Of worms and birds : approaches to the island between practice and the imaginary

Abstract

In the context of the so-called spatial turn in cultural and social studies, geographical space has been reconsidered as a cultural phenomenon moving away from the notion of space as a given constant and instead acknowledging its cultural component, defined and semanticised by its users and their practices. At the interface of materiality and discursivity, the island becomes a highly interesting as well as paradigmatic site for the negotiation of a specific ‘islandness’ (Hay 2006) from ‘within’ on the one hand and the metaphorical construction of the island from ‘outside’ on the other, having been a space for inspiration and projections to philosophers and writers for centuries. Against the backdrop of Michel de Certeau’s ‘Practice of Every-day Life’ (1980) and his theory of the two-fold appropriation of space, as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the smooth and gridded space (‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, 1980), the following paper seeks to explore the imaginary construction of the island space from two perspectives: (i) the appropriation of the island by walking on the ground, and (ii) from a bird’s eye perspective from above. These perspectives create two opposite notions of the island and contribute to the establishment of various discourses on the insular, representing different power structures and critical takes on social life, confirming as well as subverting established discourses. Using a comparative approach, different examples of constructions of islands from European literary history will be employed, mainly drawing on the genre of the Robinsonade. One central imaginary of the island in European literature is the island in the far sea, often in the Pacific; this is analysed as a pre-dominant construction of insularity in the following narratives: ‘Robinson Crusoe’ by Daniel Defoe (1719), ‘ Suzanne and the Pacific’ by Jean Giraudoux (1921), ‘The Wall’ by Marlen Haushofer (1963), ‘Friday or The Other Island’ by Michel Tournier (1967), ‘Atlas of Remote Islands’ by Judith Schalansky (2009) and ‘The Pine Islands’ by Marion Poschmann (2017).