Chapter 3

‘Gripping to a wet rock’:

Coastal Erosion and the Land-Sea Divide
as Existentialist/Ecocritical Tropes in
Contemporary British and Irish Fiction
Anne-Julia Zwierlein

Coastal Erosion: British and Irish Coastlines under Threat

‘Living on the Edge’ (Nicolson); ‘The Owners Whose Homes Are Going over a
Cliff’ (Fryer); ‘I can’t even relax in bed as I’m certain that it will go in the middle
of the night’ (Akwagyiram): these are just some samples from UK media coverage
of the threat of coastal erosion at the onset of the twenty-first century. Through
their dramatic staging of the physical processes of erosion along with their human
consequences, these articles become, in a quite literal sense, what Kerridge in
the Routledge Green Studies Reader has termed ‘ecothrillers: environmental
cliffhangers’. In 2010, the Environment Agency, a non-departmental public body
responsible to the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs,
published new long-term predictions until the year 2110 for coastal erosion along
the British and Irish coastlines, along with interactive maps which allow users to
zoom in on erosion zones in their local area and watch the predicted development
over three timescales (see ‘Coastal Erosion Maps’).
Coastal erosion is caused by factors such as the hydraulic action of waves,
abrasion and attrition (see ‘Coastal Erosion’). While the phenomenon had been
documented throughout history, scientific investigations into erosion proliferated
with the advent of nineteenth-century geology, most famously in Lyell’s chapter
on the ‘Action of the Sea on the British Coast’ from his Principles of Geology,
and arguably, the natural process itself has recently accelerated on many stretches
of the British and Irish coastline due to climate change. For a sizeable number of
people who settled near cliffs once thought safe, worries over coastal erosion have
become very serious indeed. In response to this, since 2001 scientists have been
compiling the first detailed map of Britain’s coastline, using aerial photographs,
satellite pictures, and computer technology to build up a 3D model of coastal
erosion – while ‘[t]he traditional techniques [had] involve[d] watching wooden
posts falling into the sea to estimate how much the coast is eroding’ (‘Coastal
Erosion: The First UK Map’). As Nicolson reported in The Guardian in 2006,
‘Britain’s coastline has remained more or less intact since the end of the last ice
age. But as sea levels rise, erosion is accelerating and more than a million homes
54 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

are now under threat’. UK government figures corroborate that ‘UK coastal waters
have warmed by about 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past three decades. … [T]he
average sea level around the UK is now about 10 centimetres higher than it was
in 1900’ (‘Effects’).
Still Britain’s most popular retirement location (see ‘Seaside’), the seaside is also
a symbolic boundary, which in British and Irish cases is marked by a highly visible
coastline composed of cliffs and steep rocky outcrops alternating with more level
areas of grassland: the land-sea divide. As part of cultural (and literary) narratives,
this symbolic boundary also translates into the nature-culture divide – and, in more
specifically political and ideological discourses, it also becomes synonymous
with the boundary of Englishness, associated with the island status of Great
Britain as described in John of Gaunt’s ‘famous geographical blunder of England
as the “scept’red isle”, the “precious stone set in the silver sea”’ (Tönnies 226).
Discourse about the land-sea divide, in the case of Britain, is ambivalent: on the
one hand, national pride reinforces the emblematic status of what the National
Trust designates as ‘heritage coast’, as in the 2007 plea by the then Environment
Secretary David Miliband to open up the whole of England’s coastline, in the form
of freely accessible coastal walks, to the public: ‘We are an island nation. The coast
is our birthright and everyone should be able to enjoy it’ (‘Access’). And indeed,
at present just over 1,000 kilometres, or 33 per cent, of the English coastline are
designated ‘heritage coast’ and maintained by Natural England and the National
Trust (see ‘Heritage Coast’). On the other hand, the sea is the ‘other’ of England: it
is where England stops – as Enright describes it in The Gathering (2007):

And there it is: the open tang, the calling, the smell of the sea. Such a miracle, at
the end of the Brighton line, with the town stacked behind me, and behind that
all the weight of England, in her smoke and light, jammed to a halt here, just
here, by the wide smell of the sea. (76–7)

Accordingly, the language used to describe coastal erosion in today’s political

and cultural discourse is often militaristic: as Nicolson maintains, ‘[the British]
are … living in a fortress defended against the sea’. Discussions abound as to
how much of that defence line Britain will be able to keep up – will the stakes
be raised, or ‘do we abandon what we cannot maintain?’ (Nicolson). Cost-benefit
analysis requires the value of property under threat to be greater than the cost of
protecting it for coastal defence to be economically viable. In the 1990s, the cliff at
Birling Gap in East Sussex became a well-known example of the National Trust’s
‘new orthodoxy of managed retreat’ (Nicolson), and while ‘the Landmark Trust
has begun to spend £900,000 transporting the prominent folly known as Clavell
Tower … just 80 feet back from the cliff edge’, this ‘is a luxury treatment that few
other buildings will be afforded’ (Nicolson). For almost a decade, spectacular cliff
falls on the East Sussex coast and elsewhere have also become, rather predictably,
high-scoring hits on YouTube. As Ellie Robinson of the National Trust insists:
‘Cities, towns will be defended. But large stretches of the coastline are going to go.
The coast is a history of process and change and that is what we all now have to
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 55

understand’ (Nicolson 2006). The British government’s ‘Shoreline Management

Plan’, published in 2010–2011, set out a number of possible options for dealing
with the effects of erosion, from ‘hold[ing] or advanc[ing] the existing shoreline
position’ (‘Coastal Erosion Maps’) to ‘managed realignment’ to ‘no active
intervention’ (‘Shoreline’). Indeed, if climate change and global warming are
among the factors causing coastal erosion, in this case their consequences, usually
too slow for ordinary human perception, can be observed in the here and now.

Victorian ‘Ecocriticism’: Deep Time versus Local Time on the Beach

In the light of recent ecocritical studies, the case of coastal erosion opens up other
issues: the holistic ecosystems approach which sees humans as part of a changing
natural environment deliberately includes instances of loss and destruction as
natural and inevitable occurrences. Arguably, this perspective on nature originated
in the Victorian era. More specifically and with reference to this essay’s concern
with the cultural symbolisms of the land-sea divide, from the middle of the
nineteenth century onwards, the seaside came to figure as setting for a ‘deep
historical’, evolutionary perspective on humankind – as indeed, according to
Parham, ‘ecology … represents a conjunction of natural history and evolutionary
theory’ (157; also see Worster). From Mary Anning’s fossil finds embedded in a
cliff-face at Lyme Regis which provided paleontological evidence for Hutton’s
Theory of the Earth (1788) (see Garrard) – which are also evoked in Fowles’s
The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) – to Lyell’s aforementioned Principles
of Geology, the coastline started to open up non-anthropocentric vistas into
deep time. Significantly, the subtitle to Lyell’s study changed in the course of its
publication history. The original 1830–1833 subtitle: being an attempt to explain
the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation,
with the 9th edition (1853) turned into: or the Modern Changes of the Earth and
its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology. In other words, the title page
now advertised explicitly that historical changes in the distribution or phenotypes
of the earth’s ‘Inhabitants’ (that is, species of animals) could be seen as indicative
of, and caused by, historical changes in their geological habitat – a concept that had
been influential in the young Charles Darwin’s researches during his voyage on
the Beagle (1831–1836). Lyell’s geological and Darwin’s evolutionary biological
visions became ubiquitous in mid- to late-Victorian literature, which questioned
humankind’s position in a universe thus reconceived, famously, in Thomas Hardy,
whose ‘cliffhanger scene’ from A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) can serve as shorthand
for the larger issues: Charles Knight here comes face to face with fossilised beings,
discovering his connection to the long-lost world of trilobites – ‘Separated by
millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in
their place of death’ (209).
There are multiple instances in Victorian culture where the land-sea divide
similarly emphasises the smallness of human lives against the backdrop
of evolutionary time in seaside settings where, due to the erosion of cliffs,
56 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

geological strata are more immediately visible than in other natural settings.
Lyell’s observations on the ‘[a]ction of the sea on the British coast’, which survey
‘the eastern and southern shores of the British Islands, from our Ultima Thule
in Shetland to the Land’s End in Cornwall’ (Lyell 507) document neutrally and
scientifically the powers of tides and currents and their effects on the coastline,
including both erosion and the accession of new land (524). Yet Lyell’s vivid
descriptions of landslips, submerged woods or churchyards laid open in eroding
sea-cliffs also acknowledge that there is poetic sublimity to such natural spectacles
and emphasise destruction and loss from an anthropocentric perspective, evoking
the ‘waste’ (531), the ‘havoc and ruin’ (509) and ‘annihilation’ (534), caused by
coastal erosion. Indeed, narrative methods of melodrama and sensationalism are
sometimes used in order to represent the distance between the deep and the local
timescale, as when Lyell offers glimpses of gravestones or disinterred skeletons
protruding from cliff-faces. Numerous seaports, monasteries and churches are
recorded in his pages as having been ‘blotted out’ (525) by the incursions of the
sea so that ‘no traces … are now perceptible’ (535). Like the entire work, this
chapter evokes visions of geological ‘deep time’, sometimes having recourse
to living memory, quoting childhood recollections by local eyewitnesses, but
more frequently gesturing towards the remote future, speculating that ‘in a few
centuries … future geologists will learn [about previous coastlines] from historical
documents only’ (534).
A comparable example of historical ‘deep time’ vision from pictorial art is the
famous Victorian seaside painting by William Dyce, Pegwell Bay (1859–1860),1
which offers a view of barely distinguishable human figures against the
overwhelming natural background of its seaside cliffs. While Payne’s reading of
the painting in this volume argues convincingly that it may in fact convey an
affirmation rather than a denial of religious faith, traditionally, ‘commentators on
the painting have tended to argue that humans and human life are rendered as
insignificant, especially in comparison to the vastness of time (as represented by
the geological strata of the cliffs) and space (as represented by Donati’s Comet,
visible in the sky above the cliffs)’ (Smith 75). For Pointon, Pegwell Bay ‘is a
painting about time, and especially about the contrast [perhaps not necessarily a
pessimistic one] between human time and deep or cosmic time’ (42). Moreover,
the ‘shell collecting activities of the humans in the foreground’, inspired by the
Victorian amateur fascination with seaside studies, are closely associated, as
Smith argues, with those ‘lessons of geology and astronomy’ (75). Impressed
with the seeming insignificance of humans in the scheme of nature, George
Eliot, sifting the beach at Ilfracombe in 1856 for biological specimens together
with her partner, the scientist G.H. Lewes, perceives the houses of the coastal
village, and the humans inhabiting them, as clinging to the rocks like ‘a parasitic
animal – an epizoon making his abode on the skin of the planetary organism’
(Eliot 241–2). Indeed, the beach with its deposits of oceanic life often functions,

1
See Figure 1.2 in Payne’s contribution to this volume.
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 57

as Corbin notes in his book on the ‘discovery’ of the seaside during the Romantic
and Victorian eras, as an ‘indeterminate place of biological transitions, [where] the
links connecting mankind with the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms can
be seen with exceptional clarity’ (223). Lyell’s accounts of the transitional space of
the beach, the sheer disorder created by enormous landslips, emphasise once again
the huge natural forces involved; he describes ‘a confused assemblage of broken
strata, and immense blocks of rock, invested with sea-weed and corallines, and
scattered over with shells and star-fish, and other productions of the deep’ (Lyell
543). By contrast, a famous cartoon from Punch, John Leech’s ‘Common Objects
at the Seaside’ (1857), treats the disorder of the seaside and the blurring of the
species boundary in a more humorous manner, depicting female amateur scientists
at the beach looking, in their crinolines, just like the sea anemones for which
they search.2 Humorously or not, nineteenth-century literature and culture thus
increasingly use the land-sea divide as a biological and geological trope which, in
its strong visuality, questions humankind’s uniqueness in the ecological system.

The Land-Sea Divide in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction

Taking up these cues from their Victorian precursors, a considerable number of

recent British and Irish novels have staged their discussions of individual and social
identity at or near the seaside, using the drama of evolutionary and geological deep
time not only to reinforce symbolically the crises in their protagonists’ lives but
also to offer a larger, strikingly existentialist picture of the West European human
condition at the turn of the twenty-first century: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea
(1978), Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996), John Banville’s The Sea (2005), Ian
McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007),
for instance. However, I will focus primarily on Margaret Drabble’s The Witch
of Exmoor (1996), Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship (1999), Jeanette
Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (2004) and Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007).
In all these novels, the ever-shifting margin between land and sea functions as
symbolic catalyst for existential situations, for the probing and unravelling of
human relations. As contact zone and frontier, the coast is a ‘liminal space’ as
defined in van Gennep’s Rites of Passage and later by Turner. Preston-Whyte, too,
argues that ‘as a place of desire [liminal spaces] offer a “dreamtime” that resonates
with spiritual rebirth, transformation, and recuperation. However, transitional states
are also places of anxiety replete with darker images of threat and danger’ (350).
One main concern of these texts, gesturing back to the scientific upheavals
of the Victorian era, is the analysis of humankind’s position from an ecological
perspective, against the backdrop of huge geological changes taking place over the
course of centuries, as described by Lyell. Murdoch, Drabble, Tóibín and Winterson
all present their protagonists perched on the edges of cliffs, in houses crumbling

2
On this cartoon, whose title echoes ‘both Wood’s Common Objects of the Sea-Shore
and Pratt’s Common Things of the Sea-Side’ see Smith 71; also see Stott 160.
58 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

into the sea due to coastal erosion, exploiting these images for their combined
symbolic and ecocritical potential. All the novels, indeed, oscillate between
depicting personal human tragedies and displaying larger perspectives of entropical
decline or cyclical processes of birth and death. This interplay of existentialist and
ecocritical tropes, I would suggest, can be analysed by inquiring into the texts’
ambivalent negotiations between ‘deep time’ and ‘local time’ (see Rudwick), or,
in more recent ecocritical terminology, ‘deep green’ and ‘anthropocentric’ time
(Ryle 11). Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996), for instance, fuses a concern for
the individual with a non-anthropocentric insistence on transitoriness; the famous
ending has Jack’s ashes thrown to the wind ‘on the end of Margate Pier, [looking]
across to Dreamland’ (Swift, Last 294–5), a derelict fun park which in its very
shabbiness exposes the futility of escapist seaside dreams. The merging of the
human with the non-human, ash with grey sky, grey water and grey horizon,
is the key theme, alluding to both Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘That Nature is a
Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of our Resurrection’ (1888) and T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922), and the collapse of the pier, bridge between nature and
civilisation, symbolically highlights nature’s dominance over humankind.
In all the novels, scenes of coastal erosion serve to illustrate the haphazardness
and possible meaninglessness of human lives – often re-emphasised by way of
shorthand references to evolutionary theory or Darwinism, references which
do not, however, amount to systematic remodellings of nineteenth-century
evolutionary biology but can rather be explained as twenty-first-century popular
cultural versions of what Peckham has termed ‘Darwinisticism’, that is to say a
mixture of ideological reappropriation and rehashing of isolated clichés about
Darwin’s theory, such as the ‘struggle for existence’ or the ‘survival of the fittest’
(see Peckham). What unites these novels’ adaptations of, or shorthand allusions
to, nineteenth-century geology and evolutionary theory is a deeply felt vision of
the transitoriness and possible insignificance of human lives, a vision that should
not, however, be confounded with nihilism. Thus the sea’s movements are seen
by Banville’s narrator as ‘the great world’s shrugs of indifference’ (264), and in
Tóibín, official attempts to stop erosion are mentioned in passing but declared to
be futile (51). Likewise, Banville’s protagonist remembers swimming ‘between
two of the green-slimed concrete groynes that long ago had been thrown out into
the sea in a vain attempt to halt the creeping erosion of the beach’ (136). The lack
of insurance or government compensation for property lost due to ‘chronic coastal
erosion’ is also mentioned by Tóibín as having unsettled the family’s life plans
in the past (adopting a child was impossible) – and indeed, the phrase ‘chronic
coastal erosion’ (243–4) is also used by the insurance division of NatWest Bank
(see Fryer). A recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation suggests that the
government’s ‘Shoreline Management Plan’ tends to reinforce the detrimental
impact of climate change on ‘disadvantaged UK coastal communities’ (Zsamboky
et al.), and aspects of deprivation and geographic isolation feature prominently
in journalistic and fictional representations. Tóibín’s novel even links the lack of
insurance or government compensation for lost cliff-top property with the idea
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 59

of human extinction or the individual as genealogical terminus. Moreover, all the

novels depict the sheer physical dangerousness of the border between land and sea.
In Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, for instance, getting out of the sea again after a
swim is a continual challenge, life-threatening and blood-drawing. By collecting
stones from rock pools and ‘[erecting a] border round the edge of the grass’, the
main character attempts, in vain, to reimpose control and create boundaries with
material imported from the unruly sea (260). Finally, death by water, the annihilation
of human identity, is a ubiquitous motif in all the novels; Drabble, Winterson and
Enright all insist on the fact that drowned bodies are usually ‘unrecognisable but
for [their] teeth’ (Winterson 184; also see Drabble 196, and Enright 10).
Notwithstanding, all of these novels emphasise a vision of the ‘stubbornness’
of life, the will to survive (Drabble 83; Winterson 6) – vindicating human beings’
desire to live and transferring a ‘Darwinisticist’ idea of the ‘struggle for existence’
to the individual characters depicted while at the same time blurring the boundaries
between human and animal. Charles in The Sea, The Sea admires the ‘flowers
which contrive somehow to root themselves in crannies’ (Murdoch 6), and Mike in
Swift’s Tomorrow, before ‘being biological’ with his wife-to-be Paula, treats her to
a lecture about marram grass, ‘that wind-blown stuff that grows exclusively on the
brows of sand dunes’ (78). As Corbin states: ‘By the sea, the animal nature hidden
in man erupts with particular ferocity’ (225), and indeed, the land-sea divide as a
setting for Darwinian – or Darwinisticist – competition even among the unborn
is a topic throughout: in Winterson, the protagonist’s conception is imagined
as ‘[s]hoals of babies [vying] for life. I won’ (3); Enright’s protagonist, leaving
behind the liminal space of the shore where her brother died, feels ‘the shadow
of a child in me, the swoop of the future in my belly’ (205); and in McEwan’s
novel, Edward meditates, years after the rupture with his bride on their Chesil
Beach wedding night, ‘what unborn children might [otherwise] have had their
chances’ (166). As more detailed attention to four of these novels will now reveal,
the biological proximity of humans and animals, underlined by the peculiarities of
the seaside setting, is depicted as both disconcerting and reassuring.

Drabble, Winterson, Tóibín, Swift: Coastal Erosion versus the ‘will to grip’

The symbolism of crumbling cliffs encapsulates the precariousness of the land-

sea divide in Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor (1996), which centres on
a misanthropic, aging protagonist, Frieda Haxby, who after a successful life as
a writer cuts all ties with family and society in order to retire to Ashcombe, a
ramshackle former hotel on Exmoor ‘about to fall into the sea’ (9). Frieda has
become a ‘man-hater’ (23) like Timon of Athens, who in his death was likewise
‘entomb’d upon the very hem o’th’ sea’ (23; see Timon of Athens 5.4.66). In a
text that has been described as an ‘intellectual exercise’ rather than a novel
(Sellers; as quoted in Lorenz 58), Drabble mixes Frieda’s disgust with capitalism,
commercialism and pollution, and her concern for animal rights that makes her
anticipate J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals (1999),
60 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

with philosophical meditations about the ‘just society’. Drowning – whether

accidentally or voluntarily – is a leitmotif in the novel, linked to the utopian wish
‘[t]o float free of all this, to begin again’ (20).
In her isolated situation on the cliff, however, Frieda has escaped human
society in order to be confronted with something more primitive and visceral: the
Darwinian struggle for existence, termed by Darwin himself in his The Origin of
Species (1859), with reference to the ‘high geometrical ratio of [the] increase [of]
all organic beings throughout the world’ and political economy’s teachings about
population dynamics, ‘the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdom’ (Darwin 6). Writing her memoirs at the seaside, thus trying
‘to salvage her own self’ (69), Frieda is also, on a much more mundane level,
using her natural surroundings to supply her with food. Here she is confronted
by beings of a lower kind whose tenacious grip on life far surpasses her own, like
Murdoch’s ‘flowers … root[ing] themselves in crannies’ (6) and Swift’s marram
grass. These encounters are featured as archaic confrontations between hunter and
hunted; observing the scarce ‘forms of simple seashore life [that] have colonized
[the stony shoreline]’ (83), Frieda collects resisting, ‘stubborn’ (83) mussels on the
seaside rocks, with bleeding hands:

Blood and sea-salt mingle. She hacks, and curses. She has broken a mussel shell,
and its living body is exposed. She pulls it away from its rock and a lump of
its flesh seems to leap from its crushed dwelling place and attach itself like a
leech to her bare and bleeding hand. Horrified, she tries to brush off the clinging
fragment, but it sticks. It is fierce and hopeful. It will not die. Its flesh seeks a
home on her flesh. She scrapes it off with the knife, and it falls vanquished on to
the pale purple rock. (83–4)

Here the novel taps into the Victorian contemplation of ecocritical ‘deep time’ by
having Frieda meditate on the laws of evolution, considering her own past life as
nothing more than ‘an evolutionary trick, a spasm of self gripping to a wet rock’
(135):

She thinks of the laws of living and the laws of dying, of that severed blob of
orange flesh from the sea that had clung to hers. So tenacious, so unformed. And
here she is, so complex, and so tired. She has lost that simple will to grip. … We
were born without meaning, we struggled without meaning, we met and married
and loved and hated without meaning. We are accidents. All our passions are
arbitrary, trivial, a game of hazard. (135–6)

Moreover, Frieda associates her exile on the cliff with Napoleon’s on St Helena –
another seaside location where the ousted emperor, according to her interpretation
of a Turner painting, was similarly confronted by a meaningless nature, ‘staring at
an ill-placed, an improbable and outsized rock limpet’ (136).
Eventually, ‘stick or leap’ seems the only remaining alternative (260), and, like
several other characters in the novel, Frieda chooses death by drowning, defiantly
seeking out danger instead of shunning it. Or was it an accident – did she slip when
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 61

picking mushrooms on the cliffside? In any case, her death finds a glorious parallel
in an old legend about a nearby coastal headland, ‘Hindspring Point’, where a deer
had allegedly, in order to escape its hunters, ‘with three mighty leaps … bounded
down the cliff into the sea’ (259). In tune with Frieda’s ambiguous death, the
equally ambiguous ending, set on the beach below her old mansion, presents either
her grandchildren’s double suicide or their courageous leap to safety and a new
and better life (275–6; also see Lorenz 64).
Contrasting a Freudian death-drive, symbolically reinforced by the vastness
of geological time as seen against the backdrop of the land-sea divide, with a
tenacious will to survive or ‘Darwinisticist’ struggle for existence (which, however,
is transferred to individual characters, especially the protagonist, and dissociated
from the long-term perspective of species evolution), Jeanette Winterson’s novel
Lighthousekeeping (2004) similarly oscillates around the poles of fixity and fluidity,
insisting on the impermanence of identity – ‘My life is a trail of shipwrecks and
set-sails. There are no arrivals, no destinations’ (127) – but also emphasising the
necessity for ‘anchors’ (21), for ‘navigation points’ (102), indeed, for lighthouses:
‘The sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never’ (17). The lighthouse at Cape Wrath
that served as a model was erected in 1828 by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of the
late-Victorian writer Robert Louis Stevenson, whose works feature as a prominent
intertext; the name ‘Cape Wrath’ derives from a Norse word for ‘turning point’,
a fact whose metaphorical potential Winterson exploits throughout. The novel’s
present-day protagonist, named ‘Silver’ (5) after Long John Silver of Stevenson’s
Treasure Island (1883), lives with her mother in a house cut steeply into the cliff
above the town Salts. The mother dies in the act of saving her daughter when both
fall off the precipice. Silver manages, with ‘bleeding fingers’ (7), to ‘hang … on
to one of [their] spiny shrubs …, a salty shrub that could withstand the sea and the
blast’ (6–7) – again, faced with the greater capacity for survival of lower life forms.
Living for a while in the lighthouse with its keeper, ancient Pew, she is stranded
again when it is mechanised, ‘as indeed it was in 1998’ (Andermahr 146).
The nineteenth-century subplot centres around Babel Dark, a parson who has
encounters with Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Darwin. Living a double
life like Jekyll and Hyde, one with his wife, one with his mistress, ‘Babel Dark’s
split personality and his struggle between scientific and religious world views’
are central to the plot (Andermahr 149). Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s ideas are
linked to the theme of survival, but they also gesture towards the interconnections
between species, things and people, again reflected in the land-sea divide,
Corbin’s ‘indeterminate place of biological transitions’ (223), as is evident when
Lighthousekeeping evokes the famous cliff-hanger scene from Hardy’s A Pair of
Blue Eyes, mentioned above: as he attempts to save his dog, who has fallen down a
cliff, Babel is suddenly confronted, like Charles Knight, by the ‘wall of [a] cave …
made entirely of fossils’ (116):

He looked at the dark sea-stained wall, but how could the sea have reached here?
Not since the Flood. He knew the earth was 4,000 years old, according to the
Bible.
62 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

… He put his fingers to his mouth, tasted sea and salt. He tasted the tang of
time.
Then, for no reason at all, he felt lonely.
… He had always believed in a stable-state system, made by God, and left
alone afterwards. That things might be endlessly moving and shifting was not
his wish. … Darwin tried to console him. ‘It is not less wonderful or beautiful or
grand, this world you blame on me. Only, it is less comfortable’. Dark shrugged.
Why would God make a world so imperfect that it must be continually rightening
itself? It made him feel seasick … knowing that the fight in him was all about
keeping control, when his hands were bloodless with gripping so tight. (117–20)

As with Murdoch’s protagonist, the ‘tight grip’ he tries to retain on his life is
linked metaphorically to the Darwinian struggle for survival and to the coastal
setting, evoking an image of humanity’s hands clutching the rocks in a desperate
bid for safety. Indeed, after losing his mistress and true love, Babel’s psychological
decline is metaphorically linked to the erosion he observes on the coast – ‘the
cliffs were worn away at the base’ (188). Lacking the paradoxical tenacity of his
fossils, he, too, finally chooses death by water. In fact, the initially comforting
image from his favourite hymn of Christ’s love as a ‘rock’ onto which his church is
‘fastened’ (121) is now associated first with the dead fossils fixed to the cliff, then
with the sea village, Salts, clinging to the rocks in what George Eliot would have
seen as a parasitical position and, finally, ‘transformed into a pagan counter-image
of … everlasting torment: “Fastened to the rock. And he thought of Prometheus,
chained to his rock for stealing fire from the gods”’ (Onega 219).3
Coastal erosion, evoking the ecocritical vision of ‘deep time’, is the dominant
metaphor of Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship (1999), set in Tóibín’s home
county of Wexford, Ireland. The action of natural forces, of currents and tides, is
here depicted with a precision that evokes Lyell’s Principles of Geology; Tóibín’s
long, poetic descriptive passages also share Lyell’s sense of the sublime and, at the
same time, of the human and historical losses involved. His plot revolves around
three generations of women, estranged by hurtful events buried in the family’s
past and reunited in the grandmother’s house on the coast because Declan, their
brother, son and grandson, is dying from AIDS. As Ruth Padel in a September 1999
Independent interview with Tóibín has it, they are ‘try[ing] and often fail[ing] to
understand each other, fitfully illumined by staring across the dark, estranging,
loss-filled sea between’. The title focuses on a lightship, a permanently moored
ship with light beacons, established in 1857 and ‘taken out of commission by
Irish Lights’ in 1968; Tuskar lighthouse across the bay is still in operation and is
mentioned in the novel as well (191).
Grandmother Dora’s derelict house is situated perilously close to a crumbling
cliff; a neighbour’s house has already partly fallen into the sea. The ‘walk’ to
the beach is rather a climb and a run: ‘there was always too much loose sand
at the bottom’ (50), and Dora is plagued by perpetual fears about people’s cars
rolling over the cliff (49; 138). The Irish big-house theme is here combined with

3
Onega quotes from Winterson 121.
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 63

the symbolic erosion of a family. The human psyche is described in geological

metaphors, as when Helen sees the hurts of the past as ‘eating away at me all
these years’ (211). AIDS, the disease that comes in waves and erodes Declan’s
body, and their father’s death from cancer when they were children, are likewise
connected to the natural spectacle on the coast (216). The novel ends on a note
of reconciliation – even though Declan’s imminent death has to be accepted by
all, and even though the view of the eroding cliffs and the land-sea divide, with
its intimations of a prevalence of nature over culture, for a while reinforces the
‘hardness in [Helen’s] heart against the world’ (260), yet:

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They
meant nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than
the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the
weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they
hardly existed, … they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted
remote seascape. … It might have been better, she felt, if there never had been
people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning
breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or
dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out
from behind the black rainclouds. (260)

While the backdrop of eroding cliffs diminishes the importance of human

experience, as Helen’s more pessimistic self sees it – similar to traditional
readings of Dyce’s Pegwell Bay – the motif of erosion also acquires more hopeful
connotations in the novel’s metaphorical web: identified by Persson as a ‘coming
out novel’ (150) concentrating on Declan’s homosexuality and that of his friends
Paul and Larry who come to watch over him at the seaside, the novel arguably
confronts the nuclear family model of ‘middle-class suburbia’ (160), ‘the very
foundation of Catholic Ireland’ (161), with other life models. The seaside thus
also functions as the setting for ‘confessions’; here ‘the characters share crucial
memories from their past: Paul talks about his relationship, Helen about her father’s
death and Lily remembers the story of Tuskar Lighthouse and the Blackwater
Lightship’ (Persson 166). The liminal space of the land-sea divide facilitates more
intense (and perhaps more honest) self-analyses, as the protagonists are reduced
to an existentialist mode dissociated from the professional routine of their urban
lives. Paul’s work for the European Commission and Larry’s profession – he
is an architect – are, likewise, perhaps too obviously, symbolic; according to
Persson, ‘new structures can be built inside or on top of old ones. Furthermore, a
sense of change is strongly felt in the repeated references to … erosion … [T]he
landscape … is bound to change, as are attitudes’ (Persson 166). At least according
to this reading, erosion here becomes a symbol for the crumbling of prejudices, for
a positive process of change.
The land-sea divide and its reduction of the human in scale and importance
in Graham Swift’s Tomorrow (2007), my last example, likewise allows for
more hopeful connotations: the sea is life-threatening but also a place of new
beginnings. The novel is told in a monologue by Paula, mother of two, lying in bed
64 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

awake before a crucial day of revelation. Focusing on the family secret of artificial
insemination about to be revealed to the twins, now sixteen, she meditates, like
Drabble’s Frieda, on nature’s indifference, the sheer haphazardness of existence in
terms of the evolutionary scale: ‘nature is colossally wasteful. For every life that
makes it, a staggering number of potential lives are lost. There may be millions of
us walking around, but we are all extraordinary little exceptions’ (98). She opposes
to this the paradoxical fact that her children ‘were really meant’ (98; emphasis in
original), contrasting, as far as her husband Mike is concerned, biological with
spiritual parenthood. He may have a low sperm count, but he has been a father
to his children, and he is, coincidentally, editor of a biology magazine called The
Living World.
Indeed, the land-sea divide, catalysing eruptions of ‘the animal nature hidden
in man … with particular ferocity’ (Corbin 225), had been a leitmotif of their
life together: Paula and Mike’s relationship started by the sea in Brighton – ‘The
ship of our future … was launched that day (43) – and later Mike proposed to
Paula in the dunes near Craiginish during sexual intercourse, another moment of
primitive ritual initiation which aligns them with the animal world on the beach
and which is catalysed by the proximity of the land-sea divide: ‘Second birthdays
definitely occur, lives begin all over again’ (44).4 The novel’s central and most
highly symbolised instance of a ‘second birthday’ takes place in Cornwall a
few years later, when their children, hiding in a little cave at the end of a line of
rocks leading out into the sea, are surprised by the tide coming in. In danger of
drowning, they have to be rescued by Mike, and the novel’s testing of biological
versus spiritual paternity seems to be resolved: ‘how could that man not have
been your father?’ (195). Moreover, this ‘second birth’ had been prepared earlier
when Paula remembered thinking that the twins’ birth was like their escaping from
‘some hidey-hole together’ (208), anticipating the seaside cave that nearly cost
them their lives. The blood drawn from the twins’ shins and knees when they
are pulled up out of the water by their frantic mother also evokes their biological
birth – and the Darwinian or rather ‘Darwinisticist’ struggle for existence, once
more transferred from the diachronic scale of species evolution to the individual
lives at the centre of the novel’s plot. Still, there is an even more fundamental
connection at this climactic moment between the symbolic ‘birthing’ process and
the ‘will to grip’ of primitive life forms which the family encounter as they are
clinging to the rocks’ edge: ‘under the lip of the ledge, just beneath the glinting
waterline, there were clusters of barnacles, little clenched, packed shells, tresses
and twirls of swaying seaweed, a whole world of gripping life’ (213). Again, as in
the other novels surveyed here, the liminal space between water and land offers a
vivid picture of the instinct for survival shared by humans and animals, and thus
it also evokes evolutionary deep time, embedding the concerns of local time and
individual fates in a much larger picture.

4
See the echo in Paula’s exclamation ‘“Yes”, I said. “Oh yes, yes, yes”’ of Molly’s
concluding words in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), recalling her acceptance of Bloom’s marriage
proposal.
 ‘Gripping to a wet rock’ 65

Conclusion

While not qualifying as ‘environmentally oriented work[s]’ on all the counts

of Lawrence Buell’s checklist, first and foremost among these being that ‘the
nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence
that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’ (Head 237;
with reference to Buell 179), the four novels analysed here definitely foreground
natural processes, using them as much more than just a backdrop for human affairs.
Indeed, they often question explicitly any kind of anthropocentric perspective,
as, for instance, in McEwan’s novel, where the beach becomes the site of blurred
identities, people ‘flickering and dissolving at [their] outlines’ (139), or as in
Winterson’s novel, whose protagonist sees life as a short ‘stretch of sea and sand,
[a brief] walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done’ (232).
Thus these novels integrate the diachronic visions of both nineteenth-century
evolutionary biology and geology, sharing both Darwin’s and Lyell’s longue durée
perspectives which envisage life ‘in a few centuries’ as an integral part of their
scientific conceptualisations (Lyell 534). But simultaneously the novels’ depictions
of the ‘struggle for existence’ remain ‘Darwinisticist’, in Peckham’s sense of
the term, by reducing these collective processes to the level of individual fates
and characters; again, the images of the land-sea divide are also used, in quite a
traditional way, as symbols of and catalysts for individual human development.
Indeed, this is hardly avoidable, as the term ‘nature’ is always a discursive term
and never ‘simply’ a material space and place. Thus in the realms of discourse,
‘social relations [or] differentiations between subjects … are being proposed’
through the depiction of ‘natural’ space (Ryle 12). As Head argues, ‘the represented
landscape becomes a text in which human interaction with the environment is
indelibly recorded: it follows that a Green materialist reading of this inner text
cannot divorce the social from the natural’ (236). In order to be meaningful in
representation, environmental deep time needs local time, and deep green readings
seem to be impossible without the foil of anthropocentrism. Erosion zones, in other
words, need the ‘Homes Going over a Cliff’, or the protruding skeletons.
Throughout, we have been concerned at least implicitly with recent ecocritical
discussions of whether humans are part of a holistic natural system and thus
‘naturally’ subject to environmental change, and to what extent it is legitimate
to figure such change as ‘loss’, or even more drastically as the ‘havoc and ruin’
that Lyell evokes (509). Yet what about changes induced by humans themselves?
Rarely do the novels address that question; there is no conclusive differentiation
between the ‘natural’ forces of currents and tides as described in the Principles of
Geology and, for instance, the possibility of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
human-induced phenomena such as climate change. Rather, the novels we have
been looking at use the liminality of their seaside settings to provide, not for the
first time in Western cultural history, ‘a solid test of civilization, whose presence
is hollow’ (Corbin 224). They exploit the symbolic potential of coastal erosion to
illustrate the futility of human endeavours; and, at the same time, as symbols of
the human potential for perseverance, they emphasise the tenacious ‘grip’ on life
66 The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

of primitive coastal flora and fauna such as the ‘stubborn’ seaweed (Drabble 83;
Winterson 6) or the barnacles that Darwin himself had studied so enthusiastically.
In recent years, both crime and science-fiction writing have picked up on the
metaphor of erosion in order to sensationalise the post-human or localise deep
time: Elly Griffiths’s crime novel The House at Seas End (2011) features a forensic
archaeologist investigating the discovery, due to coastal erosion, of bodies dating
from the Second World War (along with other buried secrets). While the bleak,
eroding north Norfolk coast here becomes ‘a metaphor for the decay of human
sympathy’ (Forshaw), Ian Creasey’s science-fiction story ‘Erosion’ meditates
about the ‘scars’ (8) of erosion on the Yorkshire coast, zooming in on derelict
benches with paradoxical ‘commemorative plaques’ (10) that are ranged along
a crumbling and disappearing cliff-top path. What we encounter in such cultural
representations, in more or less strongly Darwinian, or Darwinisticist terms, are
intimations of human extinction and the ‘blurred boundaries between human and
animal’ that had begun to disquiet Victorians (Stott 178): potential extinction,
staged through liminal life-and-death situations and post-human scenarios, set
against a backdrop of coastal erosion.

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