Review | Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons
Reviewed by Debra Rae Cohen, University of South Carolina
Over my years of teaching, I developed a routine for how to introduce undergraduates to modernist narrative: I would open with “Solid Objects” by Virginia Woolf, a piece that accessibly (compared to the experiments further down the syllabus) both thematizes and enacts the power of perspective to shape the world. In this brief tale, two professional men, John and Charles—first glimpsed at a distance as a single black dot down the beach—diverge in their lives and habits in the wake of John’s discovery of an object in the tidelands, concentrated, indeterminate, purposeless, yet hauntingly itself. Gradually abandoning his political career, John dedicates his life to seeking out more such objects. By story’s end, he and Charles, whose mindset is completely instrumental, converse in mutual incomprehension, speaking past each other, inhabiting different worlds. The tale, as I pointed out to my students, is often construed as a (gently mocking) defense of the artist’s vision. What I tended to overlook in my lesson, though—and what Hannah Freed-Thall brilliantly illuminates in her new monograph—was the significance of the beach.
Liminal space and site of transformation, with the capacity “to disrupt expected plotlines” and temporalities, the tidal zone serves, throughout Modernism at the Beach, as an overdetermined marker, a nexus of both/and, lying at the border of land and sea, “industry and pleasure,” nature and artifice, both a “classroom” for heterosexuality and a site for non-normative experiment (66, 2, 16). Modernists and those who followed them, Freed-Thall argues, have thus found in the beach a paradigm of mutability that “multiplies possibilities for thought” and enables “various corporeal stylings” (28, 27). For Roland Barthes, writing in 1977, the beach, Freed-Thall explains, is a site of “cognitive drift and sensory remapping,” rife with “unexpected pleasures and contingencies,” an almost synesthetic realm of transfiguration (26); Freed-Thall effectively projects such effects back onto earlier writers, as well. Working through the lenses of queer theory and ecological critique, and enlarging on her previous important theoretical work on modernist setting, Freed-Thall spans a century of tideland inspiration, moving from a trio of close readings—on Marcel Proust, Woolf, and Rachel Carson—to two more sprawling chapters that survey urban and contemporary beach effects under heightened conditions of capitalist fatigue and climate threat.
Throughout these readings runs a thread of queer utopianism, which Freed-Thall explicitly ties to the idea of the beach as a variety of “commons”—enabling “forms of togetherness not so predicated on possession” (5)—as well as the conditions of precarity and transience that underlie both such forms and the beach itself. The proliferation of shoreline lifeforms and their range of temporal and spatial scales allow for the refiguring of the human body in an interspecies context and a concomitant freeing from the constricting particularities of human society. For Proust’s narrator, Balbec—modeled on the real-life Normandy resort of Cabourg—loosens “the established framework of elite sociability,” blurring the lines of class and gender and allowing for contingent encounter in an atmosphere of evanescence (39). In Within a Budding Grove, the narrator meets, Freed-Thall notes, virtually all the novel’s important queer characters on the beach—most strikingly, the “petite bande” of teenage girls that includes Albertine, which roils down the beach as a kinetic, shape-shifting amalgam characterized by Proust as “zoophytic.” Freed-Thall enlarges on this term as indicating “a threshold phenomenon” with “species-exploding possibilities” (45, 46). Epitomized by its “fluid, unscripted mobility” that culminates in a more-than-human leap over the head of an elderly banker, the bande is “an engine of metaphor” fueled by contingency (51, 50).
The opening image of the leap—reiterated several times, Freed-Thall reminds us, throughout the novels of À la recherche du temps perdu—serves as the emblem of queer possibility, new bodily scripts made possible by tidal liminality. Its closing counterpart is an affecting image from Sarah Cameron Sunde’s recent durational artwork 36.5/A Durational Performance with the Sea, in which Sunde stands at the edge of the sea through the entire tidal cycle. In this “work of endurance”—positioning herself to experience the effects of rising seas, moving as she is moved, “as if her body were but the ocean’s canvas”—Sunde must “connect to a reality that encompasses and exceeds her” (174, 177).
Between these two striking bodily gestures, Freed-Thall limns a host of transformative encounters. Close attention to tide pools and the creatures therein marks chapters two and three. In the former, on To the Lighthouse, Freed-Thall homes in on Nancy’s beachfront play, finding in the “parenthetical” chapter of this middle child, this “experimental aside,” a third way, dissenting from both the rhythms of domesticity and the chrononormativity represented by the lighthouse (84). Nancy’s imaginative changes of scale, Freed-Thall argues, in which she “moves between close and distant modes of sight, . . . strikes a pose of mastery—and then intentionally divests herself of that force,” serve as a representation (as in “Solid Objects”) of Woolf’s own modernist vision (91). Chapter three, pleasantly and unexpectedly, presents Carson’s The Edge of the Sea as intertextually entwined with her letters to her long-term beloved, Dorothy Freeman, finding in the former an echo of the epistolary rhythms of the latter, and in both “a nonpossessive ethos of intermittency and variation” (111).
Freed-Thall relies throughout the book on an elastic definition of “beach” that opens out, in chapter four, to encompass the linguistic. In Claude McKay’s Banjo, she argues, “beaching” as a queer-coded practice of ease, “what takes place in the margins of [the] laborious universe,” allows him to establish an alternative contact zone in the shadow of the capitalist operations of the port of Marseilles (128). Although the use of the linguistic hinge here feels a bit too . . . contingent (could one use Samuel Selvon’s similar term, “liming,” to incorporate The Lonely Londoners into an argument about citrus?), Freed-Thall bolsters the chapter by linking the “dream port” of McKay’s novel to the queer countercultural commons instantiated in the 1970s and 1980s at Manhattan’s abandoned West Side piers. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitectural” deconstructive interventions into the abandoned buildings—and their brilliant photographic renderings by Alvin Baltrop—establish a transient space of outlaw art and queer intimacy “energized by the waterfront as an ephemeral contact zone” (146).
As contemporary artists like Stuart Heygarth and Mandy Barker compile from the ocean’s plastic detritus compositions that gesture to “a conception of historical process that includes a vast array of human and more-than-human actors,” so too Freed-Thall gathers in her last chapter a variegated host of works that conjure the postmodern beach as both “escape hatch” and “trash-strewn dystopia,” evocative of “the peculiar mix of boredom, dread, and wonder we might think of as late capitalism’s dial tone” (155, 173). These works—ranging from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days to Sunde’s durational performances—seem to wrest from the depressive vistas of tidal pollution and decay, Freed-Thall argues, “alternative ways of inhabiting the present” (178). Her book decisively establishes the shoreline as a key site of such imaginings, an important corrective to the prevalent understanding of urban-centered modernism.