as ye would say ye Goddesses of destinie, or els some Nimphes or Feiries, endewed with knowledge of prophesie by their Nicromanticall science, bicause every thing came to passe as they had spoken. [no closing bracket]” (Holinshead Chronicles 1577, Vol I). In the context of Macbeth this contextualisation of the Weird Sisters as being nymphs makes sense inasmuch as the illegitimate king’s castle is located close to the sea, in Forres. As early as 1652 Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy relates the narrative of Macbeth and Banquo, although not explicitly Shakespeare’s play, to water-nymphs. He writes that “Macbeth, and Banquo, two Scottish lords, that as they were wander-

206

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ing in the woods, had their fortunes told them by three strange women” (Burton 1652). The three women he calls “Water-devils” Water-devils are those Naiads or water nymphs which have been heretofore conversant about waters and rivers. The water (as Paracelsus thinks) is their chaos, wherein they live; some call them fairies, and say that Habundia is their queen; these cause inundations, many times shipwrecks, and deceive men divers ways, as Succuba, or otherwise, appearing most part (saith Tritemius) in women's shapes. (ibid.)

In Shakespeare’s narrative the women themselves stress the fact that they are “posters of the sea and land” (ibid.) and consequently they are not confined to either domain. I would like to argue with Laura Shamas that this “seems to reinforce their concomitant maritime, earthly, and ethereal assignations” (Shamas 2007: 53). They are able to move in both realms and cause mischief and chaos wherever they want. Rather than being firmly fixed in one of the spaces, sea or land, they not only connect both, but they traverse through the elements from one to another in order to cause confusion. At the same time they upset the perceived order of the world, they de-categorise pre-established definitions. After all they support Macbeth in his actions to fulfil the (self-)fulfilling prophecy of his becoming the next bearer of the Scottish crown. Not only do they deconstruct established definitions. Their inbetweenness also relates to their form, that is their appearance. Banquo is as puzzled as Macbeth: “What are these, /so withered and wild in their attire, / That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, / And yet are on’t?” (Macbeth 1.3.39-42). Not only does Banquo have problems identifying where the three are from, but they also contradict the hetero-normative gender perceptions he holds: “you should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so” (Macbeth 1.3.45-6). Their facial hair contradicts his understanding of what to expect on female faces. To express his confusion he uses a metaphor that predicts Michel Foucault’s metaphor on the nature of transgressive discourse, as stated above. Transgressive sexuality, according to Foucault “traces that line of foam showing just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence” (Foucault 1977: 30). The metaphorical concepts are analogous to Banquo’s confusion in the face of the witches, that is nymphs. He asks: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them. – Whither are they vanish’d?”

Transgression

207

(Macbeth 1.3.79-80). The witches are in their transgressive nature as evasive as the foam or the “bubbles, as the water has” (ibid.). In relation to the discourse they represent, one has to state that these sea-land-hybrids exactly resemble the discursive propensity of the shore, they are elements of the third, that is elements that unhinge existing dichotomies. The witches’/nymphs’ in-betweenness allows them to see all sides of the existing system and to unhinge and influence it in a major way. Mark Mossman suggests, in relation to Homi Bhabha’s concept of third space, that “there are always social spaces or locations for an individual to exist in which the individual can operate, and can also understand and be deeply critical of every side of the culture as a whole: it is the ability to play both sides of the system, the ultimate ability to perceive the schema of the cultural system in action” (Mossman 1999: 74). That is exactly what they do, “play[ing] both sides of the system” (ibid.), if only for their own entertainment. The witches’ position in opposition to dualistic discourses and dichotomous reasoning is repeatedly supported by the number three. Not only is their company made up of three witches, their charms also are heavily based on that number: Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, And thrice again, to make up nine (Macbeth 1.3.34-5)

Shamas argues that Shakespeare ultimately presents a triangulated deity by relating the three to Hecate. “Thus, in Macbeth, Shakespeare joins an Anglo-Saxon mythological trio to a Greco-Roman three-headed deity, fusing together two aspects of two separate pantheons in order to create a unique cosmology involving female trinitarian archetypes” (Shamas 2007: 42). Ultimately, Shakespeare may have changed the nymphs into Weird Sisters, but the connotations with the intermediary space between sea and land he does maintain. The witches are more than just side figures; they are major initiators of change. It is their prophecy, and Macbeth’s willingness to believe it, that sets off the narrative. Yet these predictions do carry within them, as truly transgressive discourse does, seeds of contradiction and future change. The witches are tricksters in the sense that they represent, like the discursive setting of the beach, a marginal sign. “The marginal sign may not just create and

208

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

discover; it may also mislead and mistake. I suspect the mark of marginality of a sign is this exact ambivalence, our inability to determine quite to the satisfaction of our more centristic perspectives whether that particular sign can be marked clearly one way or the other” (Spinks Jr 1991: 7). The prophecy of the Weird Sisters is not a glance into a firmly determined future, it is a prophecy of possibility rather than factual truth. What turns the ambivalence of their prediction into a validated reality is Macbeth’s desire to read it in that specific way. The space the witches thus create is a specific locale in the play where existing laws and rules are subverted, and possibilities are opened up to those who want to see them, even if these are only imaginary. The witches create a border space setting of Macbeth’s journey to brutally claim the throne of Scotland. The choice to do so is his; Macbeth’s interpretation of the prophecy leads him to do so. Hopkins argues in relation to the border areas in Shakespeare’s plays that “[t]ypically these journeys involve heavily allegorized choices of ways or arrivals at borders, and a particular and specialized area of cultural concern is what is to be found at these borders” (Hopkins 2005: 3). Macbeth is only too willing to refute as impossible the prophecy of the approach of Birnam Wood as a sign of his downfall. His inability to look beyond the literal into the figurative leaves him passive and averse to change. Yet that is what the shorelines and their metaphorically related protagonists are all about: infinite differentiation, endless transgression, and eternal change. Koschorke argues, “Die eigentliche Karriere der Figur des Dritten beginnt hingegen erst dort, wo solche Schließungen und Ruhigstellungen unmöglich werden. [The real importance of figures of the third comes into play where such closures and immobilisations are rendered impossible (my translation)]” (Koschorke 2010: 14). As has been argued, the witches belong to the paradigmatic group of figures of the third. Their function is to initiate change, transition, and transformation. While the motivations may differ, the goal is the same. Where the weird sisters initiate the ensuing transgressions and the murders, Ariel has the task of re-establishing the order prior to Prospero’s fall. Whatever the changes are directed at, they are elemental for the respective narratives. The witches might be identified as tricksters. This eternal transgression, however, stands in crass opposition to any established system and the discourses representing it,

Transgression

209

which is a shared characteristic of any inflexible system, such as Macbeth’s short, dictatorial reign. Where Macbeth presents the Weird Sisters as tricksters, and beings that subvert the existing norms, William Diaper inverts this perspective a century later. In 1712 Diaper published his pastoral of the sea, the Nereides: or Sea-Eclogues (Diaper 1951), a cycle of fourteen poems. The protagonists are mermaids, tritons, and nymphs. The Shakespearean witches/nymphs are semantically related to a sea understood as a hellish, inaccessible deluge. The Nereides in Diaper’s poems on the other hand look from a paradisal sea towards the shores, which they perceive as a space of toil and hardship. Nonetheless, I would like to argue, the Nereides’ presentation still maintains the shores’ elemental function as a transformative space. The Nereid Cymothoe, however, is aware of how humans perceive what the Nereides look like. She anticipates a response that can be likened to Banquo’s reaction to the witches: Since you are false, I'll leave the hated sea And yield my self to fishermen a prey. I shall on shore be as a monster shown, And trumpeted for pence through ev'ry Town, (Diaper 1712: 18)

Motivated by her broken heart she intends to leave her maritime domain and expose herself to the fishermen and shore. Cymothoe is aware of the reaction she has to expect, as she knows she will be regarded as a “monster” (ibid.) and presented as a curiosity in “ev’ry Town” (ibid.). In a central passage of the poetic cycle Muraena and Palaemon discuss the nature of the sea and its eternal movement. Muraena poses the question as follows: MURAENA. But see— The tide swells on the shore, and forward creeps, And with new slime besmears the sandy heaps. What makes this constant flux? I've often thought The cause is wondrous, and in vain I sought. (Diaper 1712: 26)

210

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The “constant flux” whose “new slime besmears the sandy heaps” of the shore amazes her, and she wonders in vain what causes this endless motion and change. Palaemon answers Muraena by proposing that this motion comes from within and is one of the most natural and necessary parts of the natural condition: PALAEMON. The cause is wondrous plain; the wise will prove The nature of a fluid is to move: In every liquid there’s a constant roll; An eddy, tho’ unseen, disturbs the whole. The gliding parts with secret motion flow; Were they at rest, they would to hardness grow. As washings left in rocks, by Winters frost Are fix’d to solid ice, and all the motion’s lost. (Diaper 1712: 27)

He argues that a lack of motion and movement would result in a “hardness” likened to that of “solid ice”. His answer implies the inherent importance of constant change and the impossibility of achieving transfixed states. Even the “solid eyes” are only temporary. As it is the result of the winter, the “hardness” will give way to softness once the spring comes. Palaemeon is speaking from the position of the third, being aware as an observer of the eternal changes and their inevitability. More importantly he knows that this change comes from within. External causes may temporarily change the direction of events, but ultimately the agency is internal rather than external. The Nereides’ change of perspective from land to sea, from passivity to activity, from the human condition being determined by external, divine forces to humans being responsible for their own deeds echoes Macbeth. As argued above, Macbeth only too willingly accepted the Weird Sisters’ prophecy. It was himself whose actions caused the “constant flux” that repeatedly changed Scotland’s situation. That this eternal transitional state is, ultimately, a demand on the human mind and cognition not to hold firmly to certain seemingly fixed beliefs, is later taken up by Anthis. In Eclogue VI she argues: “Since nothing here we fix’d or constant find, / Why should the Nereid boast a settled mind?” Anthis argues that the transitory nature of the sea and the beach has, of course, to be reflected in the state of mind of its inhabitants. Her statement implies the almost preposterous belief in

Transgression

211

an unchanging system when daily observation constantly teaches otherwise. This change of imagery surrounding the presentation of the shore in general and water in particular as metaphors for discourse and processes of thought marks an early precursor of romantic imagery. Seventy-eight years after the publication of the Nereides William Blake presents the reader with a proverb that echoes and further develops the question by Anthis quoted above and likewise considers the importance of “constant flux.” Staying within the same source domain one of Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell’ proclaims: “Expect poison from the standing water” (Blake 1976: 152). 4.3 On Robinson Crusoe’s Transgressive Shores Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is not only an account of an Englishman’s re-creation of his culture on an island far away from his native shores. More importantly, the novel deals with the re-creation of memory, identity, and the alignment of two opposing world-views: firstly, a belief in providence as the guiding principle and secondly, a belief in the self-reliance demanded by emerging capitalism. The relevance of these two ideologies and their relation to each other as they appear in Robinson Crusoe are certainly not new. I would like to propose, however, that trying to argue for the prevalence of one discourse over the other only leads to a reductionist view of the novel’s narrative. However, regarding Crusoe as a transgressive subject and as somebody who is constantly caught in between these two ideologies allows us to see the importance of transgressive thought for imperial propaganda and the effectiveness of the British Empire. Robinson Crusoe is a liminal character who is repeatedly represented as leaving from and arriving at shorelines and beaches. These represent the borderland between cultures and their respective semiospheres. They are the liminal settings that deconstruct existing epistemologies and demand from the protagonist a reformulation of their convictions. This process of repeated transgression is not necessarily presented as negative. The liminal period is a time span where the character’s occupation with transgressive thought offers a revaluation of her or his identity. It is this element of openness and potentiality that provides the chance for establishing a utopian discourse. This

212

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

perspective allows us not only to look beyond the binary epistemologies that drove Colonialism, but to share the view of the philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan “[t]hese categories and their paired juxtapositions are particularly prominent in the history of Western thought.” (Tuan 1982: 3). Tuan argues that what is missing is a cultural and historical survey touching on how groups and cohesive wholes break down as their members grow in self-awareness and withdraw into fragmented spaces; and also how individuals might then try to regroup, recreate cohesive wholes, regain a sense of unity, or regenerate objective (i.e., public) values, all at the conscious level. (Tuan 1982: 3)

Focussing on the shorelines and the narratives attached to them allows for a better insight into the creation and fragmentation of the beach/island societies. While Robinson Crusoe is repeatedly breaking out of “cohesive wholes” and “withdraw[s] into fragmented spaces” he is, I would argue, unable to “regain a sense of unity” (ibid.). Crusoe is caught in a liminal stage that does not allow him to reach a settled and coherent understanding of his surroundings, nor is he ever able to decide fully whether the course of his life is predetermined or the result of his own actions. Crusoe is presented as being in a lasting process of transgression, repeatedly switching from being an ardent believer in God and providence to being convinced of the necessity of self-reliance. This transgression, however, as I intend to show, is integral not only to Robinson’s survival and appropriation of the island on which he was stranded, but to the prosperity of the British Empire in general. It comes as no surprise that Robinson Crusoe is so concerned with boundaries, their creation and trespassing. In Crusoe we see the modern subject in a world where the boundaries of the old are unable to maintain their guiding and ordering power. Here the subject finds herself or himself suddenly at the centre of a vastly expanding world and has to recreate a new identity. This process of defining and constructing a new identity is after all the very act of evaluating and recreating existing boundaries and demands a flexibility of thought. Robinson is repeatedly given the chance to recreate his existence: he leaves England, he is able to flee his enslavement in Sallee, he leaves his plantation in Brazil, and ultimately lands on the shores of an isle that is completely at his disposal. This does not mean that Rob-

Transgression

213

inson is free to create something completely anew. What Daniel Defoe depicts in this novel is not the creation of a new, altered, system of thought. Robinson may be presented as autarkic and crafty when it comes to building himself a home and securing his survival. Yet in his way of thinking he is caught in between two systems: a world-view based on a belief in providence, and a newer, more capitalistically oriented, world-view. Robinson’s identity is constantly floating and transgressing between the two concepts. The experiences he has on his island do not allow him to maintain and find peace in one system. These transgressive changes are represented by the spaces he encounters and re-builds for himself.3 Robinson Crusoe is caught in a constant process of integrating as well as keeping out ideas that he consciously or unconsciously feels to be incompatible with his own. He may be stranded alone on an island, yet his father’s convictions, as well as those of his society of origin, are constantly working within him. Consequently, he is repeatedly changing convictions. What appears, at times, to be an integration of difference in his world-view, or what appears to be an act of critical thinking, is only a flickering admission of other thinking. Quickly he returns to his old ways. This, however, does not fully explain why he is constantly changing from an ardent believer in providence to an impressive example of an early capitalist. In the end, as I would argue, he is not a shining example of the Puritan ethos that combines both prayer and hard work. For this to be the case his recur-

























































3

In his novel Foe Coetzee exposes Robinson’s inherent inability or unwillingness to change more explicitly. Robinson tells Susan Barton: “I ask you to remember, not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway at heart.” (Coetzee 1986: 33) Robinson may bear the mark of the castaway, which in Louis Marin’s sense turns him into a man with utopian possibilities. He is, however, unwilling or unable to implement anything new at all. The fruitless nature of his undertaking is represented by the space in two ways: firstly, Robinson alters the island on a grand scale. He builds terraces for future settlers. These, however, do not bring forth any fruit or vegetables. The lack of something to plant illustrates the lack of utopian imagination. The garden they do have, which hints at future growth and progression, does not survive a heavy rain: “After two nights and a day the rain abated and we came out to stretch our limbs. We found the garden near washed away” (Coetzee 1986: 29). The future is put on hold as represented by the dead spaces and the silence.

214

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ring bursts of doubt are too constant. What, then, is the cause of his repeated faltering and change of convictions? Robinson is, however, unable to maintain his semiotic constructions and the attached perceptions of his surroundings for long periods at a time. He repeatedly sins, repents, only to sin again. Every decision to believe in a guiding God is followed by the conviction of his own utter self-reliance. Events of a different order which change the main discourse he adheres to. One footprint on the beach is enough to keep up the novel’s transgressive presentation of discourse: Thus my fear banished all my religious hope, all that former confidence in God, which was founded upon such wonderful experience as I had had of His goodness, now vanished […]. How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man! and by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about, as differing circumstances present! (RC 154)

These “differing springs” result in an ongoing process of transgressive thought. Crusoe constantly crosses and re-crosses the boundaries of his constructivist world-view, and is unable to settle on one of them and act accordingly. Robinson tries to counter this unsettling experience of transgression by maintaining a dualist and binary world-view and is unable to reach a monist perception of his self and his surroundings. This is most notable in the repeated distinction between body and mind, which according to his perception both have their separate illnesses and cures: “the discomposure of the mind must necessarily be as great as the disability of the body” (RC 161). Before the encounter with the footprint Robinson found on the shore a chest with “a cure both for soul and body” (RC 95), that is he found the bible for the soul and tobacco for the body. This duality is related to Robinson’s father teaching him of the benefits of the “middle state of life” (RC 9) which was “not subjected to so many distempers and uneasinesses either of body and mind” (ibid.). Robinson is unable to arrive at a unified perspective, or a middle ground, because of his “unlucky head, that was always to let me know it was born to make my body miserable” (RC 191). This elemental binary informs Robinson’s thinking and is illustrated by his list-making, which could be read as an attempt to shield his binary world-view from the fears and anxieties inflicted on him by

Transgression

215

transgressive thought. The first list he creates he subdivides into two groups “like debtor and creditor” (RC 68): the columns are “Evil” and “Good” (RC 69). The weather on the island he equally divides into binary oppositions, namely “Dry” and “Rainy” (RC 107). Not only is the weather reduced to two aggregates, but most months, like February, April, August, October, are described as exactly half-rainy and half-dry. A middle-ground does not exist. His last, infamous list, which presents the result of his and Friday’s fight against the cannibals on the shore, likewise follows in its logic an essential binary: dead/alive. Seventeen humans he killed, “4 escaped in the boat, whereof one wounded, if not dead.” (RC 232) This list, ultimately, is the result of Robinson assuming the right to distinguish between biological life and ‘homo sacer’, and assuming the right to decide who is allowed to live and who has to die. It is this list that most explicitly illustrates Robinson’s repeated transgression between discourses: before killing the natives on the shore he holds a lengthy discourse on the barbarities of the Spaniards in Southern America, “as for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion” (RC 168). Yet when it comes to his own situation his actions, and the ensuing list, are reminiscent more of a capitalist trader than a compassionate Christian. While Robinson regards those slain by the Spaniards as subjects, those he killed himself are merely numbered objects. The high number of murdered ‘Cannibals’ renders even more cynical his happiness upon seeing that his “island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection, which I frequently made, how much like a king I looked. […] I was absolute lord and lawgiver” (RC 236) His being “absolute lord and lawgiver” (ibid.) allows him to alternate between a Christian discourse, which would forbid the killing of anyone, and a Capitalist discourse, which transforms humans into objects to be enslaved or disposed of. And the figure of the Cannibal is constructed as a categorically open entity: “They embody, even as they figure, an ontological uncertainty” (Freccero 2010: 49). It is this culturally produced uncertainty on which Robinson Crusoe’s ambiguous actions are founded. Anybody who passes Robinson’s beach, and he does perceive it as his beach as is shown by the quotation above, dies or is educated into submission, as the example of Friday illustrates.

216

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

On the surface the reader is deluded into reading Crusoe’s actions in two ways: his taking in Friday might be perceived as a humanitarian act, for after all Crusoe is saving his life. The killing on the shore might be regarded as an act of self-defence. Yet his self-defence rather appears as a pre-emptive strike, and Robinson’s ensuing list of all the killings and their respective causes reeks of something else altogether. At the heart of this indeterminacy is Robinson’s treatment of Friday. What is it that allows Friday to be exempt from Crusoe’s murders that are based on the categorization of the natives as others? Friday, after all, may belong to a different tribe, but in Crusoe’s perception he surely belongs to the same ‘category’, that is a ‘cannibal.’ The narration ensures that this initial lack of distinction is hidden by victimising Friday, by presenting him as a passive being in need of help. Once Friday flees the group who brought him to the shore where he is supposed to be killed Robinson Crusoe’s rule of the island enters the stage of bio-politics. The previously undifferentiated group of natives is subdivided into two categories, with two opposing rights. To argue with Michel Foucault: “What follows is a kind of bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust” (quoted in Agamben 1995: 3). Via the sea the natives reached Crusoe’s shore to perform their rites. Once they arrive Crusoe assumes the power to categorise them and to grant or withhold respective rights. While they are staying on the beach he divides them into two groups, humans and beasts, man and animal. Under the pretence of preventing cannibalistic acts he commits similar crimes, albeit with a pseudo-moralistic justification. His actions represent, at their core, the onset of bio-politics. Crusoe decides about life and death, yet whatever decisions he takes, both ensuing groups remain in his power. His action signifies the increasing fluidity of the line that divides life/death as political categories and illustrates how the absoluteness of an order such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is increasingly transformed into ‘Thou shalt not kill those whom thou decidest are fit to live.’ One of the most decisive juridical boundaries concerning life/death enters a state of murkiness that affects all ensuing political and punitive actions:

Transgression

217

If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest. (Agamben 1998: 122)

Being the solitary island-dweller and ruler of a miniature empire that he is, Robinson assumes the competence in all of these roles from jurist to priest, yielding him unprecedented powers, which in turn allow him to make and justify decisions and assume powers his native England would never grant to him. Ironically, Robinson turns after all into what his late father always intended him to be: a lawyer. Analogous to the natives’ cannibalism his behaviour is in the vein of bio-politics a resemblance of endo- and exocannibalism. The natives remain outsiders and their killing resembles exocannibalism in the sense that Robinson assumes power over the human beings that do not belong to his own group. Crusoe saves and preserves Friday’s life merely to use his manpower according to his own intentions. Once Friday has crossed the shore, coming from the sea, which represents the domain of the bestialised, into the island, which signifies Crusoe’s rule and culture, he is transformed into a ‘docile body’. Giorgio Agamben argues, in response to Foucault’s quotation above, that [i]n particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the ‘docile bodies’ that it needed. (Agamben 1998: 3)

The first two symbolic binaries Robinson establishes in order to indoctrinate Friday are hierarchical: “I likewise taught him to say ‘Master,’ and then let him know that was to be my name” (RC 203). This instruction is followed by the dichotomy of yes/no: “I likewise taught him to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and to know the meaning of them” (RC 203). Friday, however, is not only the “aptest scholar that ever was” (RC 207), his critical mind also threatens Crusoe’s world-view. The narrating Crusoe is in hindsight aware of his own intellectual short-

218

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

comings, and that he was “ill enough qualified for a casuist, or a solver of difficulties” (RC 215). Whenever possible he tries to avoid any deconstruction of his own beliefs, and quickly evades any counterdiscourses. When Friday innocently challenges some of Crusoe’s beliefs, Robinson reacts accordingly by literally fleeing the discourse: “I therefore diverted the present discourse between me and my man, rising up hastily, as upon some sudden occasion of going out” (RC 215). This aspect of avoiding counter-discourses is taken up by J.M. Coetzee in Foe, the re-write of Robinson Crusoe: “Growing old on his island kingdom with no one to say him nay had so narrowed his horizon – when the horizon all around us was so vast and majestic! – that he had come to be persuaded he knew all there was to know about the world” (Foe 13). In Coetzee’s version Robinson appears to be untouched by everything outside his area of interest. This lack of opening of Robinson’s semiosphere is represented by his being immune to his surroundings. Once Susan Barton arrives on the shore nature invades the boundaries of her body: “I felt a sharp hurt, and drew from my heel a long black-tipped thorn” (Coetzee 1986: 6). The shore in Foe is anything but an idealised, edenic, lush space. It is presented in a rather different way: But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves. Off the island grew beds of brown seaweed which, borne ashore by the waves, gave off a noisome stench and supported swarms of large pale fleas. (Coetzee 1986: 7)

The beach in Foe is a space that invades the body through all the senses: biting “large pale fleas”, stinging “thorns”, and the “noisome stench”. The bodily integrity of Susan is under constant siege. Even the apes on the island, Crusoe warns Susan, might not spare her, since she is a woman. The full extent of the bodily intrusion is seen on the one occasion Robinson sleeps with Susan, a scene which remains ambiguous in its representation. It is never clarified whether Susan willingly agreed to the intercourse or not. So where the island represents a space of constant invasion of her body and mind, Robinson seems to be impervious to all outer influences with the exception of a small bug that “ate its way into the flesh” (Coetzee 1986: 7).

Transgression

219

This aversion to change is less explicit in Daniel Defoe’s version of the Robinson-myth. Ultimately, what Crusoe does is not to build a new world on his island, either in thought or in practice. The tools he rescues from the sinking ship, which he then uses to build his miniature society, are metaphors for this conceptual progress. His constructions of otherness are based on ideas and concepts that he brought along just like his tools. What he is actually building is a recreation, rather than a new creation. Yet this re-creation is just a peripheral mimicry of the centre. Crusoe is and always remains an ambassador of his native Empire. All he does is to extend the empire’s normative discourses towards the periphery. As a novel, Robinson Crusoe does of course just the same thing: it perpetuates the hegemonic norms of an ever-expanding England for its own citizens. As such it is a mere propagandist piece that in a seemingly on-going discussion on the part of Crusoe with himself and others disguises the inflexibility of his convictions. The importance lies in the fact that Crusoe is not indebted to one system exclusively, that is providence or capitalism. Any attempt to divide both perceptions strictly into binary opposites and to allocate Crusoe to either one of them would result in a reductionist perception of the novel’s underlying discourse. Crusoe is constantly transgressing his beliefs in providence and emerging capitalism. The disciple of providence does believe in a higher power that is leading him and cares for him, an entity Robinson feels he is indebted to. The believer in capitalism does believe in his own responsibility. If he does form relationships with others, as is the case outside of the island episode, these relationships are horizontal and based on the mutual exchange of goods. Ultimately, Robinson is the centre of this world-view. In the former world-view the chain of command is vertical. In the later the chain of command is horizontal. To make the British Empire as successful as it turned out to be, both chains of command were necessary. In order to thrive and prosper economically, capitalistic entrepreneurship is supported, since this is required to fund the making of Empire. Yet in order to have a strong leadership and create a sense of ideological coherence, the vertical power structure needs to stay in command also. The queens and kings of Empire symbolize none other than God and Providence.

220

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The synthesis of both discourses is, ultimately, impossible. The attempt to produce one is, paradoxically, essential for success. The two systems are incompatible: emerging capitalism is based on a broad, flat, rhizomic network of exchange of goods. There surely are hierarchical structures to be found. These form a meritocracy as opposed to aristocratic power structures. Robinson himself contemplates the possibility of a meritocratic order: It was my great misfortune that in all these adventures I did not ship myself as a sailor; whereby, though I might indeed have worked a little harder than ordinary, yet at the same time I had learned the duty and office of a foremast man; and in time might have qualified myself for a mate or lieutenant, if not for a master. (RC 21)

His having missed this chance might explain why he is so eager to undo this mistake, and once he takes in Friday he has to make sure that the very first word Friday has to learn is “Master”. Whatever Robinson’s motivations, he is nonetheless very much aware of the meritocratic and transformative nature of seafaring. Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a century later, presents a character that is less enthusiastic in regard to the social mobility this specific trade offers. Talking specifically about the navy Sir Walter argues: “I have two strong grounds of objection to it. First, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of” (Austen 1818: 22). Secondly, the vain Sir Walter is concerned with the sea’s negative effect on a man’s physical complexion. The irony is of course, that Sir Walter is himself facing an unexpected moment of social mobility. His is a decline from the social position and monetary amenities he was born into. And this decline transfers him to the shore. He ends up in Bath, where his family is struggling to keep up appearances, whereas a member of the Navy is about to move into his estate. In short, the sea offered the social mobility the social structure on land did not yet provide. Yet, despite its clear chain of command the capitalist system is rather decentralised in opposition to an absolutist monarchy with its centralised power. The driving ideological force of the British Empire lay, however, in the way it combined both systems rather than in the attempt to create a homogenized synthesis of both. Crusoe’s transgression of and repeated alternation between both discourses – provi-

Transgression

221

dential and capitalist determination – creates the two Gs, ‘greed’ (capitalism) and ‘guilt’ (providence) that ultimately drive the “three Cs enumerated by the missionary David Livingstone: commerce, Christianity and civilization” (Mirzoeff 1998: 282). The effectiveness of this connection, the driving on two discourses rather than one, can be seen in comparison to other Empires, who faltered due to their discursive one-sidedness. The Spanish certainly were driven by an interest in obtaining riches, but their brutality resulted from a religious justification. Robinson Crusoe himself is very much aware of the “conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practiced in America, where they destroyed millions of people […] and that the rooting them out of the country is spoken of with the most abhorrence and detestation by even the Spaniards themselves” (RC 169). The British Empire, ideologically speaking, was not so successful because of the homogeneity of its underlying hegemonic discourse. It was so successful because its ideology remained flexible and transgressive rather than one-sided and attached to mutually excluded binaries. Kothari and Wilkinson cite Nash, who makes a similar point: “Indeed, as Nash suggests, colonial discourses and practices ‘were effective precisely because they were enormously flexible and adaptable’” (Kothari and Wilkinson 2010: 1398). Neither discourse forms a homogenised hegemonic discourse on its own. Rather, as I have argued, it is the constant transgression in a Foucauldian sense, the endless back and forth between various discourses, that has turned out to be the strength of the British Empire, at least as represented in Robinson Crusoe. At the same time the Empire knew very well what kind of discourses to maintain in an ossified state (such as the production of the other) and which discourses to keep flexible enough to constantly re-adapt the imperial ideology to an ever-increasing empire. From a literary perspective the shorelines as contact zones in Robinson Crusoe are the testing ground where these transgressive discourses may be considered. Kothari and Wilkinson are right when they argue that adventure stories, such as Robinson Crusoe, “helped construct spaces in which imperial geographies were conceived and colonial ambitions provoked, while simultaneously creating and rein-

222

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

forcing socio-religious, racial and gender hierarchies” (Kothari and Wilkinson 2010: 1399). 4.4 From Heterotopia to Camp: The Politics of the Shore The multiple semantic meanings denoting borders and frontiers do apply to the beach as a literary setting. These meanings mutually inform each other; they are constantly changing and resist binary applications. One of the most important spatial realisations of the shore resulting from this ambiguity is, as argued above, the beach’s status as a space that allows and forces transgressive epistemologies on to the characters’ perception. This in turn is reciprocally related to the characters’ liminality (e.g. the survivors of a shipwreck being in between life/death. For subjects being punished at or exiled to the beach) transgression is an essential part of the presentation of liminality. How does the beach as liminal space fit into the broader concept of border thinking, that is the spatial analysis of borders, frontiers, liminalities and its effects on the subjects or communities living there? ‘Border thinking’ encounters a growing interest in current criticism. Terms such as third space (cf. Bhabha 1994, Soja 1996 and Ikas 2009), marginal space (cf. Shields 1991 and Cresswell 1996), paradoxical space (Rose 1993), and borderlands (Matynia 2011, Johnson, Reece, et.al. 2011, Schröder 2006, Anzaldúa 1999) are being used in different contexts from postcolonial studies, geography, social studies, and anthropology to educational studies. Not all of these refer explicitly or exclusively to liminality as such. What these terms have in common is their attempt to classify spaces that stand in contrast to hegemonic spaces. Gillian Rose argues that some spaces are inherently paradoxical and “that spaces that would be mutually exclusive if charted on a two-dimensional map – centre and margin, inside and outside – are occupied simultaneously.” (Rose 1993: 140) While these liminal spaces need not be placed on the geographical margins they can be literally placed on the borders, and the subjects there can explicitly identify themselves as border people. Magdalena Naum argues: Borderlands or frontiers are ambiguous landscapes. The dictionary definitions describe borderland and frontier in synonymous terms: as a

Transgression

223

fringe, as a vague intermediate state or landscape or as a region positioned along the dividing line between two countries. […] Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more groups come into contact with each other, where people of different cultural backgrounds occupy the same territory and where the space between them grows intimate. (Naum 2010: 101)

In the first chapter I illustrated this ambiguity of borderlands in relation to the beach, and also argued that the multiplicity of cultural contacts does not allow for a singular and restrictive understanding of these spaces. Once a minimum of two social groups encounter each other in a single space the territory is already subdivided into a minimum of three places: each group produces their own understanding of what the respective space denotes for them, and a third space that is the result of this contest. This perspective does not even include the individual perspectives of the respective characters. Prospero takes over the island from Sycorax, which in turn changes the space for Caliban from a home into a prison. Prospero’s ruling the island sets free Ariel, who himself was imprisoned in a tree. A historic example for the beach as a social borderland visited by different classes is provided by sea-bathing at Blackpool. While being an ‘other place’ for English society at large the shoreline was still further segmented into sub-spaces reserved for the respective classes to maintain their seclusion from the rest of society. While the beach was the ‘other place’ for the entirety of the visitors, the concept of ‘other’ related solely to their own life and social situation at home. The beach did not deconstruct and remove existing class-barriers (cf. Darren 2005). Nonetheless, the beach life had a carnivalesque effect on all visitors and was as such only utopian for the respective groups themselves. The significance of the border, however, lies in the possibility and sometimes the necessity for it to be transgressed. Lotman adds: “There is a significant change in the accepted norms of behaviour when moving from boundary to centre” (ibid.). Moving from the centre to the boundary likewise changes the perception of norms and behavioural expectations. Ultimately, the marginal, liminal, and paradoxical spaces represent border-spaces in the discursive sense rather than in a strictly spatial one. These spaces of the ‘Other’ can be right in the middle of or adjacent to the hetero-normative space. Yet what they denote is locat-

224

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ed on the margins of the majority’s norms and morals. The shoreline is such a space and incorporates the all-important carnivalesque which dissolves traditional boundaries and enables a revelation of truth, creating an inversion of norms that allows its participants a brief sense of freedom from restriction imposed by political and social order as well as by life and death. This reversal is imagined by the rhythmic pattern of the waves as they crest, break, and re-form along the shore. (Hanson 2006: 6)

So far I have looked at liminality and transgression mostly as concepts affecting individuals rather than societies, and have focussed on liminal personae, such as Caliban, Ariel, the Weird Sisters in Macbeth, and Robinson Crusoe. In this chapter I would like to focus more broadly on the respective societies that initiate transitions and on the spatial representations on the shorelines. Either these transitions are, as argued above, embedded in deliberately performed rites, e.g. in Will Farnaby’s initiation in Island, or the liminal stage results from an opposition to the societies’ rules and norms, as in The Beach. What liminal and transgressive personae, however, do have in common is their particular type of emplacement. Victor Turner argues: “The neophytes are sometimes said to ‘be in another place.’ They have physical but not social ‘reality,’ hence they have to be hidden, since it is a paradox, a scandal, to see what ought not to be there!” (Turner 1987: 8). This holds true for the characters of the narratives analysed here, who are literally and figuratively in “another place” (ibid.). Prospero and Miranda indeed have a physical reality, but by sending them into exile they are rendered invisible and insignificant for the social structure in Naples. Robinson, similarly, is excluded from the social reality by refusing to accept his father’s social expectations. Kurtz is hiding by himself, in order to remain invisible and maintain the liminal state he has created for himself. The boys in Lord of the Flies are taken out of society due to their plane crashing on an island. This perspective is still quite general and only repeats a statement made above: a crisis turns the characters into liminal personae and separates them spatially and socially from their original society. It is at this point that I would like to fuse two argumentative threads I elaborated individually above: the concepts of transgression and of the parasite. As argued above, transgression presents individuals or socie-

Transgression

225

ties in a liminal state of transition. They are a tabula rasa lacking clearly defined inscriptions. The concept of the parasite serves to show that the power structures causing liminality are never stable but ever changing. As the relations of power change so do the spaces that represent this relation. Michel Serres’s concept of the parasite helps to identify this transitional nature, which is inherent in all existing systems. More importantly, as will be illustrated below, it also serves to show that systems that do not acknowledge this fluidity and try to exclude these figurations of the third are prone to destruct the social fabric of their (utopian) societies. In this chapter I will illustrate how transgression and liminality and their concurrent transformations are translated into spatial representations, most notably the beach. When trying to locate the liminal rite and the liminal persona in space, one of Michel Foucault’s concepts is helpful for understanding their ambiguous nature. As seen in Victor Turner’s statement above, the neophytes are often presented as being in “another place” (Turner 1987: 8). This phrase relates to Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopia. This relationship is not only of a semantic nature – heterotopia translates as ‘another place’ – both concepts relate to liminality. The heterotopia is the ‘other place’, where the liminal personae experience a time of transgression in the hope of a positive outcome. According to Peter Johnson: Foucault outlines the notion of heterotopia on three occasions: first, in his preface to Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) published in 1966 (1966a); second, in the same year, within a radio broadcast as part of a series on the theme of utopia and literature; and finally, in a lecture presented to a group of architects in 1967. The first refers to textual spaces, while the other two, with close similarities, concern an analysis of particular social spaces. (Johnson 2006: 75)

Foucault’s concept originated, as did Turner’s, in the 1960s. One reason for its popularity is probably based on the fact that Foucault outlined this concept rather roughly. Johnson argues that “Foucault’s account of heterotopia, however playfully presented, remains briefly sketched, provisional and at times confusing. Edward Soja describes Foucault’s analysis as ‘frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent’ (1996: 162)” (Johnson 2006: 81). Michel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter are less critical, yet they argue that “one also gets the feeling

226

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

that it lacks definition and is perhaps too encompassing” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 4). How, then, can this concept be helpful for understanding literary beaches and shores as sites of liminality and transgression?4 My argument is that these sites are spatial representations of transgression and liminal states, partly in Victor Turner’s sense. These sites may not always be related to ritual, but may still represent the protagonists, as argued above, in states of liminality. Johnson asserts that in regard to academia’s responses to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia the interpretations thereof are quite diverse: “However, among all the attempts to apply and make sense of the concept, there is a persistent association with spaces of resistance and transgression. Yet, curiously, this link is often asserted with little substantiation” (Johnson 2006: 81). This relationship of transgression and resistance shall be outlined. One major difference between Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Turner’s understanding of liminality is, of course, the fact that Turner is talking about rituals and hence his ‘other places’ are socially constructed as part of and designed for a specific ritual. These rituals elevate individuals from one position in society to another. Foucault is concerned with outsiders that don’t fit into the respective societies’ norms. The liminal personae either decide to enter these spaces of otherness by themselves, as part of a ritual, or they are forced to enter them due to their status as social outcasts. Yet there is a striking conceptual similarity that is detectable in all shore narratives. In the cases of both Turner and Foucault, the society generates spaces to which those who don’t fit into the societies’ symbolic structure are exiled. These spaces are for those for whom there is no name. The spatial and semantic exclusion from the existing discourse attempts to stabilize the discourse itself. In the case of these other places, however, the process is only the first step. Those for whom there is not a name, no concept, those who are neither here nor

























































4

Michel Foucault outlines various possible heterotopias, the beach being one of them. Fiona Handyside argues in relation to Foucault’s theory: “the beach is of the same order as the city’s exemplary modern leisure sites, the cinema and the café. They share qualities of being temporary stopping points in the daily round, areas of public intimacy and snatched leisure moments, all predicated on mass entertainment and the fleeting encounter in the crowd” (Handyside 2011: 84f).

Transgression

227

there, cannot be integrated into this network of dichotomies. In a second step, their symbolic nature has to be erased or hidden, since their very existence poses a threat to the established categories, rather than strengthening them. By exposing this symbolic fabric of cultures heterotopias and transitional rites do open the discourse to transgressive thought. Heterotopias may often be referred to existing spaces, yet what makes them real or important, whether these are architectonic or literary representations, is their antagonistic relation to existing discourses: “Heterotopias are not figments of our imagination. […] Heterotopias are concrete technologies. They are rhetorical machines” (Faubian 2008: 33). Heterotopias do set in motion and represent the discourses on the liminal line. How do these “rhetorical machines” (ibid.) work? In his examination of the history of space, Foucault refers to Galileo’s “constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space” (Foucault 1986: 23). In regard to that, Foucault hints at the inherent instability of space. He proposes that space, like time, is constantly changing. What is perceived as an unchanging spatial entity is really a misinterpretation. A synchronic impression of space is taken as a diachronic reality, “just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down” (ibid.).5 If one accepts the constant mutations of space, in relation to the fact that space is produced by society and reciprocally produces society, then the belief in a stable utopian space/society can only be held as a thought experiment. Utopia, as argued above, traditionally is the ‘other place’, presented as far, far away, either temporally or spatially. It is described as hidden or forgotten in space and time, and thus unreachable. By means of its distant location it is rendered as a play of thoughts, an allegory discussing the societies they are modelled on. Heterotopias, according to Foucault, have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types. First there are the utopias.

























































5

Michel Serres expresses a similar perspective; he uses, however, a different source domain for his argument: “There are only metabolas. What we take as an equilibrium is only a slowing down of metabolic processes” (Serres 2007: 72).

228

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces. (Foucault 1986: 24)

This element of the un-real is reflected in the fact that utopias, such as More’s Utopia, are often perceived as satirical rather than realistic attempts at changing the existing status quo. Heterotopias on the other hand are, according to Foucault, real places. They are real in the sense that they are embedded inside cultures, rather than being placed out of reach. Even more, they are presented as an integral part of this society. The brothel or the prison is a structural part of the community it is related to, and eliminating these spaces means changing the structure of these societies. The utopia as the ‘other place’, on the other hand, is, in the strictest sense, not a part of the society it reflects upon. Thomas More’s Utopia certainly provides a comment on contemporary England, yet as part of the fictional world it is culturally and geographically unrelated to the fictional England. The same holds true for The Isle of Pines. The settlers may be of English origin, but their utopia is presented as other in its spatial location as well as its identity. Also, it would be wrong to understand heterotopias merely as ‘the good place’ inside a society, as opposed to the distant utopia. Heterotopia as ‘other place’ can represent both a ‘utopian’ and a ‘dystopian’ vision. The heterotopia may be a utopian space for some, but it is also a very dystopian space for others. In the context of Gender Studies in particular it has been pointed out that the heterotopian space certainly doesn’t always figure as ‘the good place.’ Utopias, in the sense of ‘good place’, attempt to create a social structure in which all members are treated justly, equally, and fairly. They present the ideal of inherent justice and an equality of rights for everybody who is part of the community. Heterotopia does not do that, nor can it. Hilde Heynen is right when she argues that a small change of perspective empties heterotopia of any such utopian notions: The most troubling questions regarding Foucault’s heterotopias come forward when adding the perspective of human agency. One can wonder indeed whether the heterotopic space-time constellations that he describes do have the same meaning for all actors involved. If the bourgeois male visitor to the brothel has a liberating experience in

Transgression

229

which he can temporarily step out of his daily existence and momentarily see his own subjectivity as an illusory construction, should one assume that the prostitute who serves him shares a similar epiphany? Or is his heterotopia her constricted and normative everyday? (Heynen 2008: 320)

The same change of perspective applies to the various heterotopian beaches analysed here: Prospero created a heterotopian space that is in opposition to his native home Milan. Yet for Caliban and Ariel this heterotopia entails subjugation and imprisonment. Kurtz’s creation of his African heterotopia is partly in opposition to the company he represents; his creation subjugates the Africans following him. The beach society in The Beach creates a heterotopia, with everybody who spoils their fun being excluded, an exclusion that results mostly in death. The way heterotopias are being understood in this study is not that they represent ‘other places’ in the sense of the ‘good place’. There are certainly elements that improve upon the societies the protagonists originate in. It is these aspects heterotopias create anew and in opposition to the original societies. Thus they are counter-foils that allow the narratives to expose a certain lack, as well as injustices in the societies they are critiquing upon. As opposed to utopian spaces such as Thomas More’s island in Utopia, literary heterotopias in general and those located on the shorelines in particular are subject to constant change. The classical utopian society is presented as the perfectly enclosed, autarkic system. The classical utopia is self-contained and averse to interventions from the outside. Such an invasion of “infection and the hand of war” yields catastrophic results, and in the end the utopian system is destroyed. According to Goodman “the Garden of Eden […] could not even sustain the eating of a wrong kind of apple. The frangibility of utopian stasis is exposed by the sin of Adam and Eve, which broke the laiddown rules for conformity in this particular utopia” (Goodman 2003: 1). As soon as Adam and Eve have to leave Eden, the space “went from ‘good place’ to being a ‘non place’” (ibid.). In addition, classical utopias are presented as trans-historical. They existed before the travellers landed there, and they will exist many years longer as soon as the narrators leave. More’s Utopia, e.g., had after all existed for many years, when Raphael Hythloday first set foot on the island. The beach heterotopias, as opposed to Paradise, do not turn into non-places after the initial utopian structures break apart.

230

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

The protagonists are bound to their respective islands. Either they are shipwrecked and lack the means to leave, such as Prospero or Robinson, or they resist leaving, such as Kurtz in Heart of Darkness or Richard in The Beach. At this moment the formerly utopian space has to be reorganized, resulting in the production of one or more additional heterotopias. The spatial changes on the heterotopian beach are as fast as those of the societies producing them. This production of space and society, as illustrated in the introduction, is reciprocal. According to Nozick, Foucault’s notion of heterotopia contests the certainty engendered by the conventional utopia/dystopia opposition, setting the reader off on a very different journey of discovery – to seek the virtues of instability and shifting meaning instead of static spaces irrevocably inscribed with unambiguous significance. (cf. Nozick 328)

The beach and shores with their ambiguous semantic meaning, its (dis-)location in space and time and its presentation of various cultures and discourses is a heterotopia par excellence. The beach as “[h]eterotopia goes further, by making explicit how fragmented, mobile and changing the production of space is” (Cenzatti 2008: 81). Can this postmodern understanding of space and the semantics of spaces be applied to literary spaces reaching back as far as the island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest? Cenzatti argues: “Heterotopias, Foucault tells us, are common to all civilizations, but they change, taking different forms and purposes in different social contexts” (Cenzatti 2008: 76). After all, what these spaces, whether literary or real, achieve, is to reflect upon the social structures that create them. It is on and through these spaces that the existing hegemonic discourses are contrasted with their other, that is counter-discourses. Even if this contrasting element is the result of exclusion on the societies’ part, as is the case with heterotopias such as hospitals or prisons, the existing social structures are being confirmed by this exclusion. I would like to read the beach societies as heterotopias of difference, where according to Marco Cenzatti another layer of spaces can be added. Heterotopias of difference are still places in which irreconcilable spaces coexist, but what constitutes irreconcilability is constantly contested and changing. As these heterotopias fluctuate between contradiction and acceptance, their physical

Transgression

231

expression equally fluctuates between invisibility and recognition. (Cenzatti 2008: 77)

This conceptual addition of the ‘heterotopias of difference’ might prove to be problematic when it comes to regarding real spaces, since an increasing focus on the different layers of spatial realisations ultimately turns the heterotopia into a regular rather than an ‘other space’. After all the “irreconcilability” of spaces is the norm rather the exception. As a concept for analysing literary spaces, however, the “heterotopias of difference” are far more helpful. In that respect they shed light on the irreconcilability of discourses and their spatial representations that are constructed on antagonistic terms. Secondly, Cenzatti’s understanding of the heterotopian possibility to “fluctuate” in terms of their acceptance and physical realisation perfectly relates to literary shores that arguably do the same. In the following chapter I will illustrate the beaches’ propensity to create and deconstruct heterotopias and camps in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. 4.5 The Heterotopian Shore in Golding’s Lord of the Flies This chapter will apply Foucault’s theory to the beach and the island in Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The novel presents, among those analysed in this study, one of the reversals of a utopian imaginary into a dystopian reality, an ambiguous utopia. One of the main themes is mankind’s inherently bestial and lawless nature. At the same time, and maybe more importantly, Golding’s underlying argument is that of a systemic responsibility for atrocities committed in the name of a community. Not only are the leaders, the demagogues, the populists, and a society’s executing branches responsible for a community’s downturn into a violent, fascist regime, but Golding stresses the individual’s responsibility in this process. His vision reverberates Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” and its call for a strong government, only to subvert this demand by showing the very impossibility of imposing binding rules and laws on a society. What makes this novel so helpful for the analysis of the beach as a heterotopian space is the fast-paced transformation of the community depicted therein: the boys, with the exception of Jack’s choir,

232

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

hardly know each other. They meet first on the beach, groups form and are dissolved, parties grow and fight each other, processes of othering and scapegoating gain momentum and, ultimately, result in the murder of two of the boys. This speeded-up rise and fall of a civilisation in miniature is paralleled by the analogous construction and deconstruction of spaces on the beach. In the following analysis I will focus on the beach and its ensuing subdivision, with spaces such as the platform where the boys discuss and the castle rock. I will also look into the hidden spot in the centre of the island. These spaces are heterotopian and mirror the socio-political changes to be considered. With the increasing fragmentation of the boys’ beach-society an increasing number of ‘other places’ is created. The production of these sites is in itself an act of transgression, a circular production of space that does not result in the synthesis and perfection of spaces, but in an endless process of further fragmentation, up to the moment when the system breaks apart. This relation of space and the transgression of space itself will be analysed in detail below. That the beach, while being a heterotopia itself, is able to contain and signify various other heterotopias is no contradiction, but is, rather, the very nature of this space: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1986: 25). The beach as heterotopia does reflect, initially, a heterotopia that stands in contrast to the boys’ culture of origin, which is England. Over time the beach is subdivided into different spaces and contrasting heterotopias.6 In Lord of the Flies the reader initially enters the beach of the island with Ralph and Piggy: “The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity” (LotF 10). The reader’s first experience on the spatial triangle of land, beach, and water, is presented through an internal focalization of Ralph’s own perspective. His gaze produces the central perspective, puts him into the centre of the novel. The island continually grows by means of a continuous description, rather than in the form of an introductive overview of the locality. This narrative technique supports the

























































6

This increasing differentiation is of course related to the execution of power. “The master”, as Michel Serres says, “is always a geometer, a topologist, and someone who knows space first of all” (Serres 2007: 59).

Transgression

233

‘fluidity’ of space in the perception of the reader. With every step Ralph, or any of the other focalised characters, takes, the island grows. Every step thus means a transgression from the known into the unknown space, and every newly encountered space is thus contrasted and aligned with the spaces known so far. Every step turns into a symbolic action, such as the stepping out of the dark jungle on to the light shore. This mobility transforms a static setting into a discursive, transformative setting. Spaces never are what they seem, nor do they remain as what they are perceived to be. The beach, for example, is quickly turned from a space into a place, associated with connotations such as homeliness and safety. The un-inscribed jungle space is quickly turned into a place that serves as a testing ground for the boys’ bravery as well as their imagination. The fluidity of space quickly undoes these reciprocal inscriptions between space/place and the character’s identity. Towards the end of the story, the beach turns into a place of punishment and rage. The jungle turns from a playground that helps to unify the community into a space of threat and disorder. To use Yi-Fu Tuan’s terminology, ‘topophilia’, the love for a place, transforms into ‘topophobia’, that is the fear of a place. Space and place in Lord of the Flies are fluent and ever changing; they are as liminal as the boys’ state in life. The first scene initially establishes this in-betweenness: through the island’s creepers and branches the boys exit the jungle, towards a “shore [that] was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air” (LotF 9). The light and translucent atmosphere contrasts with the “darkness of the forest” (LotF 10) behind them, and after the thicket of the jungle the beach is presented as an infinite open space: this liminality in between light and dark, inside and outside, finite and infinite space is then aligned with the liminality of Ralph himself, who is right between boyhood and adulthood: “He was old enough, twelve years and a few months, to have lost the prominent tummy of childhood and not yet old enough for adolescence to have made him awkward” (LotF 10). At the same time “he was big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority” (LotF 59). The liminality of his being between childhood and adulthood is supported by the alignment of lagoon – jungle – beach. The lagoon is a motif of re-birth and the maternal womb: for one thing, the lagoon embedded in the beach contains “water [that] was warmer than his

234

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

blood” (LotF 12). The narrator repeats this important attribute later in the text: a “couple of littluns were playing at the edge, trying to extract comfort from a wetness warmer than blood” (LotF 147). The lagoon is aligned with the safety of a maternal womb that gives comfort and safety and provides for the boys. The warm water also has the effect of soothing all the kids, especially at times when the tension between them increases: it is here all of them feel most sheltered and behave most innocently. This attribution is, at the beginning, metonymically aligned with the island as a whole: the boys do not need to work for anything, since food and water are provided by the island’s ecosystem. Their crashing on to island is presented as a re-birth into a seemingly pristine place of carefree living. This metaphor of re-birth is supported by the fact that Ralph’s first reaction after surviving the plane-crash is to undress, to free himself from the “snake-clasp of his belt” (LotF 10) and to take a bath. The alignment of the shore, especially the lagoon, with attributes of motherhood and femininity becomes even more interesting when one considers that girls or women do not figure at all in Lord of the Flies. Also, while there is some talk about the boys’ family-backgrounds, mothers are excluded from this narrative: Ralph only refers to his father, a naval-officer. Piggy is ashamed to admit that he does not have a mother or a father any more but is left with an overprotective grandmother. When it comes to representing female characters and gendered attributes, however constructed and stereotypical, the beach is the only space where these can be found. It is interesting to note how the narrator represents a gendered perception of space and inverts it. As has been said, the beach in general and the lagoon in particular are likened to a womb and attributed with stereotypical associations of female motherhood. In the end of the story this gendered attribution is completely inversed: safety has given way to violence and murder, the community has broken up into violent individuality, and the endless supply of fruit-trees lined up on the beach is immediately brought to an end by the fire caused by the boys. It is at this point in the story that the femininity of the space is replaced by a male attribution: “A naval officer stood on the sand, looking down at Ralph in wary astonishment” (LotF 200). This officer is not only a synecdoche for the culture that brought war and manslaughter into the world in the first place. As opposed to the warm, engulfing, comforting lagoon he represents the very opposite. He is

Transgression

235

cold, detached, and embarrassed by Ralph’s emotion. To realize that these gendered dichotomies are highly problematic constructions, one need not look into decades of Gender-discourses. This alignment of the sea, as represented by its extension the lagoon, representing femininity, however, goes a long way back into the imagery of the sea and land. The alignment of the sailor, penetrating and subduing the sea with his ship, supports this imagery. The dark jungle represents the opposite of the lagoon, namely adolescence. Whereas the lagoon represents a sheltered existence, in the jungle everyone has to fend for himself. Here most of the boys show their violent side, here they go hunting for animals and, in the end, for each other. The jungle is increasingly turning into a site of war, where the kids behave as the grown-ups that started the atomic war they were fleeing. The beach is the intermediary space, where the kids are building their huts and hold counsel. The shore represents a heterotopia in two ways: first of all, it is the metaphorical site of transformation from kid into adult, and it is here where the pubescent boys are located. There are also younger kids, the “Littluns”. These, however, hardly figure. The age of the main protagonists is, like their names, a nod in the direction of R.M. Ballantyne’s novel Coral Island, the Victorian children’s book Lord of the Flies is based on. This allusion relates to the second, more important, realisation of the beach as a heterotopia. Whereas Piggy is concerned about the lack of grown-ups, signifying a lack of parental order, “Ralph said nothing. Here was a coral island” (LotF 14). In a double sense Ralph realizes that this space, just like the one in the children’s novel, is a dream come true, this is a space without grownups and without order: “Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life” (LotF 15). Thus, the moment when Ralph strips off his clothes is similarly a metaphor for him stripping off the pre-existent rules and expectations. The beach turns into a space that stands in opposition to the world of their origins, the spaces where they grew up and were educated, their parents’ houses, the boarding schools, and the English education system as a hegemonic space in its entirety. Here on the island they can do whatever pleases them, whatever they wish for, without anyone denying them their will. As soon as they realize their freedom, the formerly strange place quickly turns into something they

236

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

“thought of as their beach.” (LotF 29) The beach represents not only an ‘other place’, it is also a signifier of their being completely cut off from their prior existence. Thus the metaphor of re-birth relates not only to Ralph but to the whole group. According to Foucault, Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. (Foucault 1986: 26)

The plane-crash that brought the kids on to the island, as well as the atomic war that caused them to leave England, is a crisis that cuts them off from their past and opens a new spatio-temporal order, that is a temporal order that stands in opposition to everything they have known so far. The boys, however, quickly realise the need for a slightly ordered way of living. They understand that merely following their instincts will not do. This is the moment when a second heterotopia is established. They establish a place for discussion and decision making, whose appearance stands in the same opposition to the beach as its function does to the boy’s un-regulated life on the beach: “Here the beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly through a forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high” (LotF 13). This space represents the suspension of all the freedoms that are granted on the rest of the island. Michel Foucault himself distinguishes between two kinds of heterotopias, the crisis-heterotopia in “the so-called primitive societies” (Foucault 1986: 24) and the “heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (Foucault 1986: 25). Examples of the former type are spaces designated for subjects in a crisis transformational period, such as “adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” (Foucault 1986: 24); examples of the latter type are psychiatric hospitals, rest homes and prisons. Here one finds yet another interesting connection to Turner’s concept of liminality and rites of transformation. Turner also distinguishes between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern societies’. While the former

Transgression

237

use binding rites of transitions as a communal event, the latter transfer these rites out of the public domain to a more individual level. The communal status of rites is diminished but the form and variation of these rites increase many times over. The same holds true for heterotopias. The heterotopias mentioned above share another attribute that illustrates the transformation of the beach from an open and freely accessible space into a confined and confining space. The spaces in Lord of the Flies in general, and the heterotopias in particular, are heavily constructed along the dichotomy inside/outside, and the transgression of this line is not always free. Foucault argues that: “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault 1986: 26). This holds true for the island-space in its totality, as well as the heterotopian places constructed by the boys. The heterotopias’ enclosure is constructed by the physical and social realities alike. Foucault adds that not only does the number of heterotopias increase in accordance with the dissolution and fragmentation of the society, but their shielding of the inside from the outside likewise becomes stricter. Foucault argues that “[i]n general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures” (Foucault 1986: 26). With the advancing segmentation of the society the spaces become more exclusive and the rites required to enter these spaces and join the groups therein become more important. The island itself is secluded and seemingly off the maps. It takes a catastrophe to transgress the island’s isolation. The beach in its entirety is shut off by the sea and the thick jungle with its creepers: “On two sides was the beach; behind, the lagoon; in front, the darkness of the island” (LotF 77). The sea is impossible to transgress, since the boys have no boats, some of them like Piggy cannot swim, and the waters beyond the reef are infested with sharks: “no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water where the snapping sharks waited” (LotF 56). The jungle is penetrable, yet the vegetation does not allow for an easy and comfortable transgression. The heterotopia of their discussion

238

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

ground, the elevated rock on the beach, may be accessible, but this requires climbing. At the same time it is presented as a place where the boys are constantly falling off into the sand. In addition to the physical restrictions this place is reserved for certain specific occasions, and only then is it free to be used. The small opening in the jungle discovered by Simon is guarded by the thickness of the vegetation surrounding it. “When he was secure in the middle he was in a little cabin screened off from the open space by a few leaves” (LotF 57). “Castle Rock” is the most enclosed and most shielded of all heterotopias on the beach as well as on the island. It is over “forty feet” high (LotF 181) and hard to ascend. Once Jack’s group begin to use this space as their castle, they fortify it further by means of logs and stones. In addition this space is constantly guarded against the fear of attacks and intrusions. To become part of the heavily homogeneous group the boys need to show their allegiance to Jack and his tribe by applying face-paint and hiding their faces and identity behind these masks. Consequently, the heterotopias in Lord of the Flies connect individuals and help with the formation of communities. At the same time, however, they are spaces that represent the segmentation of the group of boys, into those who are inside and those who are outside. Interestingly enough, this separation is already hinted at before the elevated rock on the beach is turned into “castle rock”. At the same time the heterotopias in Lord of the Flies perfectly illustrate the reciprocal relationship between the production of space and the spatial production of society: when Jack and Ralph encounter and explore this space first, their reactions are completely opposite to each other. While Jack excitedly yells: “What a place for a fort!” (LotF 106), Ralph’s immediate reaction is the very opposite: “This is a rotten place” (ibid.). As in the case of The Tempest, for example, a specific space is not neutral. It represents completely different meanings to different characters. At the same time the space turns into a mirror of the boys’ attitudes and characters in general: Jack’s perception of the rock as a “fort” (ibid.) exposes his fascination with the military, war, and the strict hierarchical rule associated with such military encampments. For him the rock represents a clear dividing line, a demarcation of inside and outside, right and wrong. As such this physical space is immediately turned into a semantic space, a semiosphere. Ralph’s reaction to the rock also lacks any neutrality or detachment. As such, a

Transgression

239

space turns from an empty canvas into a signifier of the boys’ characters. In addition, Golding uses a set of spatial metaphors to express the boys’ relation to each other. Space is used to indicate the increasing separation of their characters and semiospheres. The increasing separation between Ralph and Jack is indicated by a spatial metaphor: “They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate” (LotF 55). This is an essential statement in the context of the novel, since it shows how Jack’s and Ralph’s identities are constructed alongside their perception of space. This importance goes beyond their both being metaphorically represented as “continents” (ibid.). As argued above, Jack identifies the nature of the rock as an enclosed, shielded, and impenetrable space. Ralph finds this space to be rotten and advocates the creation of a communally shared space, e.g. the huts on the beach. This alignment of space and the protagonists’ identities is important because it extends to the dominant narrative voice in the novel. This quotation and its metaphor of identity as a continent is interesting and important in the sense that this is one of the very few times that Jack is indicated to have various feelings and emotions, rather than just being a stock character representing everything that is violent and bad. The reader immediately perceives Jack as the bad, wild, unruly savage. One doesn’t for a moment ask what motivates him, what drives him, what angers and scares him. The reader gladly and instantly accepts Jack’s role as the devil-child, the savage out of bounds, freed from the shackles of civilisation. While Golding makes a case for the innately immoral nature of man and mankind, he still forces the viewer, willingly or not, into the perspective of the morally superior instance, an instance which brings its own, albeit superficial, judgment upon these unleashed kids on their postlapsarian island. To support his point the narrator activates the same perceptual, reactionary instincts that created the concept of the savage in the first place. The narrator’s constant, external focalisation on Jack denies the reader the chance to look deeper at this character. Of course, this narrative technique is in perfect alignment with one of the novel’s governing symbolic fields, namely the isotope of the mask. This symbol, ranging from the choir’s cloaks to the hand-painted masks, is one of the leading devices which support this idea of the savage beneath and the deindividualisation of the respective character behind the masks. The

240

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

refusal of any internal focalisation of Jack’s part is in perfect alignment with this theme. At the same time, it favours an essentialism which the seemingly enlightened message of Lord of the Flies wants to deconstruct, as one might suspect. Golding follows Conrad in misusing the “savage” to criticise the savagery of Western civilisation. Golding may not use, like Conrad, indigenous groups to do so. Yet he does rely heavily on the racist and essentialist connotations the signifier of the “savage” evokes. This signifier not only stands in the tradition of the indecipherable otherness of the “savage”, but this image violently supports this misperception. Where Robinson and Marlow construct the world they see around them according to their expectations, so too does the reader of Lord of the Flies. With regard to Jack, the mode of external focalisation does give enough hints at the character behind the mask. But while Ralph, the fair, tall boy, is granted absolution from internal focalisation, Jack is denied any justification of his deeds. Ralph likewise displays tendencies towards emotional and physical cruelty. But the narrator constantly counters these acts by showing his weak and vulnerable side. The dichotomy signified by the perception of this space is aligned with values and norms that at the same time cause and result in the strict separation of the boys into different groups. Shortly before his death, Piggy summarises this dichotomy and its attached values. Standing in front of the fort he asks: Which is better – to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? […] Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? […] Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up? (Golding 1954: 180)

Once Jack seizes the dominion over the majority of the group and the castle-rock this formerly oppositional space turns into the space of hegemonic rule. All other heterotopias that represented a communal effort or allowed for the individuality of certain characters are erased: the huts on the village are invaded and their inclusive character is desecrated. In the end, the safe space in the heart of the jungle, which represents the inside of the characters entering it, is smoked out and destroyed. Jack’s rule does not leave any middleground on the island, either spatially or of a discursive nature. Here the boys have reached a point where the infinity of choice they initial-

Transgression

241

ly had is reduced to a set of binary oppositions: a middle ground does not exist any more. Why, ultimately, are the boys unable to create a working heterotopian space that would stand in opposition to the society of norms and rules of their parents and of England in general? Why are they falling back into the old patterns of re-creating a segmented and mutually exclusive society, steeped in violence? Why can’t they use the seemingly neutral island space to create something new? Because this very space is anything but neutral. While the boys are convinced that they have escaped parental control, that they are free to do what they want, to live how they wish, without any sanctions, they are unable to create a lasting heterotopia. The irony lies in the fact that they believe they have escaped the spaces representing societies’ rules, such as schools, their parent’s houses, boarding schools, etc., while really they have already been ingrained and turned into spaces of this very rule themselves. All of the boys, each one of them, in themselves represent a space of their own. In an essential event of the novel, two boys who neither before nor after play any decisive role, Roger and Henry, are playfully fighting with each other. This quarrel results in Roger intending to throw pebbles at Henry; however, as he realizes, he cannot execute his intention: Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policeman and the law. Robert’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins. (Golding 1954: 62)

Wherever they go they take this parental order with them. Regardless of the material and geological reality of the beach, it is already pre-inscribed by rules and norms which are attached to the boys themselves. The boys are each at the centre of a normative semiosphere created by their education. The semiosphere’s border must never be trespassed. Additionally, the boys have received these rules in the form of the colonialist children’s literature they have read as children. Ralph is immediately reminded of the classics of this genre: Treasure Island‚ Swallows and Amazons‚ and Coral Island (LotF 34f) For him “[i]t’s

242

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

like in a book” (LotF 34). When Ralph is excited to realise that the island is a literary space come true, he does not understand that his perception of his space is a construction of the adults who wrote the books he loves so much, that is Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Michael Ballantyne. The seemingly empty canvas that is the beach and the island is really a pre-fabricated mind-map, infused with the more or less explicit values presented in the books mentioned. Once they set foot on the island they are already entering a space that is preconnected to certain scripts and behavioural norms as presented to them by these very books. Thus the first heterotopia they are intending to create is one that is nothing more than a realisation of the colonial order established in the various novels they have read. The boys in Lord of the Flies, however, are presented as being entangled in between both: the novel starts as a coming-of-age story, presenting at least the perfect setting and situation for such. Initially, the boys take on responsibilities by trying to establish some sort of rule and by accepting or demanding leadership. Various thresholds are to be mastered, such as organising the group and its social spaces, hunting in the dark jungle, building huts. Not all of these are transgressive, and not all of them are they able to perform. In one scene analysed above, Roger, e.g., intends to throw stones at his friend Henry, but is unable to transgress the prohibition implemented by society’s rules. In another, more evocative, example, Jack is unable to transgress the law that tells him ‘not to kill’. A pig entangled in the jungle creepers lies defenceless before him, yet he is unable to kill it: “They knew very well why he hadn’t: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood”. At this point the taboo is still strong enough (Golding 1954: 31). Later, however, Jack does trespass this former limit, and thus enters into a new state. Interestingly enough, the description of him killing the pig, of his transgressing the line and thus eliminating any ambiguity concerning his ability to do so, is immediately followed by a description of the beach disappearing almost completely: “The tide was coming in and there was only a narrow strip of firm beach between the water and the white, stumbling stuff near the palm terrace” (LotF 76). It is this transgression that introduces the subdivision of the two groups into the hunters/savages and those who decide against joining this tribe.

Transgression

243

By transgressing the rules, and doing so repeatedly, Jack finally assumes the power and leadership he was refused at the beginning. While the initial election left him without additional powers, his successful hunting changes the power-balance. So much so, that ultimately any taboos that surrounded the island are suddenly attached to him. He is turning himself into the law-giving power, which reciprocally turns him into somebody, if not something, else. His transgression leads to an estrangement of himself. After his first application of a painted mask he “looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome stranger” (LotF 63). The effect is massive, as the mask basically eliminates the boy behind: “the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness” (LotF 64). Golding stresses the importance of this effect by repeating this statement almost word for word: Jack “paused and looked round. He was safe from shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in turn” (LotF 140). While his taking on a mask has repeatedly been read as a descent into savagery, this is not the case at all. It is indeed a transformation, but it is not a degression into a lawless state. Rather the mask represents the re-formulation of the existing rules. What is represented as freeing and silencing any self-consciousness is, however, the very opposite. He does not just transgress once, or even twice. His transgressions are cyclical, and thus repeated. Rather than reading this as a proof for Jack’s or, on a broader perspective, humankind’s inherently violent and vicious nature, I would propose a different reading. His repeated transgressions are what I would like to call a ‘loop of justification’. He certainly is aware that his transgressive acts are in themselves not right. As has been argued, every transgression confirms the existing taboo, while at the same time the taboo’s power is put on hold, and as such justifies the transgressive act itself. Thus at the same time the crime is justified and a deed’s nature as a crime is silenced and hidden. To outdo the previous deed’s nature of a crime, the norm demarcating it as a crime has again to be erased by another transgression. This leads to an infinite number of crimes, all of them committed with the sole intention of undoing the previous crime. The taboo is repeatedly broken in order to silence its normative force. Every death on the island is met with silence. The first one, the littlun’s death in the fire started by the boys, elicits no response from the other boys. Simon, who died in the frenzy of the boys’ ritual dance, is likewise

244

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

suppressed, even by Ralph and most importantly by Piggy, who is always presented as the rational and critical member of the group. In the end, however, it is Piggy who loudly voices his disgust at the state of the boys and breaks the newly established taboo that demands that they do not talk about the transgressive nature of their prior deeds. Only when the boys’ behaviour is not presented as a transgression does it remain just and true to them. Their accepting the transgressions as such would obliterate the existing social structure with Jack at the top. It is consequently Jack who for one thing erases his identity by putting on a mask and transforms himself, the most transgressive subject on the island, into the very signifier of the new order. This new order also includes the rule that his name must not be uttered: “‘Jack.’ A taboo was evolving round that word too” (LotF 140). Jack is deified: he changes from a boy into a symbol of a new order. Any attack on him represents an attack on his society: “Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol. There were piles of meat on green leaves near him, and fruit, and coconut shells full of drink” (LotF 149). The word “taboo” appears just twice in Lord of the Flies: once in relation to Jack and his rule, as seen in the quotation above, and earlier in relation to the rules implemented by the boys’ culture of origin. Earlier in the story, when Roger wants to hit Henry by throwing a pebble at him, he is unable to do so, because his hand is held back since “[h]ere, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life” (LotF 62). The moment when the laws represented by “the taboo of the old life” (ibid.) give way to the laws represented by Jack as the taboo of the new life is the moment he “cut the pig’s throat” (LotF 69). In the highly symbolical structure of Lord of the Flies this first transgression of a taboo is illustrated by various spaces and the transgressions thereof. As illustrated above, the boys’ increasingly divided community is represented by an increasing number of heterotopias. The place on the top of the hill where the signal fire is located is one of them. This place is signified as exceptional and has to be guarded at all times, since the fire has to keep on burning. Whoever is responsible for maintaining the signal fire’s visibility is for the moment freed from all other responsibilities, and at the same time he is solely focussed on this one task. The fire itself represents the only constant visible link to the world outside the island, and as such it is a link to the outside culture. At the same time it represents culture itself: the

Transgression

245

fireplace is supposed to be the place where every kind of irrationality and childish behaviour has to be put on hold. This symbolic importance is supported, of course, by the fact that it is, after all, Piggy’s glasses that set the wood aflame. The fire, however, not only symbolises culture by metonymically referring to the culture of the outside world, but is also, and maybe more importantly, a signifier of the boys’ community. Ralph understands this function only quite late on: “This was the first time he had admitted the double function of the fire. Certainly one was to send up a beckoning column of smoke; but the other was to be a hearth now and a comfort until they slept” (LotF 162). The fire, consequently, also represents the single, most important rule: not to allow the fire ever to be extinguished. The end of the fire represents the end of any possibility of rescue as well as the end of the community. In consequence the moment when Jack hunts and kills the pig is the very moment when the fire on the hill goes out. A ship passing the island at this very moment is unable to detect the boys. At this point in time various transgressions conflate, turning Jack into the culprit. Jack and the rest of the boys are all aware of what has happened: the “dismal truth was filtering through to everybody” (LotF 71). Neither does Jack admit to his transgression nor does Ralph allow him to save face. Jack’s wearing a mask from this moment on metaphorically supports the fact that he is losing face. At the end of the story Ralph has problems looking at Jack in the “green and black mask before him, trying to remember what Jack looked like” (LotF 177f). Ralph’s assertion of leadership and his insistence on always maintaining the rules on the island, however, come with a price: “So Ralph asserted his chieftainship […]. Against this weapon, so indefinable and so effective, Jack was powerless and raged without knowing why. By the time the pile was built, they were on different sides of a high barrier” (LotF 73). Not only does this transgressive moment completely separate the group, but in doing so the connotation of the fire also changes: in the end it is the fire which the boys who have regressed into savagery use to smoke Ralph out of his hiding-place with the intention of killing him. This erasure of any evidence and the suppression of any memory concerning the two murders are represented on the beach. Here both Simon and Piggy are killed. On the beach they remain for a

246

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

short time before being swallowed up by the sea. Simon’s “broken body” (LotF 154) lies on the beach until the tide takes it out to the sea. “The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted. […] Simon’s body moved out toward the open sea” (ibid.). After Simon’s death Ralph and Piggy “passed the place where the tribe had danced. The charred sticks still lay on the rocks where the rain had quenched them but the sand by the water was smooth again” (LotF 174). Simon’s body as well as his blood have been washed away. The memory of Piggy is equally erased by the tide: “Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. […] Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone” (LotF 181). In the end, it is Jack who decides what laws exist and what laws are in place, and which rules and norms may or may not be transgressed. That his implementation of rules is completely arbitrary is shown by a short scene on the side, describing the punishment of one of his own. Robert says: “‘He’s going to beat Wilfred.’ ‘What for?’ Robert shook his head doubtfully. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. He got angry and made us tie Wilfred up. He’s been’ – he giggled excitedly – ‘he’s been tied for hours, waiting’” (LotF 159). At this point the heterotopian space turns into its inverse. Whereas the heterotopias in Lord of the Flies represented freedom from parental and societal control and were therefore the ‘other places’ in regard to the boys’ home country, Jack’s “castle rock” is something else altogether. As soon as the beach society splits up and segregates, the spaces they create mirror the increasing separation. Whereas the beach was initially a space of freedom from rule it increasingly turns into a space representing the conquest for power and control. Whereas the beach was initially a space of inclusion, with the important exception of Piggy, it now turns into a place of sovereign power. These spaces the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to as camp. The notion of the camp allows for a broader understanding of Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, since both represent two sides of the same coin. Dehaene and De Cauter link the concept of the heterotopia with that of the camp: “Heterotopia, so we argue is the opposite of the camp and could be a counterstrategy to the proliferation of camps and the spread of the exposure to the conditions of bare life” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008: 5). As argued above, the reversal from

Transgression

247

utopia into dystopia is initiated by an end of transgression and an intended eradication of ambiguity. That this attempt is reflected in the spaces to be considered can be seen with the creation of the camps that stand in opposition to the heterotopian aspirations. In many cases the perceived threat of the other, that is the other of utopia, turns into a justification of extending laws and rules that are intended to resist transgressive thought or actions. The liminal status of individuals and societies alike, which can be regarded as a time of possible change and reinvention of culture and identity, is stripped away. The transition from utopia to dystopia resembles the “contiguity between mass democracy and totalitarian states, [which] nevertheless, does not have the form of a sudden transformation” (Agamben 1998: 121). The openness of discourses, which guaranteed the freedom of each individual of the respective communities, is reduced and the discourses return to the binary set-up they initially intended to avoid. According to Giorgio Agamben, It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. (Agamben 1998: 121)

I will argue that the surveillance of language, ideology, and (utopian) culture translates into spatial practices that are in essence dystopian. 4.6 Fighting Ambiguity on the Shore: The Beach as Camp In an attempt to counter the ambiguity and difference prevailing in their societies the beach-communities transform their heterotopias quickly into camps, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms. The beach thus turns into a space of exception and its inhabitants or prisoners are by means of othering turned into bare-life, stripped of any pre-existing rights and in the last resort of their human status. The same holds true for utopian and dystopian thought and imagination in general. As has been argued, a major characteristic of utopias is their inability to cope with change and excessive elements

248

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

of any kind. To prevail and to maintain their utopian status any outside influence has to be avoided. Group members who are no longer incorporated into the hegemonic ideologies need to be either reeducated or excluded. The classic example is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from their utopian Paradise. After eating the apple “Adam and Eve were ejected from Paradise because they had lost the naiveté demanded by utopias” (Goodman 2003: 2). This single element of additional knowledge subverted the inherently perfect order and structure in the Garden of Eden. In addition Lord of the Flies effectively shows the inherent instability of any psychological, physical, political, or linguistic system. Any system is bound to change, and the more desperate the attempt to avoid change and transformation, the stricter the rules and norms become, the more threateningly will acts of transgression be perceived. Any act of transgression exemplifies an opening and a fracture inside a system that is intended to be closed and coherent.7 The beach turns into a locale of punishment: in Paradise Lost Satan is chained close to the shore of hell. The society in Island of Pines executes its criminals on the coasts of the island. Robinson Crusoe kills the invading cannibals and quells the mutiny on the ship arriving on his shore. Dr Moreau punishes his creatures on the beach. Piggy in Lord of the Flies dies on the edge of the water. Karl the Swede in The Beach, who suffered a lethal attack by a shark, is relocated to the margins of the island community to die out of sight. The execution of punishment on the beach can be read in the following ways: as argued above, the creation of island societies goes hand in hand with the creation of an idiosyncratic culture, specific rules and expectations. This symbolic order can be read as the establishment of a new semiosphere whose internal circle is increasingly impermeable and averse to change.

























































7

As such transgression is related to what Michel Serres calls noise, transgression produces the static that undermines a system’s equilibrium. The representative(s) of hegemonic power “represses the noise if he belongs to the functioning of the system. He represses the parasites [...]. This repression is also religious excommunication, political imprisonment, the isolation of the sick, garbage collection, public health, the pasteurization of milk, and so forth, as much as it is repression in the psychoanalytical sense” (Serres 2007: 68).

Transgression

249

The established discourse, often utopian in nature, is intended to maintain the status quo. Alterity and otherness are increasingly regarded as threats to the existing order and to the set ways of the societies. This closure of the semiosphere is an attempt to avoid difference and differentiation, resulting in a mindset that could be called structuralist at best. The perceived threats to this system multiply and include members of the community as well as externalised threats. Due to their increased inflexibility the respective systems are endangered by the most miniscule epistemic changes. In their most basic form these signifiers are presented in various ways: a prophecy (Macbeth), the apple from the tree of knowledge (Paradise Lost), the footprint in the sand (Robinson Crusoe), the capitalistic fashion catalogue (Island), the forbidden map (The Beach), the unspeakable word (Oryx and Crake), and others. Any epistemic excess, any transgressive thought, proves to be the grain of sand that will shake the utopian equilibrium out of balance. To keep utopia intact Satan is exiled from heaven, Adam and Eve have to leave Paradise, Caliban is subjugated and robbed of his native language, the sinners in the The Isle of Pines are thrown off the cliffs, the cannibals in Robinson Crusoe are killed, Kurtz has the enemies of his dystopian society hunted to death by his disciples, Piggy is stoned, the newcomers in Island are re-educated. In Oryx and Crake Crake, the creator of “Paradice” is as extreme as the God of the Old Testament: he extinguishes the old system through a viral flood, and recreates the society according to his own ideas. The transformative power as represented by the beach is countered by a most inflexible, fossilized utopia. It is this very end of semantic and systemic mobility that brings the utopia to an end and turns it into a dystopian state. Once the discourses of the established islands turn from being developing, open and flexible entities into binding laws, the beach, the metaphor of this very openness and, ultimately, freedom, turns into the very locale where transgressions are punished. Everybody who does not adhere to the rules of the newly created societies, everybody who does not fit into the newly (re-) established dichotomies, is punished here. Yet every transgression, and every attempt to undo such a transgression by means of punishments, leads to further thirding and differentiation. Naturally, the cementation of laws and dystopian regulations has to be performed at the space that represents the opposite, namely ambiguity, the beach. This transgressive space is transformed

250

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

into a symbolic site of punishment. The punishment there is a form of spatial exclusion. The misbehaving group member is othered by marking her or him as an outsider and placing the culprit outside. Thus the power of binary law symbolically overwrites the space of third thinking, of openness and progressive discourse. The punishment, then, is not only symbolic in the sense that it is inflicted and inscribed on to the punished, by placing him or her outside, or in a state between. The punishment is in addition symbolic in that it overwrites the metaphorical significance of the space where it is executed. The shore that marked the beginning of a new society and of a recreation is turned into its opposite.8 In general the liminal space of the beach is consequently the most prominent site of punishment. As argued above, the beaches, banks, and coastlines represent a contact zone of cultures, ideologies and ideas. These are spaces where two systems encounter, contest or support each other. The hegemonic powers on the islands have hardly any interest in taking over the visitors’ convictions. Thus with the increasing fossilisation of the powers on the island the beach turns into an important site of punishment and exclusion. The binaries of cultural competition and the dichotomies that are produced by this very antagonistic world-view, such as inside/outside, citizen/stranger, are intended to be implemented in the single space that represents the very resistance to any fixed symbolic matrix. The implementation of laws through punishment attempts to break the non-conformity of this symbolic space and its adjacent systems. The punishments are intended to give form and fixture to a cultural construct that is either losing coherence or is at pains to construct and formulate a new cultural identity. These rules are of differing complexity and necessarily reflect the identity of the societies they spring from. The relation between the established laws, their time of origin in the respective narrative and the space where the punishments

























































8

The prefix in the word re-creation, the ‘re-’, already hints at the impossibility of creating something completely new, the difficulty of installing a society that is drastically different from what is known to the creators. Many of the narratives present the readers with characters that have the possibility of starting anew, that have the possibility of creating a utopian society, but repeatedly fail to do so. Ultimately, they re-create what they already know, as is the case, e.g., in Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, or The Beach.

Transgression

251

are executed are of vital importance for understanding their genesis. As argued above, this space is the very suture between the outside and the inside, between the culture of the imagined binaries and chaos. Punishing the culprits in this very space is a mostly futile attempt to extend the rule to conquer the very place that refuses definition. In Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines this process of establishing law and order and excluding the other is rather straightforward. The male-centred utopia is in the course of several generations transformed into a society with very strict rules. Immediately after the first uprising, “bad manners produceth good and wholesome laws for the preservation of humane society” (The Isle of Pines 202). Unexcused absence from the monthly bible sessions results in the person concerned being denied food and drink. Rape is punished by the perpetrator being burnt at the stake, a punishment by fire that symbolically resembles the passions that led to the crime in the first place. Adultery results in loss of “privities” for the men and loss of the right eye for the women (The Isle of Pines 202). Physical injuries and theft are to be repaid in the same fashion. Disrespect and insubordination lead to punishment “by whipping with rods” and expulsion from the society. (The Isle of Pines 203) Those who “blaspheme or talk irrelevantly of the name of God should be put to death” (The Isle of Pines 202). The particular crime of blasphemy is “adjudged to death and thrown off a steep rock into the sea, the only way they have of punishing any by death, except burning” (The Isle of Pines 208). Eviction from the island by throwing the culprit down the cliffs is put into action twice in The Isle of Pines: John Phill and Henry Phill are both perceived as usurpers against God and the Governor. Both have to go the way of Satan and his Peers in Paradise Lost: they are thrown out of “paradise” (The Isle of Pines 197). Their fall from grace is symbolically punished with their falling into the sea towards their deaths. Again, this punishment for one thing comprises the Lacanian notion of “double death”, with life and body as a symbolic reference to the culprit being erased. The cliff, which in distinction to the beach is a clear divider of land and sea, is the site of punishment. The rite of legal execution, however, is not as clearly divided. As has been argued, the implementation of laws and their execution marks the downfall of most utopian societies in the respective beach narratives. Why is that?

252

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

While the seemingly unmistakable rules are intended to counteract the symbolic chaos, as represented by the beach, these laws are in themselves highly fluid and anything but clear. Even in the case of a rather simplistic and satirical account such as The Isle of Pines, the laws cannot escape the logic of a third. The six laws issued by Pine the Elder “with the advice of some few others of his counsel” (The Isle of Pines 202) resemble the Mosaic law from the Old Testament. Their reductionism punishes the one who misses the spiritual nourishment of the bible by withholding food and drink, the rapist on the burning stake, the adulteress with “her eye bored out” (The Isle of Pines 202) and theft and violence are punished on a similar basis. Every deed corresponds to a particular punishment. These four laws are bracketed by law number one, blasphemy against God, and law number six, insubordination against the Governor. These crimes against the two “capital Gs”, God and Governor, reserve capital punishment for blasphemy. The punishment of Henry Phill, however, combines laws one and six and formulates an implicit seventh law. Insubordination against the Governor equals blasphemy against God. The punishments are equally connected; the expulsion “from the society of the rest of the inhabitants” (The Isle of Pines 203) is joined with being “put to death” (The Isle of Pines 202) in terms of the first law. This very combination of both laws and their execution not only hints at the hegemonic hubris of the Pines. More importantly, this silent legislation, adding to the six commandments a secret seventh law, thus completing the holy number, is a legislative figure of the third. This expansion gives rise to an infinite number of interpretations of the law. The unspoken seventh law is actually a realisation of a law whose implementations are infinite, and as such is a travesty of justice. The myriad utopian freedoms are suddenly overturned by myriad dystopian limitations. This renders ironic the statements made in the postscript that these islanders “have not the happy means to express themselves. In this respect we may account them fortunate, in that possessing little, they enjoy all things” (The Isle of Pines 212).

Transgression

253

4.7 Crossing the Epistemic Abyss: Narrating the Other Side in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake In some of the beach narratives the ambiguous openness of the spaces, as seen in Robinson Crusoe, is counteracted by figures of the third assigned for that very reason. The following part of this study is concerned with the analysis of figures of the third that are intended to communicate the incommunicable, rather than intentionally attempting a distortion of the existing systems. The beach as a spatial representation not only of cultural contact but also of the related discourses is a space where discourses are presented as fluid, in the making and as constantly changing. The liminality of the space and of several of the protagonists entails dissolution of the dichotomic discourses at hand. So rather than just re-capitulating and confirming the existing dichotomies, the focus shall be on the space in-between, the inbetween of the discourses, the transgressive elements thereof. However, the following analysis of the intermediate spaces of dichotomous discourse intends to show that these discourses are far from being merely dualistic. They are rather triadic in nature, and hardened as the concepts of I/Other, inside/outside, culture/nature may appear, there is always an element of the third. Koschorke argues: Differenztheoretisch entstehen ‘Effekte des Dritten’ immer dann, wenn intellektuelle Operationen nicht mehr bloß zwischen den beiden Seiten einer Unterscheidung oszilieren, sondern die Unterscheidung als solche zum Gegenstand und Problem wird. Zu den jeweils unterschiedenen Größen dritt die Tatsache der Unterscheidung wie ein Drittes hinzu, das keine eigene Position innehat, aber die Positionen auf beiden Seiten der Unterscheidung ins Verhältnis setzt, indem sie sie zugleich verbindet und trennt: ein Drittes, das binäre Codierungen erst möglich macht, während es selbst als konstituierender Mechanismus gewöhnlich im Verborgenen bleibt. (Koschorke 2010: 11)

Beach narratives abound with elements of the third, but the figure of the third is not necessarily a character or an allegorical representation. Figures of the third appear in various forms: they can be presented as of characters, spaces, and linguistic-semantic processes. The type of discourse all of them illustrate I will read as transgression. The third is a form of transgression, yet not in the sense in which the word is often used and as its etymological root implies. This study

254

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

argues that the transitory nature of the beach is based on its being, more importantly, a site of transgression. The transformation of subjects and societies is not done by crossing borders, as the process of transgression is often misinterpreted. Transformation and transition are the result of transgression, but transgression is not merely the process of stepping across. Transgression is the act of staying on the liminal line, remaining in the liminal state, either wilfully or forced by external circumstances. According to Michel de Certeau this is a paradox of the frontier: created by contacts, the points of differentiation between two bodies are also their common points. Conjunction and disjunction are inseparable in them. Of two bodies in contact, which one possesses the frontier that distinguishes them? Neither. Does that amount to saying: no one? (de Certeau 1984: 127)

Paradise Lost’s seraphim Raphael and Oryx and Crake’s Snowman may appear to be as discrepant as it gets, when it comes to comparing both characters. Not only are 336 years between them, but also completely different historical backgrounds and motives. This initial discrepancy, however, will only make more visible the paradigmatic similarities between them. Additionally, they do share certain characteristics beyond their being figures of the third, to be precise, messengers. Both are gobetweens between two worlds that are presented as unconnected and separated by a gulf that is uncrossable for the subjects they are responsible for: Adam and Eve are unable to transgress from Paradise to Heaven, even if they wanted to. They are absolutely excluded from the heavenly space. John Milton may go to great lengths to present the trajectory Heaven – Chaos – Earth – Chaos – Hell as connected (e.g. by means of the golden ladder reaching to heaven, and its counterpart the bridge connecting hell and earth). But neither pathway can be trodden by Adam and Eve. The Crakers in Oryx and Crake are separated from the world prior to their existence through temporal barriers. The past, and their creator Crake, are extinguished by a viral apocalypse. Raphael and Snowman are both charged with the task of connecting both worlds and imparting the wisdom of one culture to the other. God sends Raphael to Eve and Adam to inform them about the creation of the universe. Crake sends Snowman to tell his own creations about the reason for their existence. Both are imparting the my-

Transgression

255

thologies of the other side to the beings in the here and now. And both do so by means of language. That this aspect is anything but banal, but is rather the problematic core of epistemic exchange between two cultures presented as oppositional, will be illustrated shortly. Transgression is Raphael’s and Snowman’s task: transferral of knowledge from one system to the other, without threatening the systemic integrity of either or both, is imperative. Snowman does so by bringing the Crakers to the beach. Between the ocean and the apocalyptic world, in this ambiguous space he is trying to fulfil the task presented to him by Crake. Interestingly, in the spatial set-up of Oryx and Crake it is the sea, rather than the land, that represents the past. It is the sea that makes Snowman’s creation of a new myth for a new creation almost impossible. While he is trying to create a mythical, yet, coherent, world-view for his subjects, the beach spits out objects of a destroyed civilization, objects the Crakers cannot integrate into their developing world-view. Snowman, being a figure of the third himself, thus has to deal with the beach, whose flotsam represents a third element of its own. And thus the parasitic, infinite process of signification begins. Raphael is in a similar situation. He may not go to a beach or a shore, yet Paradise is equally located between two systems affecting its semantic integrity. Only initially does Milton present Paradise as a secluded and heavily guarded space in the vein of More’s island Utopia. But Milton quickly extends the vision and presents Paradise, like the beach in Oryx and Crake, as a space in-between. Heaven sends his messenger, Raphael, to pre-emptively save Adam and Eve from Hell’s messenger Satan, who wants to destroy the inherent order in Paradise by imparting his lies. Adam and Eve, like the Crakers, are caught in the midst of a war of ideologies, between two systems of thought that are oppositional to each other. Raphael’s and Snowman’s position as messengers demands of them to accept a liminal state in-between: they cannot look and talk as they would in their system of origin, that is heaven and the preapocalyptic world. Both are presented, and present themselves as degendered. Angels, Raphael tells Adam, are not gendered, rather they can take any form they intend to. And that is exactly what Raphael does: prior to talking to Adam and Eve, he takes on the physical nature of a male human-like figure. He turns himself into a sign of hu-

256

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

mankind, rather than appearing in his angelic form since this form, he explains, would be beyond understanding for Adam and Eve. Consequently he does not only change his corporal form. To deliver his message he employs a mode of accommodation that is mostly tropical in the linguistic sense. Raphael argues: Yet for thy good This is dispensed, and what surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms As may express them best. Though what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heav’n and things therein Each to other more like than on Earth is thought? (PL 5.570-77)

To re-create an image of heaven and narrate the creation of Earth, Paradise and Adam and Eve he has to invent a symbolical language of his own. This accommodation serves to help Adam and Eve to approach an understanding of the realities beyond their plane of existence.9 Snowman is equally de-categorised from the perspective of the Crakers. As if in anticipation Jimmy renamed himself Snowman, a name that by reference designates his in-between status: “existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints” (OaC 8). As does the beach, Snowman represents a figuration of the third, he is everything and nothing at the same time. So both of their appearances float between the dichotomic systems of the subjects they are talking to. They are human enough not to be terrifying, yet they lack specific characteristics, which would help Eve and Adam as well as the Crakers to incorporate their being different into their existing world-views. As such they are symbols themselves, they neither belong to one category nor the other. They are transgressing the boundaries of existing categories. Yet this transgression, typical for figures of the third, is of a double nature: the transgression is necessary to com-

























































9

This notion of Adam and Eve lacking the capacity to take in the realities outside of Paradise is taken up in Book VII: “Immediate are the acts of God, more swift / than time or motion but to human ears / Cannot without process of speech be told, / (So told as earthly notion can receive.)” (PL 7.176-79)

Transgression

257

municate that which cannot be communicated, while at the same time it undermines the dichotomies they have to confirm. Raphael’s task is to stabilize the epistemic structure of Paradise, to help Adam and Eve to maintain their perfect utopia. But the perfection of this utopia, of this immaculate microcosm, is under siege from the outside, that looming threat of Satan transgressing the limits that are Chaos and the walls of Eden. To fight fire with fire God sends Raphael to prohibit this intrusion. But, ironically, once Raphael sets foot and wing in Paradise the process of infinite transgression is initiated. Raphael’s presence indicates to Adam and Eve that there is something else outside their perfectly ordered world, and it is this very knowledge that turns the forbidden fruit from an ordinary apple into a singular temptation. Snowman faces similar problems. He is given very clear rules by Crake concerning what the Crakers must know and what they never know. Oryx and Crake does not present a figure like Satan, nor is there an opposition as between Satan and Raphael. Both elements are united in Snowman himself. He partly takes on the responsibility of educating the Crakers and of providing a myth for them. But his own inner in-coherence, his slow regression into madness, as well as the remnants of times past, make it increasingly hard for him to maintain a semantically logical world-view according to the demands of Crake. According to Ralph Pordzik “Crake notoriously belittled the idea of spirituality along with the view that ideas are produced through discourse. [...] Language, for Crake, is merely a vehicle to transport notions already shaped and fixed in the mind” (Pordzik 2012: 153). To maintain these notions, however, is impossible. One of Crake’s rules was “that no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent – even stuffed, even skeletal – could not be demonstrated” (OaC 8). And Snowman is left with the task to create for the Crakers a coherent myth and symbolic world-view. This attempt, however, is constantly challenged. For one thing, the shorelines where the Crakers live constantly bring forth the debris of the bygone culture: the flotsam includes “a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean” (OaC 7). Each of these Snowman has to recontextualize in order to integrate them into the myth. He certainly is aware that he has to get the “story straight, keep it simple, don’t falter [...]. Internal consistency is best” (OaC 110). Yet this internal consistency is threatened by everything that enters from the Crakers’ domain. And the further he expands his narrative, the more Snowman

258

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

has to integrate tropical language, even if he “should avoid arcane metaphors” (OaC 112). The second problem he has to face is the lack of signification, or in one elemental case the missing signified for the signifier. According to Pordzik, the “signifying chain is always incomplete; it always lacks the signifier or term that could complete it; the missing signifier is constitutive of their subject position as a post- or transhuman tribe” (Pordzik 2012: 154). When Snowman once has to leave the Crakers for a longer time his absence leaves them with a void in their chain of signification, which they fill by creating a substitution for Snowman,10 an effigy. Solely “[d]ifferentiating on the simple basis of the dichotomy presence/absence, they thus acknowledge and transcend the lack they perceive to exist in their world” (Pordzik 2012: 155). By creating this effigy the Crakers evolve from a community based on dualistic symbolic-processes to a community entangled in trialectics. Earl Ingersoll argues: “In addition to their deities Oryx and Crake, they seem to be developing symbolic representation and possibly another deity – Snowman, to whom they were praying for his safe return” (Ingersoll 2004: n.p.). The duality of the Crakers’ gods is transformed into a tripartite religion with Snowman representing the connection between the here and there, the literal and the figural. The structuralist world intended by Crake, which according to his design would be free of “any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money” is about to break apart (OaC 359). In the end, the shore turns into a contact zone again. Following “the beach northward” (OaC 430) Snowman encounters “a human footprint, in the sand. Then another one” (OaC 431). The humans of old are about to encounter their genetically engineered children. This contact is re-starting the transgressive cycle of signification all over again, the time is re-set: “From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour, Snowman thinks. Time to go” (OaC 433). In Michel Serres’s terms, Snowman is a parasite in the double sense: firstly he lives off the fish the vegetarian Crakers unwillingly catch for him. There is no return-value from his side. The Crakers

























































10

This event could be read as the birth of a myth. Frederic Jameson argues: “For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a narrative process whereby tribal society seeks an imaginary solution” (Jameson 2003: 4). Snowman’s absence introduces the Crakers to figurative thinking.

Transgression

259

assume that he can save them, but in the end Snowman lives off their contributions. Secondly, Snowman is the parasitic noise that threatens the symbolic unity of the Crakers. Serres argues that “in this somewhat fuzzy spot, a parasite is an abusive guest, an unavoidable animal, a break in a message. In English this constellation does not exist: a break in the message is called static, from a different semantic field” (Serres 2007: 8). Ironically the one person that is supposed to eradicate ambiguity is the irritant grain of sand that unsettles everything. Both John Milton and Margaret Atwood present the problem of mediation between these two discrepant worlds as a linguistic one. Both represent language as the core-problem of the impending downfall. Both versions are in a way post-structuralist deconstructions of structuralist world-views. That Margaret Atwood would write in such a way does not come as a surprise, really. As an academic trained in these very fields she is certainly more than aware of the respective theories. And whether she is a post-structuralist or not, Oryx and Crake certainly plays with post-structuralist notions concerning the creation of meaning. It is undoubtedly a nice satirical gesture to present the only God-like creator, the genius of creation, that is Crake, as a structuralist, whose biggest mistake is a belief in a system that can be divided into binary oppositions. This idea certainly fits the notion presented throughout the book that pits natural scientists, “numberspeople” (OaC 28), against students and professions related to the Arts,11 “word-people” (ibid.). Ultimately, both Milton and Atwood depict the impossibility of maintaining a closed system of thought, represented by an absolutely coherent linguistic system that withholds the production of alternative meaning, and, consequently, alternative thought. Both texts represent the liminality of a human existence as represented through and constructed by language. C.W. Spinks argues: The point here is that the epistemological condition of man – whether we, he or she like it or not – is liminal. Human beings live on the threshold, and their perspectives must shift when their threshold shifts.

























































11

In this respect Atwood’s Oryx and Crake stands in opposition to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. Where the Crakers’ creation of the effigy re-introduces symbolism and art, “McCarthy shows us a future in which the end of nature spells the end of art, character, conversation, and social complexity” (Harbach 2007: n.p.).

260

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville Data are ephemeral, and the patterns of data are in flux. (Spinks Jr 1991: 81f)

Paradise Lost and Oryx and Crake represent in Raphael and Snowman two figures of the third that are supposed to prevent transgression and transgressive discourse, but their very existence, their very otherness as perceived by two cultures that prior to their arrival did not know alterity, sets off what they wanted to pretend. Their presence introduces a third into binary systems, and when “binaries are put together in triadic relations, their growth potential is virtually unlimited” (Spinks Jr 1991: 77).12 This addition of the third leads to an infinity of combinations, and hence an excess of signification. And this excess needs to find representation, which, then, is offered by spaces of the third, and is expressed by figures of the third. The protagonists are sent back to a natural state from culture. By opening up a third space, as represented by the beach, the island as setting still answers, according to Gilles Deleuze, the “question so dear to the old explorers – ‘which creatures live on deserted islands?’ – one could only answer: human beings live there already, but uncommon humans, they are absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a prototype […]. There you have a human being who precedes itself” (Deleuze 2004: 11). The former is prelapsarian, the latter is postlapsarian and thus grounded in mythology. However by transferring the past into the present and the present into the past in the form of utopian or dystopian spaces the island is transformed into a microcosm of the society it refers to. It offers the possibility to present the macrocosm and deviations thereof in miniature. Here on the beaches and shorelines mankind is deprived of civilization and portrayed as an essentialist version of itself that has to re-create its culture and identity. The beach is the stage where this re-formulation of identity is set: Late in the evening, they came at last to the shore. The leaves of the trees were rustling, the water was gently waving, the setting sun was

























































12

Gilles Deleuze reads island narratives as infinite re-creations. He does, however, as opposed to Spinks, think of a circular structure, that is a constantly repeated creation, rather than a progressive multiplication of possibilities: “It is not enough that everything begin, everything must begin again once the cycle of possible combinations has come to completion” (Deleuze 2004: 13).

Transgression

261

reflected on it, pink and red. The sands were white, the offshore towers overflowing with birds. “It is so beautiful here.” “Oh look! Are those feathers?” “What is this place called?” “It is called home,” said Snowman. (OaC 412)

4.8 A Second Genesis: The Shorelines of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost Transgression results in ambiguity and questions existing dichotomies while at the same time confirming them. In order to transgress in the first place limits are required, and these limits are constructed analogous to the cultures that produce them. In the following analysis I will focus on beaches and shorelines as figures of the third in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This epic poem employs the beach as a figure of the third at various times and with various intentions. This reading will be helpful in tracing the creation and semantisation of various limits and their transgression. I will focus on the initial scene in hell and the creation of Pandemonium. Paradise Lost’s depiction of hell may be read as a first ambiguous utopia as it presents the attempted genesis of a utopian space and the failure thereof. This creation and deconstruction of a utopian state starts and is located at a beach. In Paradise Lost one of the first spaces the reader encounters is a shoreline. The shore in hell is the very place where the fallen angels discuss their future, a fact which carries utopian traces but then initiates the completion of their dystopian state. As such, the beach in hell is a discursive setting rather than a locale of predetermined connotations: it poses as a space in which the fallen angels negotiate their plans and direction. The beach also initiates and reflects the development of a character that initially is also presented as a figure of the third: Satan. The assertion that Satan, the antipode of God, is nothing other than the quintessential binary other may hold true for most rewrites of the Genesis story and the Bible in general. In Paradise Lost, however, the case is not so clear. William Blake’s description of “Milton being of the devil’s party” (Blake 1976: 150) as well as his recontextualisation of this old binary in Marriage of Heaven and Hell also allude to the openness of this character.

262

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

As has been said, Paradise Lost employs the beach as a storytelling device right at the beginning. The first effect is the creation of space per se: Satan and his fellow fallen angels are cast down into a bottomless pit, and this space is where Milton takes the reader of Paradise Lost right after his invocation of the muse. Hell is the place where the narrative starts, where time and space are defined. As far as its spatial qualities are concerned, hell is a place of nothingness, as these examples show: it is not exactly chaos, for which Milton created a separate sphere in his cosmology. Nonetheless, the initial impact of Hell is sensual rather than conceptual: like Satan, the reader is overwhelmed by the sheer sensual intake of sulphuric fire, noise, and visible darkness. Additionally, it is Milton’s extensive use of oxymora that makes difficult the cognitive access to these spatial surroundings. All this creates the image of a non-space, which is most likely what Milton intended to show, a place that is equal to the non-state, the hierarchical degradation of Satan and his peers. It is a place that mirrors their internal confusion as well: “O how unlike the place from whence they fell!” (PL 1.75). But to make it a worthwhile narrative space Milton acts like his God in the creationist accounts: he draws a line. He separates sea and earth. Fiery water and fiery earth it may be, but, nonetheless, both create sea and land. The dualism which stands at the beginning of a process in which the fallen angels rearrange, restate and reclaim their lost position is a spatial dualism. Following the invocation of the muse, the reader enters with Satan the middle of hell and encounters a protagonist that is not at the end but right in the middle of a process of individuation. Satan, being thrown out of heaven, is banished to Hell and sits in “Adamantine Chains” (PL 1.48) in the fiery lake. He is described as being chained to the lake of fire. Half of his body is submerged in the molten lava, the other half above: “he with his horrid crew / Lay vanquished rolling in the fiery gulf / Confounded though immortal” (PL 1.51-3). Here Satan sights his fallen army “o’erwhelmed / With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire” (PL 1.77). In Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island the punishment of pirates is described by Long John Silver as follows: We’re that near the gibbet that my neck’s stiff with thinking on it. You’ve seen ’em, maybe, hanged in chains, birds about ’em, seamen p’inting ’em out as they go down with the tide. […] And you can hear

Transgression

263

the chains a-jangle as you go about and reach for the other buoy.” (Stevenson 1883: 186)

Pirates were executed by means of this symbolic punishment: their corpses were exposed to the public by being put on the gibbet. John Briggs argues: “The punishment was designed to fit the crime. The convicted pirate was hung in chains at low water and then left to drown from the incoming tide” (Briggs 1996: 30). As was the custom, the pirates’ hands were fastened to a pole overhead on a gibbet located at the execution dock in Wapping, London. The specific locale was chosen so that the pirates’ bodies were placed amidst the Thames’ infinitely alternating interplay of ebb and flow. The tide’s repetitions resulted in the floods covering most of the criminals’ bodies and the ebbs laying bare the hanging corpses. The symbolism of this punishment places the culprits’ corpses in eternal liminality, an endless change of flood and ebb. Satan himself is fixed, in a position that resembles the punishment for pirates on the gibbet:13 he is “Chained on the burning lake”

























































13

In this presentation he resembles two side-characters in Thomas Heywood’s play “Fortune of the Sea: A Tragi-Comedy” (1655). Two side-characters, the pirates Purser and Clinton, who were modelled on historical figures, also end up on the gibbet. Symbolic as the punishment is, the reasons that can be identified for the pirates being marked out and punished share a structural similarity that reverberates throughout the text. The symbolic and actual liminality of the punishment on the tidal islet only echoes the reasons that made Clinton and Purser turn into pirates in the first place. While under Queen Elizabeth’s rule privateering was officially sanctioned, under King James’ rule, this former type of enterprise, which after all helped enormously in the foundation of the British Empire, was proclaimed illegal: James’ proclamation of “June 23, 1603 [was] the statute that officially ended the Tudor sponsorship of privateering.” (Netzloff 2003 53) This proclamation transformed those unwilling or unable to quit their maritime endeavours from privateers into pirates, and from patriots into outcasts. Consequently, Purser and Clinton are caught in the changing tides of their times. Their heroic virtue is now a perceived threat. Heywood focuses on this transition: “The play’s Elizabethan setting blurs distinctions between sanctioned Elizabethan privateering and prohibited Jacobean piracy, calling into question the ability of changing state practices to reconstitute the status of subjects.” (Netzloff 2003: 58) Purser and Clinton do get the chance of repentance; they are offered a position on a merchant’s ship, where their skills would be appreciated. Their refusal, however, hints at the real transition that is slowly being formulated and put into practice in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean times: the formulation and rise of a meritocratic ethic. What is really at stake for Purser and Clinton is the proto-

264

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

(PL 1.210) with “adamantine chains” (PL 1.48) only with “head uplift above the waves […] His other parts besides, Prone on the flood” (PL 1.193-95). Transgression and trespassing do come with a price, and the punishment on the gibbet located between land and sea is in its symbolic nature very much tied to the shorelines. Considering that this type of punishment was mostly applied to pirates, Satan’s being stamped as such might seem unusual. However, when looking at the text’s maritime metaphors and contextualisation it becomes increasingly clear that this alignment is not as far off as it might appear. Satan is, after all, the master-navigator of the epic poem and maritime imagery abounds. Satan’s revolution resembles a mutiny based on his pride and envy, and his wish to ascend the throne. Ironically he reaches the position he aspires to only after he and his followers are thrown into hell. Only then “Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d” (PL 2.5). In the group of the fallen angels Satan remains leader of the group, despite his unsuccessful revolution. He is blinded by envy concerning the status of the Son of God, which he regards as unjust and unmerited. But even in Milton’s cosmos meritocracy, despite God’s rule, is becoming increasingly important. As a supporter of Cromwell and the Commonwealth Milton went to great lengths to illustrate that true power is not bound to aristocratic heritage. In consequence the Messiah is also presented as someone “who by right of merit Reigns” (PL 6.43). The Son of God is not the second in line because of his position in the divine lineage but because of his deeds. God himself stresses the importance of right behaviour: “By merit more than Birthright Son of God, / Found worthiest to be so by being Good, Farr more than Great or High” (PL 3. 309-11). Satan feels his merits are misjudged: his mutiny fails, however, and he is punished accordingly on the gibbet in hell.14
























































































































democratic system established on their vessel and the freedoms they gained. In a nation where personal freedom is increasingly linked to the possession of land, those who spent their lives on the sea would upon their return be put into a subservient position, whatever their trade. 14

In this respect Satan likewise resembles Thomas Heywood’s presentation of the pirates Purser and Clinton. They also prefer to be executed than to serve in a society that does not respect their merits as seamen. In 1639, Thomas Heywood published a book called “The True Relation, of the Lives and Deaths of the Two Most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton” (Heywood1639). Here he narrates the first encounter of the historic Purser and Clinton: “that in regard of their experience and skill in Navigation, what basenesse it was in

Transgression

265

Here in hell, amidst the “doom”, “pain”, and “dismay”, he slowly gains spatial orientation in this place unknown to him. What he encounters is “A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible / serv’d onely to discover sights of woe, / Regions of sorrow” (PL 1.61-65). On the analogy of God’s creation of the world, the beginning is consumed with shapelessness and darkness. Only when Satan convinces himself and his fellow fallen angels not to give up is he able to create his own world. It is here that the seemingly infinite fiery sea is suddenly recognized as a “Lake of Fire” (PL 1.280), and thus sea and earth are separated as Satan “was moving toward the shoar” (PL 1.284). The analogy between Satan’s creation and God’s creation continues insofar as his bringing light into his new world is alluded to as part of the Homeric simile. This simile compares his shield in its size and its materiality to the moon. The imagery of plants, if only as a metaphor, is likewise supported in this simile by comparing his spear to “the tallest Pine” (PL 1.292). Satan’s initiation is completed and his fiery tempest conquered, once on the “Beach / Of that inflamed Sea, he stood” (PL 1.300). His reaching the beach ends the first act of measuring and thus mapping his new home. At this moment the location represents the first in-between two states, sea and land, eternal punishment and the possibility of a second revolt. Satan’s fellow angels, less active than their leader, have not yet crossed that liminal stage and are compared to seaweed on the “Red-Sea Coast”, where from “the safe shore […] [the Israelites] beheld their floating carcasses” (PL 1.306ff) after Moses parted the Red Sea. This shore is one of the very first spatial liminalities in hell, whose transgression by Satan indicates a new step in the narrative. This beach, however, as the fallen angel’s situation, is not as distinctive a space: the lack of definition in space and the variation of liminal concepts are transferred to everything surrounding the beach and ultimately inform
























































































































them to bee no better than servants, who had both the Judgement, and the ability to command, and to bee onely Imployed to benefit and inrich others, whilst they in the Interim wanted themselves” (Heywood 1639). According to Heywood’s account, both Purser and Clinton have too much experience to go the way of subordination. They are very much aware that the socio-economic transformation they desire will not be granted as quickly when working and “inrich[ing] others”.

266

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Hell’s ambiguous utopia: the fallen angels’ appearance, which reflects their mental state, the appearance of Pandemonium, and, most importantly, the physical and psychological state of Satan. The fallen angels may have been clearly defeated in war but their loss has not yet ended their transformation. They still have to decide on their future. Here next to this shore the fallen angels decide upon their future, and it is here they reflect upon their state in-between redemption or eternal damnation. When I propose that this situation does actually carry utopian and dystopian traces and is ultimately a very early ambiguous utopia in literary history, I do so on the following grounds: the possibility of utopia is not the proposed return to heaven after a phase of redemption, dystopia is not the prospect of eternal damnation. What is utopian, despite the fallen angels’ hostile surroundings, is the possibility for the community to reset and restart a society modelled on its very own perceptions and convictions. The mere fact that the fallen angels discuss together their fate, as well as their future, appears more democratic than God’s decision-making and command over his creation. The description of Hell’s first council is one of the very few times in Paradise Lost where an exchange of arguments, a discussion, is achieved. The majority of the discussions in this narrative consist mostly of discourses that are commands or mere instructions. Pandemonium, the assembly hall they create, is a first signifier not only of the fallen angels’ policy-making but also of their inability to achieve a utopian state. This space, which could be the representative locale of a new kind of government, a style of leadership that is opposed to the heavenly order, is anything but that. Pandemonium represents rather a process of mimicking heavenly order and, as a representation thereof, heavenly architecture. This is made obvious by the architect, the fallen angel called Mammon, whose “hand was known / In Heav’n by many a towered structure high” (PL 1.732f). If one examines heavenly architecture it becomes obvious that the differences are not as vast as one might assume. By employing the following conceit Milton counteracts the grandeur of the seemingly splendid building: the first description of size is illustrated by an imagery of smallness. Milton suddenly compares the multitude of angels to “bees in springtime” (PL 1.768). Pandemonium, which was first described as a “stately pile [that] stood fixed” (PL 1.722f), is then likened to a bee hive, a “straw-built citadel” (PL 1.773), an image that

Transgression

267

rather suggests frailty and hints at the building’s temporality, considering the locale of this straw-built Pandemonium, right next to a lake of fire. By means of this architectural metaphor Milton quickly makes clear that all the utopian imaginations of Satan and his peers are naught but mimicry of what they formerly opposed and he illustrates how prone this new society is to corruption. The variety of utopian possibilities the fallen angels encounter and discuss is likewise mirrored and resembled by the landscape, and notably again by the coastlines thereof. After the initial duality of fiery lake and land and the construction of Pandemonium, Hell is, in analogy to the angels’ decision making, further mapped: “along the Banks / Of four infernal Rivers that disgorge / Into the burning Lake thir baleful streams” (PL 2.574-76) the angels disperse. The angels decide which bank they want to follow, the banks of Styx, representing hate; the banks of Acheron, representing “sorrow, black and deep” (PL 2.578); Cocytus the river of lamentation or the river of rage, Phlegeton. These rivers are discursive spaces that resemble the speeches of the angels in Pandemonium. In Pandemonium, and before, the infinity of possible decisions is reduced to four proposals by the various angels, and the riverlandscape reflects these possibilities: Mammon’s argument stands in analogy to the river Styx, which represents hate. He argues that redemption would lead to having an “Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom we hate” (PL 2.248f). Moloch, the “strongest and the fiercest spirit” (PL 2.44) proposes a line of argument that recalls the river of rage, Phlegeton. Moloch would rather see the angels “armed with hell flames and fury all at once” (PL 2.60) rather than accepting “this dark opprobrious den of shame” (PL 2.58). This, however, is exactly what Belial assumes to be the right way. His path resembles the river Acheron, the river of sorrow. Belial doesn’t wallow in sorrow, but he is convinced that it is best to accept their present state, since being “chained on the burning lake […] sure was worse” (PL 2.169) and “Ages of hopeless end? This would be worse!” (PL 2.186). That he is proposing anything but a state of inaction, as often argued, is to be seen by the last option symbolized by the last river. Enduring the pains and sorrows is certainly less pro-active than starting a new war, but remains, nonetheless, a process that demands physical strength.

268

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

While the four options presented by the four rivers and proposed by the four angels are open to be followed, the fifth option is forever concealed. The river Lethe, which grants oblivion to those drinking thereof, lies “far off from these” (PL 2.583). Lethe’s water, which drowns in “sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe” (PL 2.608), can never be obtained since Medusa “with Gorgonian terror guards / The Ford” (PL 2.611f), supported by “harpy-footed furies” (PL 2.596). In addition the river Lethe represents a dystopian beach in the most negative and consequent sense: “the water flies / All taste of living wight, as once it fled / The lip of Tantalus” (PL 2.613-14). Just as the pool that promised Tantalus nourishment receded upon his approach, the water of the Lethe cannot be touched. Its fleeing from the thirsty man on the shore infinitely expands the shoreline, and the water can never be reached. This intransible shoreline is a powerful metaphor for a threshold that can never be trespassed. Interestingly enough this boundary is one of the few liminal spaces in Paradise Lost that is never transgressed. Forgetting and loss of memory, which promise bliss in these dire surroundings, is not an option for the fallen angels, and their inerasable memory stands for two things: eternal memory, hence, is a form of eternal punishment. Sin is not a discourse to be erased in hell. Here Milton also illustrates that redemption is most importantly the duty of facing one’s own narrative. This hardly comes as a surprise considering the overall importance of narrating and instruction in Paradise Lost. Like the beach, Satan is at this moment of the narrative a figure of the third. At this point in the narrative he is still in a process of transformation, which may be almost completed, yet is still progressing. His floating between the two states towards his final denunciation of God is also signified by his loss of light. This metaphor is employed by Milton quite extensively to show that Satan has not yet reached the distance farthest from God, as far as his character, space and appearance are concerned. Coming back to the importance of the beach it is important to note that the more Satan is set on his ways and on the fulfilment of his scheming, the further away he is from the beach. The beach as a figure of the third allows and initiates processes of individuation, as well as of personal change. In Satan’s history it signifies not only the transgression from one state to another, from heaven to hell, from grace to damnation. The beach also signifies the very moments in which Satan

Transgression

269

is making decisions on the way ahead and on his future. It poses as the very space that allows for utopian policies and presents the respective politics.

4.9 Post-Apocalyptic Shores and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road One of the bleakest accounts of a post-apocalyptic society published in recent years is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. The world it depicts is one of utter regression, where the most basic human laws are put on hold. It is a world of man against man. I would like to conclude this chapter on the shore as a site of regression with an analysis of this novel. This analysis intends to illustrate the following: in the first place I would like to recapitulate the various aspects I attempted to identify in relation to shore-narratives, such as the liminal, transgression, and regression. Various motifs such as the dissolution of space, bodies, language, and identity are as prevalent in McCarthy’s novel as in most of the other texts I have analysed above. An additional reason why The Road provides more than a mere summary is the fact that it not only presents a society at the absolute end, but rather focuses on the (possible) re-creation of a new society that rises from the ashes of the past. The Road presents the reader with the very moment before the second cycle of creation begins. The beach is, yet again, the space of hope and of new beginnings. In the following analysis I will read the journey towards the beach, which is one on the land, not from the sea, as a quest of re-mapping space, language, and, ultimately, identity. In a sense The Road is the opposite of John Banville’s The Sea, as interpreted in the introduction. Whereas the former is obsessed with the past and with memory, the latter is solely focused on the future. Both are representations of trauma, loss, and disorientation, and both are hoping to find salvation on the shore.15 As an U.S.-

























































15

The dystopian film Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón (2006) employs a similar topological motive. The movie presents a world where all women are infertile. After many years, however, a first woman is about to give birth. To save the mother and her baby she has to be brought to the coast where a ship, the “Tomorrow” waits for her. The coastal town is presented as a camp where immigrants and minorities are rounded up and subjected to the punitive powers of a state of exception. The shore is an impenetrable space which stops

270

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

American novel it does not fit the mostly British corpus of works I have looked at so far. As the analysis will show, The Road accumulates a multitude of references to British texts, so that with regard to its treatment of the utopian/dystopian beach it can function here as a cultural mediator and connector between the various texts. I would like to illustrate how Cormac McCarthy’s novel presents the protagonists’ quest towards the shore as a re-mapping of space and identity in a post-apocalyptic world. The novel turns public, everyday spaces into territories of threat and fear. The protagonists are liminal personae in a world where space and language are reduced to the most basic dichotomies. The Road presents a journey along the “isthmus” (Road 277) of existence, a line between light/darkness, subject/other, culture/nature, and life/death. The road itself is such an isthmus, and is presented as one of the safer spaces in the novel’s cosmos. It is lined by spaces that are potentially lethal. The forests are wet and muddy, but most importantly the dead trees are constantly threatening to crush anybody near them. The open plains are dangerous due to the increased visibility they provide. Yet in the case of the road itself, visibility also offers security as it allows a good surveillance of the surrounding spaces. I will read the protagonists’ journey directed towards the shore as a quest for the re-formulation of identity: “Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence” (Road 274). The topos of the journey towards the shore recalls various survival narratives which, post-apocalyptic or not, are concerned with the re-creation and re-formulation of culture. To mind comes Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, an account of a post-human race settling on the shores. Neville Shute’s novel On the Beach follows a submarine-crew searching for survivors of an atomic war along the American shorelines. McCarthy repeatedly evokes Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Not only is the rummaging of the floating ship in search of remains of a sunken civilization a classic trope of the genre, but McCarthy also recalls the discovery of the “bootprints in the sand”
























































































































mobility in both directions.

Transgression

271

(Road 253). As with Robinson, the encounter strikes fear and terror into the hearts of the father and his son. It is an empty sign that forces the protagonists to expect the same. As such it fits the general setting, which is one of an utterly destabilised world, where nothing is as it seems and constant re-evaluations are demanded. As with all these narratives, the novel portrays an existential crisis forcing the protagonists to reinvent their identity.16 This re-creation, however, even in the most apocalyptic narratives carries utopian traces. Alex Hunt and Martin M. Jacobsen who compare The Road to Plato’s Simile of the Sun identify a central theme of the novel as “the power and fragility of language in enabling meaning and thus civilization” (Hunt and Jacobsen 2012: 156). Initially, the narration in The Road neutralizes the setting by detaching the fictional spaces from any previously existing connotations and meanings. The imagined geographies of America, to use Edward Said’s terminology, of protagonists and readers alike are deconstructed. The cities in The Road may be real in the sense that they are material structures scattered all over the destroyed land. Yet as spaces they are useless, in regard to their former function, while as spatial signifiers they are emptied of pre-existing references. The cities and “the country [were] looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb” (Road 129). Consequently, the urban spaces lost all of their previous functions. Their former identity is erased. The derelict ruins are what Marc Augé calls “Non-Places” (1995), spaces that are too detached from symbolic connotations to be perceived as places. Some of these spaces only exist as memories of space, with no material remnants whatsoever.17 The past does reappear repeatedly in the form of artefacts, but these serve no particular function any more: He “picked up an arrowhead […] Then he found a coin. Or a button” (Road 203f).

























































16

Reviewers also have also recognized similarities to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play “Waiting for Godot” (cf. Warner 2006). McCarthy does allude to, e.g., Vladimir’s and Estragon’s planning suicide, which they denounce, because of the risk of leaving one of them alive. In The Road the mother, the father, and the son face a similar dilemma, being left with only two bullets in their gun.

17

Rainer Emig coins for these nostalgic projections of spaces the term ‘a-place’ (Emig 2011).

272

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

But these objects hardly mean anything in the post-apocalyptic world: “he dropped the coin and hurried to catch up” (Road 205).18 This change of symbolic meaning is of course reflected in the novel’s language, which hardly employs proper nouns or names. While the father and his son use a map, the places they encounter are only referred to as ‘cities,’ and their descriptions do not allow them to be identified: “the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste” (Road 8). “The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition” (Road 9) and “Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim” (Road 159). The similes likening the cities to “drawings”, “apparitions”, “black paper scrim” (Road 8, 9, 159), as well as to shapes and outlines, hint at their ontologically unreal status. The cities in The Road are empty signs in regard to their former function. Since the survivors are grouped into migratory tribes, the immobility a city demands from its citizens is likened to starvation and death and the various towns are perceived as dangerous sights: “In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid. The higher floors of the buildings were all dark. You’d have to carry up water. You could be smoked out” (Road 83). The spaces in The Road are almost indistinguishable. Everything is covered by grey ash, the temperature hardly changes, the light is dim and pale. Time is put on hold. The father only knows that the “clocks stopped at 1:17” (Road 52) and that it is “[l]ate in the year. He hardly knew the month” (Road 29). Time and space in combination are impossible to measure, an understanding of distances is hardly possible: “He’d no notion how far the summit might be” (Road 31). The narrator does give hints concerning the exact location of certain places, only to undermine them at the same time. One such indicator is an “advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the

























































18

The almost impressionistic style of The Road is at times reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s modernist poem “Tender Buttons” in which she consecutively aligns various objects from daily life with loosely connected associations. It is left to the reader to map these common goods and extract a sense of identity from this enumerative process. While McCarthy’s style resembles the impressionistic mode, he nonetheless inverts it by emptying the respective artefacts of any use and associations in the mind of the protagonists.

Transgression

273

roofslope. See Rock City” (Road 21). This billboard referring to Chattanooga in Tennessee, however, does not help the reader to map the position of the protagonists at all. The slogan “See Rock City” is famous for being painted on over 900 houses all over the Mid-West or Southeast. Consequently, this reference only indicates that the journey is probably along the East Coast, and a more accurate location cannot be deduced from this information. The extent of the “See Rock City” marketing campaign, which included nineteen states, makes mapping impossible. In The Road all means of mapping space are rendered useless. A tool mentioned in the novel is a sextant the father finds on a boat (Road 223). He was “[s]truck by the beauty of it […] there were patches of green on it […] but otherwise it looked perfect. […] It was the first thing in a long time that stirred him” (Road 228). Yet the mapping of space by means of the movement of the stars is impossible in a world where the darkness blocks out the skies. The darkness is impenetrable: “The blackness he woke on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (Road 15). The notion of eternal blackness, as well as its context and linguistic representation, are a reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Satan and his peers arrive in hell, at the shore of a storming sea of fire. McCarthy and Milton use respectively synaesthesia and oxymoron to describe the un-describable darkness: “yet from those flames/ No light, but rather darkness visible/ Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe” (PL 1.62-4). On the boat the man also finds a “yellow plastic EPIRB” (Road 228). The Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, however, is a mapping device that is also useless in a world bereft of the people necessary for receiving a signal. Pre-existing maps are not helpful either. Repeatedly “[t]hey studied the pieces of map but he’d little notion of where they were” (Road 127). The process of mapping and orientation is, ultimately, an individual task left to the protagonists’ instincts and experiences. The boat is one of the few objects that carry a name: “Pájaro de Esperanza. Tenerife. [Bird of Hope. Teneriffe.]” (Road 223). The fact that it ran aground on the coast and its interior is almost completely destroyed by the sea fits the bleak atmosphere of the novel. More importantly, I would argue, is the reference to Teneriffe, which fits the

274

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

theme of the quest. The isle of Teneriffe was the last safe haven for ships that intended to cross the Atlantic towards America. The ship as well as the man and the boy arrive from two directions at the same shore, a space of hope that remains unfilled. The setting in The Road is as reduced as in “Waiting for Godot”, where the peripheral text reads: “A country Road. A Tree. Evening”. Like Beckett, McCarthy uses an abundance of indefinite articles to describe and dislocate the fictional space. Any sense of orientation is impossible. Connections between names and named, signifiers and signified are deconstructed and inverted. Consequently, the spaces and maps in The Road require constant re-evaluation. This transitional status of cities, and their extinction, is metaphorically replicated by the boy who builds a city made of sand on the beach: He had a spatula made from a flattened foodtin and with it he built a small village. He dredged a grid of streets. […] The boy looked up. The ocean’s going to get it, isn’t it? he said. Yes. That’s okay. (Road 244f)

The deconstruction of public spaces also relates to the end of consumerism, whose symbols are inverted. An advertisement on a billboard, e.g., is painted over to warn strangers approaching a city. Whereas the advertisement intended to create desire, the warning sign does the opposite. While the advertisement wanted to include customers in consumer culture, the warning sign is a symbol of exclusion. Whereas the billboard was a metonymical sign for a society’s surplus and abundance, the warning sign represents the scarcity and starvation that have infiltrated into the post-apocalyptic city-limits. Consumerism may have been an element of pre-apocalyptic times; it remains, however, inscribed into the father’s discourse. Upon finding a can of “Coca-Cola” (Road 23) the father responds to his son by implicitly quoting an old commercial: “Yes, it is” (Road 23). The reference to the slogan “Coke it is” is lost on the son. His drinking the last can of coke can be read as a final step of extinguishing the capitalist past, its hegemonic discourse, and the spaces capitalism created. Brian Donnelly is wrong when he states that “Coca-Cola” was the only brand name in the novel. The narration also refers to “Hezzaninth, London” (Road 228) an English company producing sextants. The supermarket turns into an empty and useless space. Later in the

Transgression

275

novel McCarthy presents the supermarket’s post-apocalyptic spatial double. In a farmhouse the father discovers a basement close to a recently used kitchen. This dungeon is filled with chained survivors, whose limbs are partially cut off: “On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt” (Road 111). Such is McCarthy’s narrative style, that the narrator does not need to explicate the use of the body parts which have been cut off. Partly responsible for the narrative deconstruction of space is the double-focalisation of the novel. While the narration’s main mode of focalisation is mostly internal, that is the father’s perception, the novel repeatedly adds the son’s perspective. Thus the narration achieves a double mapping. One concrete, real space elicits two oppositional responses. The former is antediluvian and the latter postdiluvian. The father remembers the urban centres as spaces of community, culture, and safety. The son, who was born after the apocalyptic event, has never experienced urbanity as his father did. At one point the father realises the extent and the impact of their different perspectives of space: “Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed” (Road 153). This diverging perspective becomes painfully clear when they visit the “house where [the father] grew up” (Road 25). The man recollects the memories of his former home: “All much as he’d remembered it” (Road 36). The boy, on the other hand, is petrified by the potential threats the house represents to him: “There could be somebody there” (Road 35). He understands that his father has a perception of this place he cannot share, which he experiences as estranging. The son observes how the memories take hold of his father. The boy “[w]atched shapes claiming him [the father] he could not see” (Road 26). In the end, the beach, the only space of hope, turns out to be as dead and dangerous as the rest of the country. It is likened to a “vast sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless” (Road 222). This image is a reference to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its description of Brussels as a “whited sepulchre” (HoD 9), a space that contains nothing but death. The “Senseless. Senseless.” (ibid.) echoes Kurtz’s last words: “The horror. The horror” (HoD 69). Both quotations are related to the im-

276

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

possibility of making sense of and generating sense in a hostile and strange environment. The senselessness which is expressed illustrates the linguistic un-mapping of place and space. The re-mapping of place into space and the deconstruction of any pre-existing connotations are paralleled by a general dissolution of language. Since urban centres as communal spaces are non-existent, the boy never learned the vocabulary to describe communal spaces. I’ll be in the neighbourhood. Okay? Where’s the neighbourhood? It just means I wont be far. Okay. (Road 95)

A coherent fabric of semantic relations only exists in the father’s dreams. He dreams of “[t]hings no longer known in the world. […] He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (Road 13). With every step they take, with every act of remapping the past, even more is extinguished. The symbolic unity is ruptured as is the semantic space through which they wander. At the heart of the novel is a Beckettian distrust of language and symbolism. The eradication of space and language ultimately results in the dissolution of identities. Father and son are unable to define who/what they are (“What are you? They’d no way to answer the question.” – Road 162) and who/what others are (“Who is it? said the boy. I dont know. Who is anybody.” – Road 49). If “Esse est percipi” as George Berkeley claimed, what is the effect of a world where subjects are constantly forced to hide from another’s gaze. That to be seen and to be named is a threat is repeatedly stated in The Road. The old man whom the father and son encounter on their journey argues: “I couldn’t trust you with it. To do something with it. I don’t want anybody talking about me. To say where I was or what I said when I was there. I mean you could talk about me maybe. But nobody could say that it was me. I could be anybody” (Road 171). Yet in the re-mapping of space, language, and identity lies a utopian possibility of forming a new world. It is the boy who signifies the possible transition from old to new, from past to future: he is the one who is able to bridge Erebus. Playing a self-made flute, the boy is

Transgression

277

likened to Orpheus, wandering between the worlds of the dead and the living, to bring back his loved one. His music is likened to an Orphean language in creation: “A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from the ashes of its ruin” (Road 77). However, as in the Orphean narrative the backward look is perceived as dangerous if not deadly. Looking back, that is recovering the meanings of old, could result in misreading the spaces and humans of the present. In a world where language is created anew, the symbols of old are potentially misleading. Nostalgia is a trap. The lack of a symbolically coherent language, as well as the two perspectives of father and son, is countered by a single symbol, the fire that offers them a common vision: “If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same” (Road 180). The metaphor of the fire they are carrying connects past, present, and future. The “fire” is one of the few tropical signs in a world reduced to binary thinking, a world where ambiguity is crossed out but where there is an infinite threat of death. The “fire” not only allows both father and son to project their hopes and fears into that singular signifier, and as such acts as a moral mapping device in an immoral world, but it is also Promethean in the sense that their belief in the good in an immoral world helps them to maintain their humanity: Is it real? The fire? Yes it is. Where is it? I dont know where it is. Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it. (Road 279)

In the end a family of survivors, who promise a chance of safety and security, takes in the boy. The narration thus aligns the boy with various literary predecessors who walked through hell, escaped death and madness, and reached the safe shore, such as Dante, Robinson, Marlow, Ralph, Morden, and all the other characters who escaped their personal Inferno. All of these arrive on a shore whose ambiguous setting undermines their epistemic preconceptions, puts them in a liminal position, and thus offers the chance of recreation and transformation. The shorelines and beaches stand at the end and at the beginning of cyclical processes of individuation and regression, creating and deconstructing cultures and infinite changes.




5 Conclusion: Epistemic Anxieties And the map has started tearing along its creases due to overuse (The Books, “Smells Like Content”) Der Grenzraum ist das Wirkliche, die Grenzlinie die Abstraktion davon. (Friedrich Ratzel, 1851)1

Beaches and shorelines are literary spaces constructed as margins and borderlands. They represent the in-between of the discourses that meet in this contact zone. As such they are posited as more than symbolic spaces that present binary discourses. In various narratives employing the beach or the shore as a setting established discourse patterns are questioned, undermined, and deconstructed. The ensuing ambiguities give way to constructions of liminality and discursive transgression. With its connotations of borders, frontiers, or the limit the beachspace is a highly fluid spatial construction where various norms, cultural constructs and beliefs are intersecting each other. The shore turns into an epistemic microcosm that represents the simultaneity of important discourses existing in the contemporary societies. Ultimately, these trialectic processes initiate potential change and transformation. This potential is, at least in some cases, fulfilled, while in other cases the changes are met with increasing resistance and even greater adherence to existing beliefs. The epistemic openness is perceived as a threat rather than a chance and thus quickly transforms utopian aspirations into dystopian realities, open systems into closed and highly controlled systems. Yet whatever the outcome the beach as a setting foregrounds transformation and the potential for change. 1

Quoted in J.R.V. Prescott, The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries (1968).

280

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

In this interplay of stasis and transformation certain topological and discursive elements are constantly recurring. The three elements ambiguity, liminality, and transgression are repeatedly interrelated. The ambiguity of the spatial surroundings gives way to or indicates the protagonists’ liminal state. The arrival on the shore introduces the protagonists into a liminal state where they are forced to re-think and re-create their identity, culture, or, on a larger scale, society. This paradoxical state of ‘statuslessness,’ as it were, is sometimes a form of punishment; more often it offers the chance for utopian reformulations of pre-existing epistemic convictions. The protagonists are placed on an isthmus in-between two spaces representing opposition, binary concepts. Their being in-between offers them the possibility of transgressing pre-existing patterns of thought, epistemic constructs, perspectives, and ideologies. These initiate the possibility of transgressive discourses that can often be read as counterhegemonic and lead into possible transformations and re-creations of culture. The prefix ‘re-’ hints at the cyclical nature of these narratives, the old is taken over by the new, re-creation follows creation in an implicitly endless process. The second cycle is, however, not a synthesis in the Hegelian sense. This process of transgression has been read as a constant back and forth between binary oppositions, a process that undermines and confirms these at the same time, yet is never able to completely escape this pre-established matrix. This constant back-and-forth is repeated on a larger scale. Gilles Deleuze argues: “from the deserted island it is not creation, but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin” (Deleuze 2004: 13). This statement very much relates to a quotation of Michel Foucault on transgression which stresses the circular structure of transgression: “Essentially the product of fissures, abrupt descents, and broken contours, this misshapen and craglike language describes a circle; it refers to itself and is folded back on a questioning of its limits” (Foucault 1977: 55). This referral back to a culture’s own limits represents a culture’s subliminal anxieties as they appear in the respective novels. The underlying wish for transformation or the terror thereof lays bare the very elements of a semiosphere that lost their previous stability as represented by the semiosphere’s centre. Thus the very illustration of

Epistemic Anxieties

281

transformation as seen on the literary shores and islands represents synchronic epistemic anxieties. In the following these elements will be concluded, summarised and illustrated as the essential attributes of the literary shore as a stage for a transgressive discourse that constantly refers back to itself. To do so the various concepts presented in the chapters on ambiguity, liminality, and transgression will be applied to a poem that in ten lines explores several of the themes encountered throughout this study. The poem to be analysed is by the American poet Robert Hass and is entitled “Envy of Other People’s Poems” (2007): In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing. It was only a sailor’s story that they could. So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed By a music that he didn’t hear – plungings of the sea, Wind – sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds – And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch, Seeing him strain against a cordage, seeing The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever On their rocky waste of island by their imagination Of his imagination of the song they didn’t sing. (Hass 2007: 3)

Not unlike John Keats’s poem “On looking into Chapman’s Homer”, Robert Hass presents in poetic form an illustration of the poetic effect of poetry. Keats’s poem employs the perspective of a reader who is appreciating another poet’s work (Homer) as mediated by a second writer (Chapman). Hass’s perspective is that of an (aspiring) writer, who observes with envy the literary productions of her or his fellow writers. The former poem is concerned with the perception of another writer’s poetry, the latter with the perceived shortcomings of one’s own poetical works. Whereas Keats’s account is filled with the attempt to express the feelings of the sublime the poetic subject brings forth in the reader, Hass’s poem rather seems to be concerned with the distortions caused by envy and the perceived deficiencies of one’s own poetic voice. What Keats and Hass do have in common though is the paradoxical attempt to express the inexpressible. Experiences of the sublime and of envy both give rise to overpowering emotions, yet are equally elusive when it comes to presenting them in the form of language. Both responses are subliminal in their affective nature. Another similarity lies in the fact that both sublimity and envy are

282

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

only symptoms of a contact between a producer and a recipient that have to remain distanced from each other. Keats and Hass both choose Homer’s fictional world as their metaphorical source domain for their illustration of the contact zone between texts and their readers who are left shaken and disturbed by the emotional chaos caused by the sublime (Keats) and envy (Hass). However, neither refers to the original account of Homer’s narratives. Keats and Hass each explicitly use a second-hand account: Keats’s lyrical I highlights the significance of Chapman’s translation; the voice in Hass’s poem refers to “one version of the legend”. The former is distanced by translation, the latter by variation, yet both differ from the original and thus present transitional and changed incarnations of the poetic source. Both poems refer to a variation, however slightly altered, of the original text. This distancing move is especially important in Robert Hass’s poem. This intermediate layer creates an ambiguous space between the respective narratives implied by a first-hand account and the second-hand account that is presented. This results in an air of indeterminacy and ambiguity that is related to the spatial set-up in Hass’s poem. On the one side of the metaphorical space the reader encounters Odysseus, “lashed to the mast”. On the other side the reader is asked to imagine the “mute women gathering kelp” on the shore. The spatial set-up replicates the implied existence of two different narrative accounts: Odysseus staring towards the shore resembles Crusoe and Marlow in that he only sees what he expects to see. His mental constructions shape the reality he encounters by transforming his passive perception into an active reception. His perspective of the shore as seen from his ship completely inverts the realities on the “rocky waste of island”. Where the mute women reside, he expects singing sirens. Yet the female symbols of seduction and sexual deviance are in reality hard-working women. Both groups are divided not only spatially but also by means of their perception. Both live in their own makeshift worlds. Odysseus’ world is based on a “sailor’s story” which results in his imagining the sirens as lethal, seductive, mythical creatures. The women on the shore are also misinformed by “their imagination”. The gazes of Odysseus and the women are directed at each other and from both shore and ship they cross the space of the sea whose realities are the fundament for their respective imaginations: the “plungings of sea, /

Epistemic Anxieties

283

Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds” are all Odysseus hears. This intermediate space is a borderland whose exceptionality is supported by the respective implied and explicit synaesthesia: Odysseus’ ship is a place whose materiality relates to the sense of touch, as indicated by the wooden “mast” and the “strain[ing] cordage”. The women’s island is likewise related to the sense of touch, the island is “rocky” and their “gathering kelp” also evokes this sensory imagery. The space between Odysseus and the women, however, is exclusively described by sound: the “plungings”, the “wind”, and the clamour implied by the “off-shore hunger of the birds”. These sensory realms are connected by means of the gazes that are directed in each direction. When the women are “[s]eeing him”, what they actually see is Odysseus’ gaze, which is described as “awful[ly] longing.” Their contactual universe is heavily distorted and ambiguous and results in an internal rather than an external ambivalence, since ultimately it is Odysseus and the women themselves who are the cause of the existing ambiguities: Generally speaking, a rise in internal ambivalence is typical of transitional periods (which are by nature dynamic), when a system evolves from one state to another. Ambivalence would therefore mark any cultural transformations, when paradigms formerly used erode, and new ones have not yet taken shape. Lotman: ‘An increase in internal unambiguity can be considered as the reinforcement of homeostatic tendencies, whereas a rise in ambivalence indicates the imminent dynamic breakthrough.’ (Zylko 2001: 402)

What Odysseus believes he hears is symbolically overwritten by the sounds of the sea. His imagination of the realities is fuelled by the fictions of the “sailor’s story”. He hears events from the shore that are not manifest in any way. Ultimately, the poem presents a constantly expanding chain of symbolic difference. The poem’s shore is, as in all of the texts analysed, a space of highest ambiguity. Homer’s original account is transformed by a “sailor’s story”, this story is equally changed by Odysseus’ “imagination”, the women likewise misread his expressions and form their own “imagination”, and the reader, in the end, continues this chain of floating signification by means of reading the poem at hand. This floating signifier is an excessively open sign that is repeatedly filled with alternating significations. The ensuing transgressive discourse as presented by the (non-)communication of the respective gazes from ship to shore and

284

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

from shore to ship undermines the states and realities in both spaces. Odysseus and the women are entering a liminal stage and are temporarily in a process of transformation. The irony, however, lies in the fact that this is only an imagined dialectical process. Both parties are guided by an anxiety of influence, yet it is merely the realities they construct for themselves that result in the ensuing imaginations. Robert Hass’s poem presents a contact between two cultures that is minimal. This, however, results in a contact of the respective cultures with themselves, their fears, and symbolic projection. “Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple refraction can exhaust” (Foucault 1977: 35). As this study is intended to show, representations of literary shorelines allow for a more nuanced analysis of narratives. Even when confined within words, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs, literary spaces are not necessarily static concepts. By means of creating a sense of vagueness and ambiguity, they force the reader to fill these “gaps of meaning” as proclaimed by Wolfgang Iser. (cf. Iser 1974) This study of ambiguous spaces would lend itself to be connected with reader-response theory in general. Thus it would be interesting to ask the question whether the most famous of the texts analysed , such as The Tempest, Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, and Heart of Darkness, can be identified as literary expressions composed in times of epistemic ruptures. Are the experiences of unprecedented mobility, the end of monarchy and the ensuing restoration, the onset of capitalism, and the spread of Darwinian theories, not to mention the decline of the British Empire, respectively the causes for the underlying epistemic anxieties? And do these anxieties translate into the literary representation of ambiguous contact zones such as beaches and shorelines? Whatever the causes, and however grand the scale of the underlying epistemic changes, the literary shores and beaches prove to be an ideal setting to play out and express the related ambiguity, liminality, and transgressive discourses. As Michel Serres argues: States change phase, and systems change state, by transitions of phases or of states. But the system itself is never stable. Its

Epistemic Anxieties

285

equilibrium is ideal, abstract, and never reached. The state, in the first meaning of the word, is outside time. [...] These flows never stop running over lacunar lands. To devour them, parasite them, nourish them, and make them live. [...] Maybe there is not or never was a system. As soon as the world came into being, its transformation began. (Serres 2007: 72)

In Robert Hass’s poem the result of this silent, imagined communication leaves the women “changed forever”.




6 Works Cited Primary Literature Arnold, Matthew (1867): “Dover Beach”. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. Vol. XLII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14. Atwood, Margaret (2004): Oryx and Crake. London: Virago. Austen, Jane (2004) [1818]: Persuasion. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP. Ballantyne, Robert Michael (1993) [1858]: Coral Island. London: Wordsworth Classics. Banville, John (2005): The Sea. London: Picador. Beckett, Samuel (1986): The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. Blake, William (1976): Complete Writings: With Variant Readings. London: Oxford UP. Caesar, Julius (1970): The Gallic War. Transl. H.J. Edwards. London: Harvard UP. Césaire, Aimé (1985): A Tempest. Transl. Richard Miller. New York: TCG Translations. Coetzee, J.M. (2003): “Nobel Lecture – Literature 2003.” Nobelprize.org. 24 Jun 2012. — (1986): Foe. London: Penguin. Conrad, Joseph (2006) [1899]: Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. New York and London: Norton. — (1926): Twixt Land and Sea. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. Crabbe, George (1810): The Borough. 21 June 2012. . Dahl, Roald (1964): Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. London: Penguin. Dante, Alighieri (1995): Inferno. Transl. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Defoe, Daniel (1994) [1719]: Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin Popular Classics. Diaper, William (1951) [1712]: The Complete Works of William Diaper. Ed. Dorothy Broughton. London: Routledge. Dickens, Charles (1957) [1836]: “The Tuggses at Ramsgate.” Sketches By Boz. London: Oxford UP, 335-354. Eliot T.S. (1963): “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber & Faber. Garland, Alex (1996): The Beach. London: Penguin. Golding, William (1956): Pincher Martin. London: Faber & Faber. — (1954): Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin. Gunn, Neil M. (1991) [1937]: Highland River. Edinburgh: Canongate.

288

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Hass, Robert (2007): “Envy of Other People’s Poems.” Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 3. Heywood, Thomas (1655): “Fortune by Land and Sea.” Open Library. 21 June 2012. . — (1639): A true relation, of the lives and deaths of two most famous English pyrats, Purser, and Clinton who lived in the reigne of Queene Elizabeth. Together with the particular actions of their takings, and undertakings with other pleasant passages which hapned before their surprizall worth the observing. 2 January 2012. . Homer (1984): Illiad. Intr. G. S. Kirk. Oxford: Oxford UP. Huxley, Aldous (2005): Island. London: Vintage Classics. Joyce, James (1964) [1922]: Ulysses. London: The Bodley Head. — (2006) [1916]: A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man. New York: Signet. Keats, John (1966) [1816]: “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” Ed. H.W. Garrod. Keats: Poetical Works. London: Oxford UP. LeGuin, Ursula (1978): “Vaster Than Empires But More Slow.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. London: Golancz. Mallock, William H. (1880): “Proteus”. Poems. London: Chatto & Windus. 149-54. Mann, Thomas (1999) [1911]: Death in Venice. Transl. Jefferson S. Chase. New York: Signet Classic. McCarthy, Cormac (2006): The Road. New York: Vintage Books. McEwan, Ian (2007): On Chesil Beach. New York: Anchor Books. Milton, John (2005) [1667]: Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton. — (2011): “Lycidas.” Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt. New York: Norton, 68-74. Neville, Henry (1999) [1668]: “The Isle of Pines.” Ed. Susan Bruce. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines. Oxford: Oxford UP. Scott, Sir Walter (1985) [1814]: Waverley. London: Penguin. Shakespeare, William (2006): Macbeth. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. — (2002): King Richard II. Ed. Charles Forker. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. — (1999): The Tempest. Eds. Virginia M. Vaughan, Alden T. Vaughan. Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Shelley, Mary (1996): Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: Norton. Shute, Nevil (1977): On the Beach. London: Pan Books. Stein, Gertrude (1914): Tender Buttons. 18 June 2012. . Stevenson, Robert Louis (2008) [1886]: Kidnapped. New York: Bantam Dell. — (1994) [1883]: Treasure Island. London: Penguin. — (2004) [1892]: “The Beach of Falesa.” Whitefish: Kessinger Publication. Tennyson, Alfred Lord (1832): “The Lotos-Eaters”. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. Vol. XLII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.

Works Cited

289

Tomlinson, Henry Major (1921): London River. 14 June 2012. . Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. (1969): Slaughterhouse Five. London: Granada Publishing. Wells, H.G. (2005) [1886]: The Island of Doctor Moreau. London: Penguin. Woolf, Virginia (1926): To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press. Wordsworth, William (1895) [1805]: “To the Daisy.” The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford University Press, 579.

Secondary Literature Agamben, Giorgio (1995): Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP. — (2002): The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP. Alexander, Bobby C. (1991): Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press. Alneng, Victor (2002): “‘What the Fuck is a Vietnam?’ Touristic Phantasms and the Popcolonization of (the) Vietnam (War).” Critique of Anthropology 22.1: 461-489. Annesley, James (2004): “Pure Shores: Travel, Consumption, and Alex Garland’s The Beach.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1: 551-569. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999): Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Appadurai, Arjun (2001): Globalization. London: Duke UP. Armitage, David (2000): The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Arnold, James A. (1978): “Césaire and Shakespeare: Two Tempests.” Comparative Literature 30.1: 236-248. Atkinson, William (2004): “Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of ‘The Heart of Darkness’ in its Immediate Context.” Twentieth-Century Literature 50.1: 368393. Auden, W.H. (1979) [1950]: The Enchafed Flood: or, the Romantic Iconography of the Sea. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P. Augé, Marc (1995): Non-Place. New York: Verso. Banco, Lindsey Michael (2007): “Trafficking Trips: Drugs and the Anti-Tourist Novels of Hunter S. Thompson and Alex Garland.” Studies in Travel Writing 11.2: 127-153. Barrows Adam (2010): “The Shortcomings of Timetables: Greenwich, Modernism, and the Limits of Modernity.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 56.2: 262-289. BBC News (1999): “Entertainment Beach Campaigners Go to US Law.” 9 June 2012. . Bellows, Andy Masaki, Marina McDougall, and Brigitte Berg, eds. (2000): Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé. Transl. Jeanine Herman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Berthold-Bond, Daniel (1995): Hegel’s Theory of Madness. New York: State U of New York P.

290

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Betteridge, Tom (2007): Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe. Ashgate: Aldershot. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994): The Location of Power. New York: Routledge. Boase, T.S.R. (1959): “Shipwrecks in English Romantic Painting.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22.3/4: 332-346. Bode, Christoph (1996): Keats: Play On. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag. Bolton, Jonathan (2006): “Writing in a Polluted Semiosphere: Everyday Life in Lotman, Foucault, and de Certeau.” Schönle, Andreas (ed.) (2006): Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P. Books, The (2005): “Smells Like Content.” Lost and Safe. Tomblab (Indigo). CD. Bowen, Roger (2007): “Journey’s End: Conrad as Revenant in Alex Garland’s The Beach.” Conradina 3.1: 39-57. Brantlinger, Patrick (1985): “Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent.” Critical Inquiry 12.1: 166-203. Breger, Claudia, Tobias Döring, eds. (1998): Figuren der/des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwisschenschaft 30. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brewster, Sir David (1831): The Life of Sir Isaac Newton. New York: J. & J. Harper. Briggs, John, Christopher Harrison, Angus McInnes, and David Vincent, eds. (1996): Crime and Punishment in England. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brosch, Renate (2012): “Binary Spaces in the Short Story: Beach and Sea in Graham Swift’s ‘Learning to Swim.’” Anglistik 23.1: 175-184. Brown, Steven D. (2004): “Parasite Logic.” Journal of Organizational Change Management 17.4: 383-395. Butler, Lance (1991): Victorian Doubt: Literary and Cultural Discourses. New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. Burton, Robert (1652): The Anatomy of Melancholy. 22 May 2012. . Buzzard, James (1993): The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918. New York: Oxford UP. Campbell, Joseph (2003): The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. Novato: First New Library. Carson, Rachel (1998) [1955]: The Edge of the Sea. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Cawelti, John G. (1976): Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P. Cenzatti, Marco (2008): “Heterotopias of Difference.” Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. Eds. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (Routledge 2008). 75-86. Children of Men (2006). Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Per. Julian Moore, Clive Owen, and Chiwetel Ejofor. Universal Pictures. Film. Chilton Paul A. (1999): “Grenzsemantik.” Nachdenken über Grenzen. Eds. Rüdiger Görner and Suzanne Kirkbright. München: Ludicrum. 19-32. Chlada, Marvin (2005): Heterotopie und Erfahrung: Abriss der Heterotopologie nach Michel Foucault. Aschaffenburg: Alibri Verlag.

Works Cited

291

Connery, Christopher (2006): “There was No More Sea: The Supersession Of The Ocean, From the Bible to Cyberspace.” Journal of Historical Geography 32: 494-511. Connor, Steven (2010): “The Dust That Measures All Our Time.” 1 June 2012. . Cooper, Lydia (2011): “Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as Apocalyptic Grail Narrative.” Studies in the Novel 43.2: 218-237. Corbin, Alain (1994): The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World: 1750-1840. Transl. Jocelyn Phelps. London: Penguin. Crampton, Jeremy W. (2010): Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. Chichester: Wiley. Cresswell, Tim (1996): In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Dean, Cornelia (1999): Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches. New York: Columbia UP. Dehaene, Michiel, Lieven De Cauter, eds. (2008): Heterotopia and the City: Public Space and the Postcivil Society. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles (2004): “Desert Islands.” Ed. David Lapoujade. Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 9-14. Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guatttari (1987): A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Dening, Greg (1978): Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. — (2004): Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Times, Cultures, and Self. Melbourne: Melbourne UP. Derrida, Jacques (2011): Parages. Ed. John P. Leavey. Stanford: Stanford UP. Dietrich, René (2009): “Towards a Poetics of Liminality in ‘This Space Between Spaces’: The Shore Lines of Contemporary American Poetry.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 125.3: 448-464. Döring, Jörg, and Tristan Thielmann, eds. (2008): Spatial Turn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Bielefeld: Transcript. Drahos, Alexis, Christine Thompson (2012): “Geology in the Pre-Raphaelite landscape: William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay.” The Edinburgh Geologist 52: 7-10. Edmond, Rod (2006): “Writing Islands.” Eds. Peter Brown, Michael Irwin. Literature & Place, 1800-2000. New York: Peter Lang, 199-218. Ehland, Christoph (2009): “Mobilität und Bewegung im englischen Drama der frühen Neuzeit.” Eds. Wolfgang Hallet, Birgit Neumann. Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Bielefeld: Transcript. 213-232. Elliot, Robert C. (1970): The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Emig, Rainer (2010): “Lost Places – Productive Spaces?” Eds. Sebastian Berg, Rainer Emig, et.al. Journal for the Studies of British Cultures 17.2: 173-184. Erchinger, Philip (2013): “Mobility, Movement, Method and Life in G.H. Lewes.” Eds. Ingo Berensmeyer, Christoph Ehland. Patterns of Mobility. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 151-175. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature.

292

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Eßlinger, Eva, Tobias Schletriemen, Doris Schweitzer, and Alexander Zons, eds. (2010): Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Frankfurt: Surhkamp. Faubian, James D. (2008): “Heterotopia: An Ecology.” Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society. Eds. Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter. London: Routledge, 31-39. Feldbusch, Thorsten (2003): Zwischen Land und Meer. Schreiben auf den Grenzen. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann. Fields, Nic (2006): Rome’s Saxon Shore: Coastal Defences of Roman Britain, AD 250-500. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. Fishman, Robert (1987): Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Fleming, James Dougal (2002): “Meanwhile, Medusa in Paradise Lost.” EHL: English Literary History 69.4: 1009-1028. Foote, Kenneth, ed. (1994): Re-Reading Cultural Geography. Austin: U of Texas P. Foucault, Michel (1991): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Transl. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin. — (1989): Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. London: Routledge. — (1977): Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Bouchard, Donald F. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Fiske, John (1983): “Surfalism and Sandiotics: The Beach in Oz-Culture.” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 1.2: 120-148. Frank, Michael C. (2006): Kulturelle Einflussangst. Inszenierungen der Grenze in der Reiseliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Bielefeld: Transcript. Freccero, Carla (2011): “Figural Historiography: Dogs, Humans, and Cynanthropic Becomings.” Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities Across Time and Cultures. Eds. Jarrod Hayes, Margaret Higonnet, and William J. Spurlin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 45-67. — (1994): “Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women: Montaigne’s ‘Des Cannibales.’” Ed. Margo Hendricks. Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York: Routledge. Friberg, Hedda (2005): “‘In the Murky Sea of Memory’: Memory’s Miscues in John Banville’s The Sea.” An Sionnach: A Review of Literature & Culture & the Arts 1.2: 111- 123. Fuchs, Barbara (2000): “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and The English Nation.” EHL: English Literary History 67.1: 45-69. Gehring, Petra (2010): “Der Parasit. Figurenfülle und strenge Permutation.” Eds. Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer and Alexander Zons. Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Frankfurt: Surhrkamp. 180-192. Gifford, Terry (1999): Pastoral. London: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Glaser, Horst Albert (1996): Utopische Inseln: Beiträge zu Ihrer Geschichte und Theorie. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Goodman, Ralph (2003): “Problematics of Utopian Discourse: The Trim Garden and the Untidy Wilderness.” English Studies in Africa 46.1: 1-13.

Works Cited

293

Görling, Reinhold (1997): Heterotopia: Lektüren einer interkulturellen Literaturwissenschaft. München: Fink. Green, Martin (1980): Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. New York: Basic Books. Gregory, Derek (1994): Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge: Blackwell. Griem, Julika (forthcoming): Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film and Cultural Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate. Günzel, Stephan, ed. (2009): Raumwissenschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Haberman, Ina (2009): “The Beach as a Site of Transgression and Transformation in the Work of Daphne du Maurier.” University Bern. ‘Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film and Cultural Theory. 20 June 2009. Lecture. Handyside, Fiona (2011): “The Feminist Beachscape: Catherine Breillat, Diane Kurys and Agnès Varda.” L’Esprit Créateur 51.1: 83-96. Hanson, Gillian Mary (2006): Riverbank and Seashore in 19th and 20th Century British Literature. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Haraway, Donna (2004): “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” The Haraway Reader. London: Routledge. Harbach, Chad (2007): “The End, The End, The End: Why Bother Dreaming Up a Devastated World When You Live In One?” n+1 Magazine. 24 June 2012. . Hatcher, John (1999): “Lonely Planet, Crowded World: Alex Garland’s The Beach.” Studies in Travel Writing 3: 131-147. Hayes, Jarrod, Margaret Higonnet, and William J. Spurlin, eds. (2010): Comparatively Queer: Interrogating Identities Across Time and Cultures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hetherington, Kevin (1997): The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge. Hicks, Emily (1991): “Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text.” Theory and History of Literature 80. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Ho, Janice (2007): “The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad’s Colonial Fictions.” Journal of Modern Literature 30.4: 1-19. hooks, bell (1996): “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Eds. Ann Gary and Marilyn Pearsall. Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosopy. New York: Routledge. 48-56. The Oxford Holinshead Project. (1577) Holinshed Chronicles Vol. I: The Historie of Scotland. 22 May 2012. . Hopkins, Lisa (2005): Shakespeare on the Edge: Border-Crossing in the Tragedies and Henriad. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hosking, Susan, Rick Hosking, Rebecca Pannell, and Nena Bierbaum, eds. (2009): Something Rich and Strange: Sea Changes, Beaches and the Littoral in The Antipodes. Kent Town: Wakefield Press. Hulme, Peter and William Sherman (2000): ‘The Tempest’ and its Travels. London: Reaktion Books. Hunt, Alex, Martin M. Jacobsen (2010): “Cormack McCarthy’s The Road and Plato’s Simile of the Sun.” The Explicator 66.3: 155-158.

294

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Hurt, Joseph (2002): “Die Kannibalen: erste europäische Bilder der Indianer – von Kolumbus bis Montaigne.” Ed. Monika Fludernik. Der Alteritätsdiskurs des Edlen Wilden. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag: 45-63. Ikas, Karin, Gerhard Wagner, eds. (2009): Communicating in the Third Space. New York: Routledge. Ingersoll, Earl G. (2004): “Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake.” Extrapolation 45.2: 162-175. Iser, Wolfgang (1974): The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Transl. David Henry Wilson. London: John Hopkins UP. Isham, Howard (2004): Images of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century. New York: Peter Lang. Jameson, Frederic (1991): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. — (1977): “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 7.2: 2-22. JanMohammed, Abdul R. (1985): “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Enquiry 12.1: 5987. Jeans, D. N. (1990): “Beach Resort Morphology in England and Australia: A Review and Extension.” Ed. Paolo Fabbri. Recreational Uses of Coastal Areas. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 277-285. Johnson, Corey, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore et al. (2011): “Interventions on Rethinking ‘The Border’ in Border Studies.” Political Geography 30: 61-69. Johnson, Peter (2006): “Unravelling Foucault’s ‘Different Spaces.’” History of the Human Sciences 19.75: 75-90. Klein, Bernhard, Gesa Mackenthun, eds. (2003): Das Meer als kulturelle Kontaktzone: Räume, Reisende, Repräsentationen. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Koschorke, Albrecht (2010): “Ein neues Paradigma der Kulturwissenschaften.” Eds. Eva Eßlinger, Tobias Schlechtriemen, Doris Schweitzer and Alexander Zons. Die Figur des Dritten: Ein kulturwissenschaftliches Paradigma. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 9-31. Kothari, Uma and Rorden Wilkinson (2010): “Colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Transformations: Exiles, Bases, Beaches.” Third World Quarterly 31.8: 13951412. Lane, Dorothy F. (1995): The Island as a Site of Resistance: An Examination of Carribean and New Zealand Texts. New York: Peter Lang. Langdon, Elsbree (1991): Ritual Passages and Narrative Structures. New York: Peter Lang. Larsen, Svend Eric (2000): “Cultural Borders and Creation of Culture.” Semiotica 128.3/4: 359-376. Lenček, Lena, Gideon Bosker (1998): The Beach. The History of Paradise on Earth. New York: Penguin. — (2000): Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea. New York: Marlowe and Company. Lefebvre, Henri (1991): The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Works Cited

295

Lockwood, Alex (2012): “The Shore is Not a Beach.” Eds. Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson. Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 259-81. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature. Lotman, Yuri M. (2000): Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Lovejoy, Arthur O. (2001): The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. London: Harvard UP. Löw, Martina (2006): “The Social Construction of Space and Gender.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(2): 119-133. Loxley, Diana (1990): Problematic Shores: The Literature of Islands. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Mansel, Henry (1858): The Limits of Religious Thought Examined in Eight Lectures, Preached Before the University of Oxford, in the Year M.DCCC.LVIII. London: John Murray. Massey, Doreen (2005): For Space. London: Sage. — (1994): Space, Place and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell. Matynia, Elzbieta (2011): “The Promise of Borderlands.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 24: 75-81. McCannel, Dean (1999): The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: U of California P. McDuffie, Allen (2009): “Joseph Conrad’s Geographies of Energy.” ELH: English Literary History 76: 75-98. Michelet, Jules (1861): The Sea. New York: Rudd & Carleton. Mignolo, Walter D., Madina V. Tlostanova (2006): “Theorizing from the Borders: Shifting the Geo- and Body-Politics of Knowledge.” European Journal of Social Theory 9: 205-221. Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1998): The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge. Mishra, Sudesh (2000): “No Sign is an Island.” Emergences 10.2: n.p. Mossman, Mark (1999): “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: National Narrative as A Liminal Voice.” The Midwest Quarterly 40.1: 66-78. Moylan, Tom (1986): Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen. Nagel, Thomas (2006): Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Natural England (2006): “Review and Evaluation of Heritage Coasts in England. Executive Summary Report to the Countryside Agency by Land Use Consultants.” 8 June 2012. . Naum, Magdalena (2010): “Re-emerging Frontiers: Postcolonial Theory and Historical Archaeology of the Borderlands.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17: 101-131. Needham, Rodney (1975): “Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences.” Man, New Series 10.3: 349-369. Netzloff, Mark (2003): England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974): The Gay Science. Transl. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Nozick, Robert (1974): Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.

296

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Nigro, Roberto (2005): “Experiences of the Self Between Limit, Transgression, and the Explosion of the Dialectical System: Foucault as a Reader of Bataille and Blanchot.” Philosophy Social Criticism 31: 649-664. “Ouroboros.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. 22 Mar. 2012. . Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (2009): “Coastal Management.” Postnote (342) 7 June 2012. . Parry, Richard Lloyd (1998): “Bratpackers.” London Review of Books. October, 15. 1998. 17 May 2012. < http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n20/lloy02_.html>. Paulson, William (2000): “Michel Serres’s Utopia of Language.” Configurations 8: 215-228. Pilkey Orrin H., William J. Neal, James Andrew Graham Cooper, and Joseph T. Kelley, eds. (2011): The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline. Berkeley: U of California P. Pordzik, Ralph (2012): “The Posthuman Future of Man: Anthropocentrism and the Other of Technology in Anglo-American Science Fiction.” Utopian Studies 23.1: 142-161. — (2001): The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992): Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Prescott, J.R.V. (1968): The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries. London: Hutchinson University Library. Preston-Whyte, Robert (2001): “Constructed Leisure Space: The Seaside at Durban.” Annals of Tourism Research 28.3: 581-596. Raguse, Hartmut (1999): “Endzeitstimmung und Endzeitphantasien in psychoanalytischer Perspektive.” Eds. Ebertz Michael, Reinhold Zwick. Jüngste Tage. Die Gegenwart der Apokalyptik. Freiburg: Herder, 340-359. Rose, Gilian (1993): Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Ruppert, Peter (1986): Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens: U of Georgia P. Ryan, Chris, ed. (2002): “Memories of the Beach.” The Tourist Experience. London: Thomson, 156-171. Saage, Richard (2001): Utopische Profile. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Said, Edward W. (1995): Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin. — (1993): Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage. Schorske, Carl (2006): “Freud: The Psychoarchaeology of Civilizations.” Ed. Jerome Neu. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 8-24. Schönle, Andreas (ed.) (2006): Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P. Schröder, Nicole (2006): Spaces and Places in Motion: Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature. Tübingen: Narr Verlag.

Works Cited

297

Schürmann, Felix (2012): “Ships and Beaches as Arenas of Entanglements from Below: Whalemen in Coastal Africa, c. 1760-1900.” InterDisciplines 1: 2547. Seth, Vanita (2003): “Difference with a Difference: Wild Men, Gods, and Other Protagonists.” Parallax 9.4: 75-87. Serres, Michel (2007): The Parasite. Transl. Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Shamas, Laura (2007): We Three. The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. New York: Peter Lang. Shields, Rob (1991): Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge. Siebers, Tobin (1994): Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Policy. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P. Singer, Christoph (2011): “Gravitating Away from an Empire’s Heart: London in Una Silberrad’s The Good Comrade”. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London. 11 June 2012. http://literarylondon.org/ london-journal/march2011/singer.html>. Skinner, Stephen (2010): “Obscurity, Apophasis, and the Critical Imagination: The Unsayable in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 42.1-2: 94-106. Slusser, George E., Eric S. Rabin (1989): Mindscapes: The Geographies of Imagined Worlds. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP. Sobecki, Sebastian (2006): “Littoral Encounters: The Shore as Cultural Interface in King Horn.” Al-Masaq 18.1: 79-86. Soja, Edward (1996): Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Malden: Blackwell. Sontag, Susan (1997): Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Spinks Jr, C.W. (1991): Semiosis, Marginal Signs and Trickster: A Dagger of the Mind. Macmillan: London. Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White (1986): The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. New York: Cornell UP. Stephanides, Stephanos and Susan Basnett (2008): “Islands, Literature, and Cultural Translatability.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures: Journal of Global Culture Studies. 9 September 2009. . 5-21. Stephenson, William (2004): “Island of the Assassins: Cannabis, Spectacle, and Terror in Alex Garland’s The Beach.” Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.1: 369-381. Street, Brian V. (1975): The Savage in Literature. Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 1858-1920. London: Routledge. Teyssot, George (1995) [1980]: “Heterotopias and the History of Spaces.” Ed. Smart, Barry. Michel Foucault (2): Critical Assessments (7). London: Routledge: 5791. Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wettenhall (1959): The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage Books. Tönnies, Merle and Ina Grimm (2010): “Introduction: Mapping the Field.” Eds. Sebastian Berg, Rainer Emig, et.al. Journal for the Studies of British Cultures. 17.2: 99-105. “Transgression.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 9 March 2012. . “Trickster.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 14 December 2011. .

298

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977): Space and Place. The Perspective of Experience. London: Edward Arnold. — (1982): Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Turner, Victor (1987): “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.” Ed. Louis Carus Mahdi. Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation. 3-19. — (1969): The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Ulrici, Hermann (2010) [1839]: “The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ed. Harold Bloom. The Trickster. New York: Infobase Publishing. Urbain, Jean-Didier (2003): At the Beach. Transl. Catherine Porter. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Urry, John (2005) [1999]: “Mass Tourism and the Rise and Fall of the Seaside Resort.” The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. 16-37. Van Duzer, Chet (2006): “From Odysseus to Robinson Crusoe: A Survey of Early Western Island Literature.” Island Studies Journal 1.1: 143-162. Vasquez, Sam (2005): “The Deployment of Humour and Song in Asserting Black Diasporic Identity in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.” The Journal of Religion and Theatre. 4.2: 189-195. Vattimo, Gianni (1992): The Transparent Society. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP. Warner, Alan (2006): “The Road to Hell.” The Guardian. 25 June 2012. . Watt, Ian (1979): Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: The U of California P. Webb, Darren (2005): “Bakhtin at the Seaside: Utopia, Modernity and the Carnivalesque.” Theory Culture Society 22.121: 121-138. West-Pavlov, Russell (2009): Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Eds. Kohl, Stephan and Robert Burden. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature 7. White, Harry, Irving L. Finston (2010): “The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana 42.1-2: 1-43. Wild, Jonathan (2006): The Rise of the Office-Clerk in Literary Culture: 1880-1939. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula (1996): “African Animism, Négritude, and the Interdependence of Place and Being in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3.2: 47-61. Yekani, Elahe Hashemi (2011): The Privilege of Crisis: Narratives of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Zapf, Hubert (2009): “The Beach as a Site of Literary Creativity.” University Bern. ‘Twixt Land and Sea: The Beach in Literature, Film and Cultural Theory. 19 June 2009. Lecture. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (2002): “Satan’s Ocean Voyage and Eighteenth-Century Seafaring Trade Fictions of the Sea.” Ed. Bernhard Klein. Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 49-76. Zylko, Boguslaw (2001): “Culture and Semiotics: Notes on Lotman’s Conception of Culture.” New Literary History 32.2: 391-408.

Index Agamben, Giorgio 25-26, 94, 138, 142-44, 216-17, 246-247 Alexander, Bobby C. 131, 133, 134, 154 Alighieri, Dante 47-48, 52-53, 62, 178, 277 Alneng, Victor 110 Alsop, J.D. 75-76 alterity 24, 79, 97, 103, 108, 117, 155, 162, 164, 174, 175, 180, 248, 249 Arcadia 40, 43 Armitage, David 75 anthropological machine 25, 26, 142144 Anzaldúa, Gloria 222 apophasis 189 Appadurai, Arjun 110 Arnold, James 151 Aslet, Clive 34-35 Atwood, Margaret 27, 128, 250-261 Auden, W.H. 38 Augé, Marc 271 Austen, Jane 121-122, 220 Bacon, Francis 86 Bakhtin, Michail 61, 139 Ballantyne, R.M. 235, 242 Banville, John 46-65 Barrie, J.M. 15 Barrows, Adam 182 Beckett, Samuel 11, 198, 271, 274, 276 Bellows, Andi Masaki 95 Berthold-Bond, Daniel 60 Betteridge, Tom 71, 103, 124 Bhabha, Homi K. 102, 144, 207, 222 Blake, William 211 Boase, T.S.R. 37

Bode, Christoph 119-120 Bolton, Jonathan 176-178 Books, The 279 Bosker, Gideon 33 Boulicaut, Yannick Le 161, 167, 169, 170 Bowen, Roger 96, 106, 109 Brantlinger, Patrick 97 Breger, Claudia 200-202 Brewster, Sir David 41 Briggs, John 263 Brown, Steven D. 199 Bühler, Karl 101 Burton, Robert 205-206 Butler, Lance 41 camp 26, 94, 115, 117, 138, 154, 222231, cartography 67-70 Caesar, Julius 35, 177 Cawelti, John G. 129 de Certeau, Michel 11, 14, 68, 81, 82, 84, 194, 254 Césaire, Aimé 139-140, 148-154 Cenzatti, Marco 230-231 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 115 Chilton, Paul 74-78 Chlada, Marvin 104, 112 Coetzee, J.M. 17-18, 22, 96, 119, 140, 157, 213, 218 Columbus, Christopher 100 Connery, Christopher 34 Connor, Steven 102, 169-170 Conrad, Joseph 20, 25, 45, 67-70, 161-189, 278 contact zone 11, 13, 26, 27, 31-33, 76, 79, 106, 111-112, 117, 121, 123-125, 151, 158, 159,

300

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

164, 188, 221, 250, 258, 279, 282, 284 contactual universe 101, 283 Cooper, Lydia 83 Corbin, Alain 33, 34, 37-39, 170, 205 Crabbe, George 38 Crampton, Jeremy 69 Cresswell, Tim 222 Cuarón, Alfonso 269 Dahl, Roald 165 Dean, Cornelia 30 De Cauter, Lieven 225-226, 246 Deleuze, Gilles 85, 117, 168, 260, 278, 280 Dening, Greg 72, 152 Derrida, Jacques 153, 196-197, 200 Diaper, William 36, 209-210 Dickens, Charles 40, 122, 202 Dietrich, René 196-197 Donne, John 58 Döring, Tobias 200-202 Doyle, Arthur Conan 165, 169 Drahos, Alexis 41 dystopia 17, 10, 24, 26, 77, 79, 87, 89, 90, 94, 117, 154, 228, 230-231, 247, 249, 252, 260, 269-277 Eden 31, 37, 39, 42, 53, 58, 71, 84, 86, 90, 102, 113, 117, 128, 229, 248, 257 Edmond, Rod 86 Ehland, Christoph 89 Eliot, T.S. 44, 49 Emig, Rainer 14-15, 271 Erchinger, Philip 95-96 Faubian, James D. 227 fear of invasion 125 Feldbusch, Thorsten 28 Frecerro, Carla 99, 215 Fields, Nic 35 Finston, Irving L. 161 Fishman, Robert 178 Fiske, John 20, 29 Fleming, Dougal 171

Foucault, Michel 20, 25-26, 62-63, 69, 90-91, 94, 126, 153, 187, 193-199, 206, 216-217, 225232, 235- 236, 246, 280, 284 Frank, Michael 124-125 Friberg, Hedda 52 Garland, Alex 30, 88, 90, 96, 92, 106117, 128 Gehring, Petra 12 Gifford, Terry 42 Gilroy, Paul 127 Glaser, Horst Albert 17, 33 Golding, William 193, 195, 198, 231248 Goodman, Ralph 229, 247 Griem, Julika 20 Grimm, Ina 12, 78 grotesque body 60-61, 139, 140 Grunberger, Béla 115 Guattari, Félix 117 Guin, Ursula Le 70 Gunn, Neil 164-165, 173-174 Handyside, Fiona 226 Hanson, Gillian Mary 166, 224 Harbach, Chad 83, 259 Hass, Robert 279-285 Hatcher, John 116-117 Hayes, Jarred 102, 193 heterotopia 12, 19, 26, 32, 40, 86-87, 94, 104, 115, 117, 154-155, 187, 222, 225-247 Hetherington, Kevin 78 Heynen, Hilde 228 Heywood, Thomas 65, 263-264 Higonnet, Margaret 102, 193 Hicks, Emily 19 hooks, bell 143 Holinshead Chronicles 205 Homer 23, 33, 35, 47, 119, 120, 265, 286 Hopkins, Lisa 71, 208 Hosking, Rick and Susan 72 King Horn 31, 35, 122-123 Hulme, Peter 88 Hunt, Alex 271 Hurt, Joseph 100

Index Huxley, Aldous 21, 86, 88, 90, 91, 134, 192 hybrid/hybridity 27, 29, 32, 50, 53, 70, 106, 146, 155, 205, 207 Ikas, Karin 222 Ingersoll, Earl G. 258 Iser, Wolfgang 84, 284 JanMohammed, Abdul R. 125 Jameson, Frederic 16, 258 Jeans, D.N. 19 Johnson, Ben 124 Johnson, Corey 222 Johnson, Peter 225-226 Joyce, James 44-45, 122-123 Keats, John 119-123, 173, 281-282 Klein, Bernhard 48, 53 Koschorke, Albrecht 73, 81, 133, 155, 208, 253 Kothari, Uma 31, 221-222 Lacan, Jacques 56, 63, 251 Langdon, Elsbree 129, 138 Larsen, Svend Erik 80, 81, 101 Lefebvre, Henri 27, 40, 67, 69, 111, 113, 145 Lenček, Lena 33 Lewes, George Henry 95 liminality 119-189 Lockwood, Alex 13 Lonely Planet 88, 113 Lotman, Yuri 11, 70, 94, 126-127, 155-189, 223, 282 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 128 Löw, Martina 22 Loxley, Diana 24 Mallock, William H. 43-44 Marin, Louis 18, 76-77, 86, 88, 89, 213 Massey, Doreen 15, 16, 22 MacCannell, Dean 116 MacDougall, Marina 95 MacDuffie, Allen 162 Matynia, Elzbieta 222 McCarthy, Cormac 259, 269-277

301 McEwan, Ian 21, 45, 192 Mann, Thomas 51 Mansel, Henry 44 maps, mapping 28, 67, 68-70, 88, 90 mappamundi 8 Maurier, Daphne du 45 Michelet, Jules 37 Mignolo, Walter 79, 154, 192 Milton, John 20, 27, 31, 43, 90, 94, 123, 128, 114-148, 171-172, 178, 253-268 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 221 Mishra, Sudesh 28, 71, 74 More, Thomas 37, 84-89, 94, 96, 159, 229, 255, 223, 228 Mossman, Mark 207 Nagel, Thomas 55-56, 62 Naum, Magdalena 222-223 Needham, Rodney 146 neophyte 92-93, 127, 130, 135, 141, 224-225 Newton, Sir Isaac 41, 44 Neville, Henry 37, 84, 251, 270 Nietzsche, Friedrich 43 Nigro, Roberto 199-200 Nozick, Robert 95, 230 nymphs 48, 205- 209 Orwell, George 87 otherness, othering 26, 40, 53, 87, 9798, 103, 112-115, 125, 140, 141-142, 219, 226, 231, 240, 247, 249, 260 Ouroboros 168 parasite 12, 57, 111, 125, 145, 156, 170, 203, 234, 225, 248, 259, 285 pastoral 36, 42, 209 Painlevé, Jean 95 Plato 84, 271 Pordzik, Ralph 26, 257-258 Pratt, Mary L. 26, 32, 77, 79, 123124, 151, 162-163 Prescott, J.R.V. 279 Preston-Whyte, Robert 29

302

Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville

Raguse, Hartmut 115-116 ritual 86, 91, 93, 113, 128-138, 158, 226, 243 riverbank 12, 25, 161, 164-169, 171172, 176, 185, 187 Rose, Gilian 222 Ruppert, Peter 87 Ryan, Chris 39 Rudin, Paul 204 Ruppert, Peter 87 Schorske, Carl 173 Schröder, Nicole 222 Schürman, Felix 127 Scott, Sir Walter 166 semiosphere 11-13, 25, 92, 94, 97, 103-104, 108-110, 116, 126127, 154-189, 211, 218, 238, 239, 241, 248, 249, 280 semiotics 24-25, 81, 104, 114, 116, 156-159, 160, 164, 172, 177, 193 Serres, Michel 12, 13, 20, 29, 32-33, 51, 56, 70, 80, 94, 101-107, 113, 125, 139, 145, 153, 156, 170, 199, 203, 225, 227, 232, 258-9, 284-285 Seth, Vanita 99 Shakespeare, William 70-82, 134-54, 204-211 Shamas, Laura 205-207 Sherman, William 88 Shelley, Mary 37 Shields, Rob 40-41, 44, 99, 101, 103, 222 Silberrad, Una Lucy 45 Shute, Nevil 85, 270 Skinner, Stephen 189-190 Sobecki, Sebastian 36 Soja, Edward 12, 17, 143, 222, 225 spatial turn 12 Spinks Jr., C.W. 193, 201, 204, 208, 259-260 Spurlin, William J. 102, 193 Stallybrass, Peter 16, 60-61, 131, 139, 141 Stephanides, Stephanos 17, 59 Stevens, Wallace 62

Stevenson, Robert Louis 15, 82, 242, 262-263 sublime 18, 37-38, 86, 110, 119, 281282, 286 third space 17, 26-27, 46, 50, 53, 78, 79, 81, 133, 144, 155, 207, 222-223, 260 third, figure of 49, 53-54, 63, 120, 133, 139, 145, 151-152, 178, 183, 189, 200-204, 215, 252253, 255, 261, 268 Tillyard, E.M.W. 128 Tlostanova, Marina 154, 192 Tomlinson, Henry Major 45 Tönnies, Merle 12, 78 topophilia/topophobia 102, 232 tourism 40, 41, 88, 110, 112-13 transgression 34, 45-46, 60-61, 74, 80, 90-91, 94, 108, 117, 121, 126-127, 131, 141, 146, 148, traveller(s)154, 181, 192-277 trialectics 16-17, 46-65 Tuan, Yi-Fu 14, 212, 233 Turner, Victor 25, 29, 52, 65, 100101, 119-189, 224-226, 236 Ulrici, Hermann 145 Urbain, Jean-Didier 112 Urry, John 39 utopia 82-95, 97, 108-109, 113-129, 139-141, 148, 151, 154, 158159, 165, 177, 201-203, 212, 223, 225, 227-231, 247-262, 255, 260, 265, 266, 278-280 Varela, María do Mar Castro 81 Vasquez, Sam 152 Vonnegut, Kurt 165 Wagner, Gerhard 222 Watt, Ian 177 Webb, Darren 39 Wells, H.G. 87 West-Pavlov, Russell 19-20, 28 Westall, William 37 White, Allon 16, 60-61, 131, 139, 141 White, Harry 161

303

Index Wild, Jonathan 183 Wilkinson, Rorden 31, 221-222 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula 148-150, 152 Woolf, Virginia 44 Wordsworth, William 38

Yekani, Elahe Haschemi 21-22 Zapf, Hubert 32, 132, 147 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia 128 Zylko, Boguslaw 157, 176, 283

Appeared earlier in the SPATIAL PRACTICES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY SERIES IN CULTURAL HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY AND LITERATURE Page and Place: Ongoing Compositions of Plot Volume 19 – By Jon Anderson Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places Volume 18 – Edited by Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, Yvonne Rosenberg and Daniel Schäbler Perspectives on Mobility Volume 17 – Edited by Ingo Berensmeyer and Christoph Ehland Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces Volume 16 – By Andrew Keller Estes Placing Poetry Volume 15 – Edited by Ian Davidson and Zoë Skoulding Topodynamics of Arrival: Essays on Self and Pilgrimage Volume 14 – Edited by Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zoric Land & Identity: Theory, Memory, and Practice Volume 13 – Edited by Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson No Maps for These Territories Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies of the Future in William Gibson Volume 12 – By Karin Hoepker Reflective Landscapes of the Anglophone Countries Volume 11 – Edited by Pascale Guibert Process: Landscape and Text Volume 10 – Edited by Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra More titles: www.rodopi.nl