George Bickers
Places to flourish?: Edge spaces and the formative
process
'Edge spaces' abound in
literature of the postmodern and contemporary period. From J. G. Ballard's
Shepperton in The Unlimited Dream Company—urban
suburb-cum-rural/tropical wilderness—to Gary Spencer Millidge's illustrated
village of Strangehaven, by way of the blogs The Haunted Shoreline
and On Vanishing Space, edge spaces are, to paraphrase Professor Edward
Casey, 'areas of creative potential'. Examining a number of edge spaces,
including those mentioned above, this paper will examine the act of creation in
these edge spaces, ultimately suggesting that the traditionally stagnant view
attached to them—things 'washing up' on beaches, existing 'quietly' on the
outskirts, spaces 'sub'rural and 'sub'urban—is misplaced when one considers the
alchemical transformations that take place within them.
Indeed, the stagnation attached
to edge spaces is an idea that needs discussion and deconstruction. The
inclusion of The Unlimited Dream Company in a collection titled 'The
Terminal Collection' suggests, among other things, that the act of being in an
edge space is to be at the end of the line, devoid of possibility or further transport.
The works above all present rural spaces (or spaces ruralised) in an enchanted
manner, from which new creative possibilities can be synthesised and edge
spaces (re)endowed with their own alchemical qualities. In doing so, these
texts suggest that edge spaces are potent sites from which new creations can be
drawn. Adopting alchemical ideas of the transmutation of base metals into
precious metal, these texts mimic this act. I will argue that the reframing of
these popularly considered waste spaces not only recognises them as sites of
potential, but that in the act of writing, a new value is given to them,
potentially (and problematically) turning edge space into consumable landscape:
the base turned precious.
George Bickers is
currently reading for an MA in Culture and Thought after 1945 in the Centre for
Modern Studies at the University of York. A recent Cambridge graduate, he is
currently applying to U.K and U.S institutions for PhD study, and maintains a
blog concerned with cities, space, place, and counterculture at
trippinginbabylon.wordpress.com
