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Fugitive Figures on the Beach: The Danger and Pleasure of Disintegration.
Robert Knight, Independent scholar
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In this paper, I will discuss a number of literary incarnations of the beach, particularly of the Gothic kind, arguing that the beach functions as a suitable venue or metaphor for the potential for the self to become fragmented or disintegrate.
Alluding firstly to popular perceptions of the beach and its place in the psyches and lives of the people who visit or inhabit it, the paper will proceed to engage with the means through which writers like Stephen King and Anne Rice, in their tales of horror, play with the signifying possibilities of the beach. In particular, I want to argue that the beach, as the site of the transition from earth to water, represents, along with other such spaces, a point at which the integrated self of rational consciousness dissolves to reveal its hidden multiplicity. The self becomes a fugitive figure, simultaneously other, while the literary text encodes fugitive figurations tantalisingly describing/inscribing (something other/more than) this process.
The beach is fundamentally a place of desire, a profoundly sexualised space. As such, there is something unnameable about it; it is a vast text whose signifying shape is always changing. The protean movement of waves crashing on the shoreline symbolises the shifting potential of the desire-driven self. This capacity for metamorphosis is vital to an understanding of the literature of horror and of fugitive figures in general. As a place of potential pleasure and danger, it is a site of the sublime, mingling the erotic and thanatogenic in an agonising yet delicious tension.
