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Beyond the Beach? Re-articulating the Limen in Oceanic Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- University of Hawai'i Press
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56 Beyond the Beach? Re-articulating the Limen in Oceanic Pasts, Presents, and Futures Margaret Jolly Greg Dening on the Beach Moruya Heads, New South Wales January 1999. I am reading Greg Dening’s Read ings/Writings tucked up against the sand dunes, pondering the relation between his writing and the materiality of the beach: its scorching sands, its vast white expanse, the turbulent palette of the ocean as the weather changes and the tide rises and ebbs, and how in the heat of an Australian summer mirages are created, confounding quotidian vision and creating a dreamy haze in which pasts, presents, and futures seem to fold into and embrace each other. Suddenly a southerly breeze picks up and scatters fine grains of sand into my book, dusting the words on its pages and insinuating themselves into its spine. I am aghast but also strangely delighted: Just as I am struggling to understand Dening’s concept of the beach, the mental and metaphysical value he imputes to that liminal space, the raw materiality of this beach has fought back. Back in Canberra I confessed what had happened to Greg. He seemed a little disturbed by my propensity for sun bathing and my penchant for taking valuable hardbacks to the beach, but he was, I think, also rather chuffed. I retell this silly story of my summer holidays not just to pay homage to Greg Dening , who is no longer with us,1 and his apical importance in the genealogy of those of us who have been exploring similar questions in Oceania, but to pose the problem of the relation between embodied experiences and encounters on the many beaches of Oceania and the central values that suffuse Dening’s concept of “the beach,” a limen where everyday understandings are displaced, where crossings occur, cross-cultural even transcultural encounters, where the exchange of bodies and meanings subverts taken-for-granted understandings and creates the potential for profound and mutual transformation. I ponder how Dening’s beach images portray the relations of Europeans and Islanders and the relations of Islanders to each other, and how it articulates the crossings between pasts, presents, and futures in Oceania. Jolly | 57 “On the beach edginess rules”: Dening’s Beach from 1974 to 2004 The idea and the value of the beach can be discerned from Dening’s earliest works, his edition of The Marquesan Journal of Edwards Robarts (1974) and his “doublevisioned ” history of Fenua‘enata/The Marquesas in Islands and Beaches (1980). But I start from Readings/Writings (1998), where the concept of the beach is clearly articulated as a theme across several essays,2 as ambivalent space, as marginal time, as metaphor for cross-cultural encounters, and, in the creative process of reading and writing, as “beaches of the mind.” “The Beach has long been a metaphor of my understanding , not just for Oceania, the Sea of Islands, but for life itself” (Dening 1998: 85).3 He acknowledges a debt to both Victor Turner and Richard White in exploring these spaces-in-between, “neither one thing nor another,” “spaces of defining rather than definition,” “ordinary moments of living” interrupted by abnormal moments when identities are suspended and novel meanings emergent, as in liminal states of ritual or the “as if” of theater (1998: 86). The beach is also that place where “the thoughts of a writer encounter the thoughts of a reader” (1998: 86), where “everything is in translation ,” “where we see ourselves reflected in somebody else’s otherness” (1998: 87); “where minds meet is a beach of sorts” (1998: 87). Dening thus evokes the beach as the shifting sands of unending conversations and mutually transforming dialogues between self and other, writer and reader. And, as such, beaches are destinations in his navigation of the historical anthropology of Oceania . He juxtaposes crossings by both Europeans and Islanders, re-membered4 in the present, for example, in the twin passages of the replica of Cook’s ship, Endeavour, and the Hawaiian canoe Hōkūle‘a. On the European side, Dening evinces a particular empathy not so much with those men who were confident captains or heroic “discoverers ,” like Cook, but those who were mutinous and “on the edge,” like Bligh, or those who deserted and even threatened the fragile ships of civilization, “beachcombers” like Edward Robarts. Dening constantly distinguishes his writing from Eurocentric, imperially minded histories of the Pacific. From the outset he aspired to tell the story from both sides of the beach. This...