Coast and Beach: Contested Spaces in Cultural and Literary Discourse
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This essay focuses on some repeatedly occurring notions that are inscribed into literary treatments of coasts and shores as liminal spaces of encounter and exchange. Coastlines offer points of entry and departure; they are connected to endings and beginnings, serve both as safety- and as danger-zones. They are read as lines of separation and exclusion, but are also conceived as hybrid spaces, inviting opposites to meet and merge. Coastlines are border zones that mark uncertain spaces where concepts of identity and place may be strengthened or transformed, and where new narratives emerge as cultural and social entities collide. In this process, the tidal motion becomes a transitory force, turning the beach into a random storehouse and (temporary) archive, while at the same time erasing evidence, leaving behind memories and palimpsestic traces. Coast and shore direct the eyes to histories both visible and unrecorded, to stories of home and longing as well as exile and migration. They tell of colonial encounters, conquest, defeat, appropriation, and destruction. Thus, coastal narratives function as sites of a binary discourse that links Utopian visions, Edenic places and romantic vistas with social and political realities. Shoreline stories are embedded in writings across cultures, languages, and times, with seminal texts such as The Bible, Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's The Tempest, or Defoe's Robinson Crusoe giving as conspicuous examples as George Vancouver's Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World. Further narratives consulted in this essay are by Cristobal Colon, Joseph Addison, Jane Austen as well as by Canadian west coast writers Malcolm Lowry, George Bowering, and Jack Hodgins.