ira friedberg*
‘Work, daydreams, and idleness’: An analysis of the the beach vacationscape
An excerpted introduction to a thesis awarded First Class Honours in English from the University of Sydney in 2024.
How should one spend their summer vacation? For the protagonists of this paper’s concern, the answer is a few weeks by the sea, as a period of respite from urban habitation, to isolate, to relax, to focus on intellectual, artistic, and romantic pursuits. Through a spatial analysis of its social and structural features, this study will identify the desires and disappointments ascribed to the modern littoral “vacationscape” and elucidate how film and literary texts construct this amalgam of environmental and social space. This paper questions the cultural understanding of the seaside vacationscape as an egalitarian utopia and restorative sojourn. It proposes that the cultural genre of the summer seaside vacation has become an imagined rather than actual escape from contemporary urban, economic, social, even temporal conditions, inevitably stunted by a social or formal imperative towards narrative eventfulness. The film Conte d’ete / A Tale of Summer (1996) by Éric Rohmer and the novel La Figlia Oscura / The Lost Daughter (2006) by Elena Ferrante have been chosen to reveal this new construction, with findings extended to Christian Petzold’s recent film Roter Himmel / Afire (2023). A reading of these texts will chart the changing shape of the contemporary vacationscape, from the earliest signs of a concerning moral ambiguity towards its most recent and damning iteration.
Littoral space is a broad category and can encompass many settings: lakes, resort towns, harbours, islands, and cliffs, while Kluwick and Richter contribute ‘coastal waters, beaches and their immediate hinterland, river deltas and marshlands as well as the settlements on and close to the shore’ (1). The two authors have co-edited an extensive collection of essays on the littoral in an anglophone context.
They describe littoral space: ‘as a natural environment engendering both desire and fear in the human imagination; as a social space inspiring particular codes of behaviour and specific discourses; as an historical site of contact and conflict, in particular in the colonial and postcolonial context; as a vacationscape – a place of regeneration and of withdrawal from everyday life, which is in turn the result of processes such as industrialisation and the rise of a modern leisure and health culture – and as both a setting and a subject for literature, film and art.’ (Kluwick and Richter 2)
To hone the conditions of this study, I have selected three texts set on or proximate to the beach. I approach the site of the beach as a ‘social space,’ a behavioural modifier and meeting point of social tensions, playing a role in the wealthy Western imagination as a vacationscape, a site for creative work and isolation. In this focus, the beach is supplementary to one’s urban home, visited for restoration that proves unachievable. Kluwick and Richter point to the vacation paradigm’s deep roots in Western psychology; images of disasters on beaches in the Global South appear to psychically affect audiences in the Global North, frustrating their dreams of a winter escape in a sunny locale (1-2). It is this to-and-fro between desire and disappointment, cultural expectation and crushing reality that defines the modern vacationscape.
In Dean MacCannell’s pioneering study of sightseeing, The Tourist (1976), he identifies the “leisure class” as an emerging modern subject. The vacationscape protagonist bears the same privilege and demeanour of this subsection of the middleclass, but they differentiate themselves by a lack of interest in accumulating experience. The sightseer searches ‘the earth for new experiences to be woven into a collective, touristic version of other peoples and other places' (MacCannell 13). Meanwhile, the archetype I jokingly but precisely term the “urban escape artist” seeks a space less for its architectural and environmental features—though proximity to the water is an essential criteria and conceit—than for its emotional, social, and geographical distinction from their urban home. MacCannell also argues that cultural experiences comprise a ‘model’—or the ‘embodied ideal’—and the emotional release, desire, and behaviour the ‘model’ propagates—its ‘influence’ (24). The escape artist subscribes to an inherited social model of the isolated beach getaway, with its expected influence being rejuvenation. Further, MacCannell positions cultural products as active in organising and stimulating social life (27)—as such, literary and film texts inherit the established vacation model but then construct its social understanding anew.
The vacationscape has a storied construction. The seas of Europe were once ‘represented as a place of rot and decay, and the beach, as the scene of shipwreck and disaster, suitable for sailors, fishermen, and castaways, not idle pleasure-seekers’ (Freed-Thall 7). A belief in the ‘therapeutic benefits of sea bathing as a cure for melancholy and urban degeneration’ was propagated in the eighteenth century (7), but these broaches of the seaside as a holiday destination were still fraught, ‘more akin to a battle: against the elements … against the temptations of the flesh’ (Kluwick and Richter 8). Today, the ‘paradisiacal beach might persist as the vanishing point of the modern traveller’s desire,’ but over-tourism and the threat of climate disaster expose this ideal as a mirage (Kluwick and Richter 8). But like hereditary trauma, resonances of danger, desire, ephemeral connection, and rebirth persist in the beach vacationscape.
In the work done by Mazierska, Gyori, Mohácsi, Kluwick, and Richter, the littoral is indicative of a British national-cultural project and continuum. The texts of this study are non-Anglophonic; the vacationscape can be understood as a Western, European phenomenon. Resort towns may be ‘a unique British institution,’ offering a vantage point onto national identity and culture’ (Gyori and Mazierska, “British Seaside Resorts” 15), but the vacationscape is a more continental entity. The texts here reveal an undifferentiated structure to the vacation, and one is scarcely aware of geographic particularity. National identity is a worthwhile line of inquiry, but a culturally varied account proves valuable also. This might be thought of in terms of Jeremy Rosen’s ‘type sites,’ contemporary settings which are ‘overtly and self-consciously rooted in prior texts and recognizable genres’ (628, qtd. in Puxan-Oliva 83). These texts present a model and influence recognisable across na-tional lines, a global seaside in contrast to the ‘type site’ of the ‘global city’ (Puxan-Oliva 83). This internationally recognisable model of the summer vacationscape is a social and cultural genre as well as a literary one. John Frow uses ‘the metaphor of translation to think about relations between the levels of setting, genre, and text’ (17), which seems particularly apt, considering how these diverse texts construct their social and material reference. Certain meanings and attributes might be emphasised or subdued in texts of differing origin, but the act of communication and its shared referents remain. While this paper covers European texts for the sake of constraint, the analysis and findings could extend to leisure-conquest across borders, including those set in the Global South, as in Alex Garland’s Thailand-set The Beach (1996) and its film adaptation (2000), or Charlotte Wells’ recent Aftersun (2022), set in a Turkish resort.
A recent publication by Hannah Freed-Thall, Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (2023)1, takes a similarly continental stance in its investigation of the seaside in literary Modernism. It furthers utopian notions of the beach as an ‘Edenic zone,’ whether as exception from humanity’s capacity for environmental destruction (1), or in its dogged ‘promise of radical egalitarianism … an arena for queer and creaturely encounters, a refuge for artists and other visionary types’ (2). Freed-Thall is not ignorant of the beach’s ulterior potential as a site of domination, particularly along racial lines, but she chooses to focus on its potentials (6). Kluwick and Richter are more attentive to the beach as a site of racial segregation in the United States (10), and on Germany’s Baltic coast, the setting of Christian Petzold’s Afire, where beaches were ‘advertising themselves as judenfrei (free of Jews)’ long before the Nazis came to power (11).
Freed-Thall’s utopian conception of the beach as an ‘inventive ecosocial gathering that blurs partitions and hierarchies’ (6) is reminiscent of Foucault’s exemplary ‘heterotopia,’ the ‘ship,’ a space whose radical oceanic isolation al-lows for progressive reinvention of social norms (Biendarra 470). The proximity to the sea might present the illusion of freedom, but at the beach, mainland normative cultural practices still dominate, leading to friction between social experimentation and moral judgement. Freed-Thall also argues that on the modernist beach, ‘industrial time is suspended and productivity set aside’ (8). The historical vacationer may have sought an escape from productivity, but the contemporary urban escape artist has demoted or abandoned that desire. They experiment by introducing labour into a space of leisure. The beach is chosen for its environmental features which might foster focus and seclusion, clashing with the inherited and locally understood sense of the seaside as a hub of sociality and leisure.
The enduring belief in littoral radicalism is not ill-founded, and I tend to agree that the modernist texts of Freed-Thall’s study channel those potentials. But in the near century that has intervened since the time of Proust and Woolf, political, economic, and cultural transformations have weakened the beach’s progressive capacity. The radical possibilities of the beach crop up in the texts of this paper, but they are made unrealisable by enterprises of ego and labour. The space’s more affective aspects remain, in opposition to the escape artist’s desire, including its inciting of ‘seaside melancholy’ (Miche in Freed-Thall 19) and defiance of order and concentration (Freed-Thall 8). Radical promises are broken, but the utopian failings of the vacationscape are more so the fault of the urban spaces being escaped from. The beach is incapable of medicating the alienated and overworked urbanites of the late capitalist moment—as Freed-Thall concludes, beaches have become ‘emblems of capitalist exhaustion’ (31).
When I write of the beach, I do not approach it as ‘fixed, abstract backdrop setting’ (Puxan-Oliva 86) but as space. The ‘spatial turn’ is the point from which Henri Lefebvre and others argued ‘the importance of space and place in theory and method’ (Ryan et al. 2) and ‘that material space is not thinkable without time, movement, and transformation … that space is also conceptualized, per-ceived, imagined’ (Puxan-Oliva 83). Roberts and Hallam argue that in film scholarship, ‘textual analysis’ is too often prioritised over the text’s social concerns (4). An emphasis on spatiality, on what Henri Lefebvre described as 'the space of social practice, the space occupied by sensory phenomena, including products of the imagination such as projects and projections, symbols and utopias' (12), can make the interpretation of both films and literary texts more fruitful. As Marta Puxan-Oliva writes, ‘space is political, the changing product of a social construct’ (84), and I am interested in the way text formally constructs space with new political significance. Concomitantly, I take a geographic approach to the reading of prose, film shots, and narrative form. The authors of Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (2016) comprise one literary theorist and two geographers, and they provide an extensive interdisciplinary map. Together, they define valuable terms such as ‘spatial frames’—the smallest units of envi-ronmental information and ‘story space’—the entire scope of material space, including sites of recollection and anticipation (Ryan et al. 24). Both terms find form in the vacationscape, whose claustrophobic quality restricts and gen-erates imaginings and recollections of other spaces. This paper avoids a doggedly cartographic approach, and I do not intend to map the textual environment as other literary geographers have done.2 I am aiming, in Fredric Jameson’s sense, to map ‘social phenomena’ through the lens of space (“Cognitive mapping” in Ryan et al. 77). Roberts and Hallam outline a five-point typology to ground the emerging focus on spatiality in film theory, and while ‘maps and mapping’ make up three of their points, I am more interested the latter two: ‘cognitive and emotional mapping’ and ‘film as spatial critique’ (8). Bertrand Westphal coined the term ‘geocriticism,’ for a method concerned with ‘how behaviour is affected by the physical properties of the environment … and how people experience and organize space and place’; the methodology is fruitful from either direction, able to assess ‘the impact of real-world geography on the collective imagination’ as well as how works of imagination inform geographic spaces (Ryan et al. 209). The seaside is a fertile generic category because it has long inspired utopian conceptions while human impact continuously challenges its material dimension.
Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu define ‘place’ as ‘the way environments and settings have been shaped and moulded by human action and habitation, while ‘space’ describes the attributes of ‘location, position, arrangement, distance, direction, orientation, and movement’ (7). Wendy Harding criticises Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative for its too-brief attempt to define these terms, but she also acknowledges the difficulty of holding solid definitions likely to blur in practice (3). Indeed, my own attempt to define space includes both social and cartographic features, but finds more commonality in what they term ‘place’. It might be best to ignore these broad categories, and instead find value in the binary which continually reappears under different names: ‘microlevel’ and ‘macrolevel’ to borrow from oral sociolinguistics (Linde and Labov in Ryan et al. 8), ‘container’ and ‘network’ (19), and the ‘tour’ and the ‘map’ (27). These terms have unique functions but correspond closely to social space on one hand, and cartographically understood space on the other. The tension between the two seems sufficient, without demanding precise, inflexible terms which will inevitably cave to the pressure of exceptions.
Marta Puxan-Oliva’s essay in Poetics Today attends to the rich advantages of connecting narrative and space. While her foci, islands and the postcolonial shore, share similarities with the vacationscape, I am again more narrowly focused on a space of temporary and leisurely seclusion, sought in opposition to urban space. Puxan-Oliva argues that not all spaces are worthy of analysis, some spaces are more loaded with cultural meaning and ambiguity and dominate a text more profoundly. The sea belongs to a set of storied environments which include ‘the ideal countryside in Jane Austen as described by Raymond Williams’ as well as ‘islands, plantations, and deserts’ (84). As advocates of geocriticism argue, the method is well-suited for the study of ‘generic places or landscape types, such as deserts, mountains, seashores … or the contrast between the city and the country’ (Ryan et al. 210). Importantly, the marriage of social space and narrative also accounts for the text’s influence on real space in line with MacCannell’s view on cultural construction (Puxan-Oliva 83). Puxan-Oliva defines these locales as ‘narrative environments … the formal narrative expression of space,’ and while setting is ‘textually self-sufficient,’ space demands recourse to cultural understanding (79). Positing the vacationscape as a narrative environment allows us to conceive of it as a ‘narrative driver’ which actively shapes narrative movement (Puxan-Oliva 82). One could also refer to Armentano’s theory of ‘place catalogue’ structures, an alternate framework with the same application as a ‘narrative environment,’ in which the thematic and narrative heart of a work is its space rather than character or traditional causal links (par. 11) Across vacationscape texts, we can detect consistent structural elements, akin to a genre, and trace their emergence to the space of the vacationscape. Each text follows the arrival of an uninterested vacationer and their attempts to isolate and work. Serendipitous encounters and mental fixations impede their focus, romantic and developmental possibilities arise, but departure occurs with little emotional growth and with social cohesion threatened.
In Teresa Castro’s articulation of Cinema’s Mapping Impulse, she argues that both cinema and cartography are graphic means of creating visual images of the world (9). The emphasis on film in this paper follows this line of inquiry. I include a literary text to bring the two mediums into conversation, arguing that both word and image construct our shared understanding of space. The three texts in two mediums offer an almost identical conception of the vacationscape. Productively, the attention paid to interior narration in the novel offers insight into the shared motivations of the filmic protagonists, while our external observation of the cinematic characters usefully detaches us from Ferrante’s all-consuming first-person narration. The distinct qualities of each medium reveal hidden features of the vacationscape narrative, then able to be supported by further textual evidence in the opposite medium.
This paper emerges then at the intersection of ‘a swell in humanities' fascination with the sea’ (Mentz 997 in Mohácsi 997) and with spatiality. Geocriticism is ‘the study of how stories, or corpora of stories, infuse physical space with symbolic meaning’ (Ryan et al. 210), and the aim of this paper is to uncover the changing meaning of the European vacationscape, to determine the relationship between the space and its cultural model, and explore the response of literary and filmic texts to the model’s change over the last three decades. The first chapter establishes the archetypal behaviour of the vacation, from the challenges of isolation and relaxation to the violation of social norms. Ferrante’s novel and Rohmer’s film, released close to the turn of the millennium, furnish this structure. The second chapter frames the urban escape artist’s anomie as the expression of a crisis in labour and leisure, with Petzold’s film illustrating this worsening plight. Importantly, this chapter will then make a quiet contribution to soothing the theoretical schism between spatial and temporal studies. While space is the theoretical basis of this work, the findings point to the inseparability of one dimension from its other. The desire to dislocate from overpopulated urban space, is revealed to be an at-tempt to negate temporality, an impossible urge furthered by the impulse to narrativise experience. I conclude by arguing that the texts belong to a formal movement favouring slowness and anti-narrativity, resisting the character’s misguided desires. Indeed, the texts make the modest offer of restoration which the vacation can no longer provide.