Still Surviving Beach Fantasies.

Libby Macdonald & Guy Redden, English Department, University of Queensland

libby.macdonald@mailbox.uq.edu.au
g.redden@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Narratives about exotic, pristine places have a long history in Western culture. Robinson Crusoe, with its fantasy of the Westerner's survival in an unfamiliar environment, is often seen as paradigmatic of the themes of this discursive trajectory. This exoticist discourse is deeply imbricated with the history of Western colonialism. Indeed, the latter could be viewed as its initial condition of possibility.

This paper will offer a reading of Alex Garland's 1996 novel, The Beach, focusing on the ways that it both extends and deviates from a wider tradition of fantasy writing in which exotic islands act as legible spaces in explorations of economic and social utopias. In this book a group of contemporary Western youths set up a secret community on a small island in a Thai national park. The community becomes a brief experiment in subsistence economy and direct democracy and yet is a simultaneous fantasy of colonisation.

Although The Beach may be read as exemplifying contemporary youth attempts to establish sub-cultural distinction against the mainstream, it clearly draws upon a tradition of adventure narratives in which the foreign island becomes a site in which 'this-cultural' social dramas are articulated. In The Beach as in other examples of its genre, the surplus capital which ultimately enables adventure and experiment in 'subsistence' is elided, as is the proprietary relation of indigenous culture to the land. These discursive limits then may uphold colonialist imaginaries in which the resources of the foreign land are available for use by traveller without question of the geopolitics of such use.