An Ocean Within.

Paul Magee, Creative Arts, UTS

cube@pacific.net.au

If the beach is a liminal space, it is because limina are, in their Latin derivation, thresholds, indeed doorways. Beaches are doorways to libidinal structures of a decidedly social kind. My paper starts at the beach and steps up from there into the hi-rise urban dwelling to see what salient features pertain to both sites. I follow a reading of Magnus Clarke’s The History of Australian Nudism through the doorway it offers into my novel The 14th Floor, an imagined community set in its entirety on various 14th Floors (which could in fact be 13th floors) of a city like Melbourne, or Sydney, or both. The change in altitude, I argue, does little to alter the libidinal architecture of the modern. Yet nudism is not, in fact, sexy. The desexualised, and indeed familial, nature of this activity is marked in Clarke’s researches: "members act more like brothers and sisters or cousins, than mere friends." In the words of one of his informants: "Mother Nature usually knows when you should be aroused sexually and it is not at a nudist club." Nor is the modern egalitarian nation, which Benedict Anderson sees in terms of abstract "fraternity," a hothouse of desire. The return of the familial within such seemingly anonymous, homogenous and empty sites leads me to a reading, via Nietzsche, of Freud’s Group Psychology, where sibling resentment, and desexualised group ties, are posed as the architectonics of democracy itself. Modernity, I argue, is a bit of a nudist colony. But what of the 13th Floor? And the ocean of desire Freud postulated beyond the limina of the modern self-same ego, with all its seemingly stable social structures? This brings me to the question of the novel itself, which seems to serve such a bureacratic function in Anderson’s analysis. What doorways does the imagination open up to the oceans within, the blue skies outside? The limen upon which literature is perched is, I argue, none other than death itself. This paper, like the novel it portrays, is about leaping off.