Islands in Literature: A Study of the Spectrum of Evolving Discourses in Island Literature across Lands and Ages

By Rama Kundu

The irresistible and eternal attraction of an island has surfaced in literature as a varied range of tropes : the domain of strange fantastic creatures, flora and fauna, an 'Other' since the ancient times; epitome of the charm of the distant in the romantic era;real geographic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Srishtisandhan
• Release date: Dec 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9788176256902

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Islands in Literature

A Study of the Spectrum of Evolving Discourses in Island Literature across Lands and Ages

Rama Kundu

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ISLANDS IN LITERATURE

A Study of the Spectrum of Evolving Discourses in Island Literature across Lands and Ages

© Author

2nd Edition - 2022

ISBN: 978-93-5208-021-2

Investigator: Rama Kundu

[Reg. No: F 6-6/2012-13/EMERITUS-2012-13-GEN-489/(SA-II)]

A Srishtisandhan Production

In memory of

Mohit K. Ray

my never-failing friend, philosopher and guide

About the Book:

The irresistible and eternal attraction of an island has surfaced in literature as a varied range of tropes : the domain of strange fantastic creatures, flora and fauna, an ‘Other’ since the ancient times; epitome of the charm of the distant in the romantic era; real geographical spaces since the era of sea-voyaging, discovery and re-mapping of islands; with the emergence of imperialism new meanings arising from the new imperial discourse; in the postcolonial era the islanders themselves ‘writing back’ to the mainstream canon. Today we have a great harvest of island literature arising out of various discourses, including postcolonial, postimperial, feminist, ecological, cultural, etc. in addition to unique work/s on island arising from individual perceptions - philosophical, imaginative, emotional, nostalgic, etc.

A study of island literature across ages and lands thus can introduce us not only to a vast spectrum of ideas, approaches, contemplation, ideation, discourses and counter discourses. but also to a wide network of inter- references, in which authors across lands and ages—from Homer to Shakespeare, Defoe-Swift-Ballantyne to Golding-Coetzee, Virginia Woolf to Margaret Atwood, Rhys-Walcott to Eco-Saramago - seem to reach out to one another and shake hands.

A basic perceptual difference between the outsider and the insider as they behold their encircled space has contributed to great counterpoints: compulsive confinement; challenge of survival; thrill of discovery; satisfaction of possession, love, claustrophobia, desire to escape, desire to return and repossess, etc. - which writers have brought to correspond to a wide range of contrapuntal discourses. It has been envisioned as the exclusive space for the artist, the woman, as time’s backwater, as the magic realm of the surreal/hyperreal fantasia, etc.

Island has come to semiotize a wide range of tropes and significations. It appears that if island is a signifier, then the signified are endless. Indeed, the island paradigm seems to be like a magic crystal reflecting innumerable strands and shades (of meanings), depending on the way you looked at it.

The subject involves an area of oceanic vastness, starting from the coast of the ancient ages right into the ports of the modern and postmodern times. The area has been ever spreading and vibrant texts have been sprawling all the time, sprouting newer branches, accumulating newer layers of meaning, and striking newer depths of perception and insight.

This book, an outcome of the UGC Emeritus Fellowship, has been an attempt to scoop up a few of these infinite ‘infinities of islands’ as they are presented and projected in texts across ages and spaces, starting from Valmiki and Homer and continuing into the postmodern islands of Jose Saramago and Umberto Eco. (433)

About the Author:

Dr Rama Kundu is former Emeritus Fellow (awarded by the UGC), and former Professor of English, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India. Her publications include:

Vision and Design in Hardy’s Fiction (1984)

Wrestling With God: Studies in English Devotional Poetry (1996)

Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain (2005)

New Perspectives on British Authors: From William Shakespeare to Graham Greene. (2006)

E.M.Forster’s A Passage to India (2007)

Intertext: A Study of the Dialogue Between Texts (2008)

Emerging Territories: A Study in New Literatures in English (2009)

The Unfamiliar Hardy: A New Look (2010)

Translated [Jointly with Mohit K.Ray] Rabindranath Tagore’s (Gora.) 2008

Translated [Jointly with Mohit K.Ray] translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Jīvansmŗti) as Jīvansmŗti :The Birth of a Poet’s Soul. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2010

Ānandamath O Sāmpradāiktā (in Bengali on Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) (1987); (12) Manobīj (collection of personal essays in Bengali) Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers, 2013

She edits The Atlantic Literary Review and has also edited an anthology of research papers on Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, a collection of essays on Thomas Hardy, two volumes of critical studies on Indian Writing in English, six anthologies of Studies in Women Writers in English, two volumes of critical essays on Salman Rushdie, and a festschrift, Widening Horizons: Essays in Honour of Professor Mohit K. Ray, in addition to translating Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Gora, [jtly with M.K.Ray] and a volume of Bengali poems by Pratima Ghosh —On the Revolving Stage - into English. She has written a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Professor Kundu has participated and chaired sessions in a large number of National and International Seminars and Conferences. Professor Kundu had also done a UGC-sponsored Major Research Project (2004-2006) on Texts Old and New: Studies in Interface.

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CONTENT

Acknowledgments:

My acknowledgments are due to:

(1) The University Grants Commission, New Delhi, for awarding the Emeritus Fellowship. [Reg. No. F 6-6/2012-13/EMERITUS-2012-13-GEN-489/(SA-II)], dtd. 25 April 2013.

(2) The University of Burdwan for providing facilities to work for the Emeritus Fellowship Project in the University Department.

(3) The teaching and non-teaching staff of Department of English, Burdwan University.

(4) Library staff of the Central Library, Burdwan University.

(5) Publishers of the following books:

Ray, M.K. [ed.] V.S.Naipaul: Critical Essays (Vol.1) Studies in Literary Criticism (Vol.2), Kundu, R. Intertext: A Dialogue between Texts. The Unfamiliar Hardy

(6) Publishers of the following journals:

The Atlantic Critical Review, New Delhi, Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies. Baleswar, Odisha Interlitteraria, Tartu, Estonia - for using materials, authored by me, and printed in the above-mentioned publications.

R. Kundu

April 2015

Abbreviations

Abbreviations of Titles as used in the following pages:

AI            The Aran Island

CI            The Coral Island

IDB            The Island of the Day Before

IHO            I Heard the Owl Call My Name

LOF            Lord of the Flies

MM            The Mystic Masseur

PfE            Places far from Ellesmere

S            Surfacing

SR            The Stone Raft

TL            To the Lighthouse

Voyage            Voyage in the Dark

WB            The Well-Beloved

WSS            Wide Sargasso Sea

CHAPTER 1

Islands in Literature

Islands in Literature:

A Study of the Spectrum of Evolving Discourses in Island Literature across Lands and Ages

You blue-eyed childlike festinator to the future, Ivar.

What islands had you not visited?

Islands of poetry in the nervous swirls of Aeolus,

with dangerously heavy word plains behind.

The island of asters’ light in the lap of the warm

Mediterranean...

[Juri Talvet. ‘21st Baltic Elegy’, Estonian Elegy. P.62]

In the beginning of the Odyssey (Book I), Athena says: my heart is heavy for Odysseus… pining in long misery of exile on an island which is just a speck in the belly of the sea (Shaw 5). An appropriate analogy indeed for such a small thing in the midst of such bewildering overwhelming vastness! In the perception of the ancients an island appeared as small and imperceptible as 'a speck', compared to the vast sea encircling it. The perception has not indeed changed much in the 21st century, in spite of all the technological advancements that man has made during the intervening eras.

The island amidst the wide sea, big or small as it may be in size, has been very special as a locale in literature and the arts all along. The uniqueness of the island as a locale lies in its total isolation. Even a mountain, which touches the pure sky at one end, rolls down at the other to the earth; when apparently inaccessible, it is not yet totally cut off, distanced as it may be. On the other hand, an island, owing to its very isolation, has accumulated layers of significances as an image, and turned out in course of time to be a multivalent sign, which has been adapted by writers and artists across lands and ages to articulate a rich spectrum of ideas, discourses, and counterdiscourses. If island serves as a signifier, then the signified are endless, - from Valmiki to Homer, from Donne to Arnold, from Shakespeare to Keats, from Cowper's Selkirk to Defoe's Crusoe to Walcott's Cruso, along with all the varied Crusoes in-between (thrown up by a range of writers including Elizabeth Bishop, Coetze, Giraudoux, Tournier, et al), from Ballantyne to Stevenson, to Golding, from A.D.Hope to Seamus Heaney, Jean Rhys to Hilda Dolittle, J.M.Synge to Margaret Craven, D.H.Lawrence to Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood to Aritha Van Herk to Anita Desai, from Rabindranath Tagore to Jibananda Das to Lawrence Durrell, from Jose Saramago to Amitav Ghosh, et al, around the world, and across ages!

There have been unique literary works on island arising from variegated individual perceptions-philosophical, imaginative, emotional, social-cultural, nostalgic, etc. A comparative study of island literatures across ages and lands thus can introduce us to a vast spectrum of ideas, approaches, contemplation, meditation evolving around one particular kind of space, spots representing unique isolation amidst a vast sea, spots of solid stable land amidst vast turbulent chaotic water, occasionally small spots of conscious life amidst vast stretches of indifferent, even hostile, nature.

Genesis

About the genesis of islands, their beginning and ending, we have mythological explanations in different cultural traditions.

For instance, islands figured in the Christian 'geosophy' [a term used by John Kirtland Wright (1966: 68-88)] as originally parts of a larger whole; due to God's wrath with Adam and Eve Eden was shattered and riven, leading to the emergence of islands. Islands were thus the emblem of God's wrath, constant reminders of man's sinfulness. But they were also... destined to disappear at the end of time, when God's grace would make the world whole again (Gillis 22).

Eventually modern science came up with its geographical, geological notions and the empirical discourse of evolution that would reject any such apocalyptic straightjacket. John R. Gillis argues: In the course of the century [eighteenth] time had finally escaped its Biblical straitjacket and islands ceased to be associated with mythical beginnings and endings (2003:30). Gillis cites the 18th century English geologist (1785) James Hutton in support of his argument: In the economy of the world... I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end (Gillis 30). Instead, creation and destruction came to be seen as part of a total long process. As Alexander von Humboldt observes: The history of the globe instructs us, that volcanoes destroy what they have been a long series of ages in creating. Islands, which the action of subterranean fires have raised above the waters, are decked by degrees in rich and smiling verdure; but these new abodes are often laid waste by the renewed action of the same power, which caused them to emerge from the bottom of the oceans (cited in Leed 1991: 202-3).

Jose Saramago in The Stone Raft voices the same notion in our times, with an added touch of awe, After all, what is an island. An island...is the emergence of submarine cordilleras and very often just the sharp peaks of rocky needles which miraculously remain upright at depths of thousands of metres, an island, in short, is the most fortuitous of events.... (SR 166) ; while at the same time he would be relating the 'genesis' of his island to the frames of the Greek and Christian myths, through witty allusions interspersed all through the text, thus reflecting the continuing hold of ancient myths on the modern mind, with reference to the subject.

The list of imaginary islands which appear in mythological tales, legends, folklore, religious texts seems to be endless; just to cite a few : Avalon, Island of Apples, believed to be the last resting place of King Arthur, Hawaiki—the supposedly ancestral abode of the Polynesians, Islands of the Blessed in Greek mythology, a place reserved for the great dead heroes, Thule—an island close to Iceland, Greenland, Thuvaraiyam Pathi — in Ayyavazhi mythology, a sunken island some 150 miles off the south coast of India. the Island of Jewel ('Mmanidwip') in ancient Hindu mythology, the womb of the universe, showing the world goddess seated on her spouse (Campbell 665).

In 'The Archipelago of Imaginary Places' Italo Calvino, in his characteristic fashion, draws up an archipelago constituted of a series of fantasy/allegoric islands, which is again supposedly drawn upon a book, titled The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), by an Argentine and an Italian in collaboration (Calvino 135). Some of these textual (folkloric, legendary, fictional) islands, as cited by Calvino, are: Frivola in the Pacific, where life is so easy that proves frustrating; the Diamond Islands, which swallow up imprudent travellers; Capillaria, a no-males-land beneath the sea, exclusively inhabited by beautiful self-reproducing women; the island of Odes, where the roads are living creatures which freely move as they like; London-on-Thames, which is not the famous city, but one dug out of the top of a rock, and ruled by a gorilla with several wives; the island of Dionysus where the vineyard have vines which are women from the waist upwards, and a traveller embracing them by chance would certainly become a vine himself; the island of Malacovia which is made entirely out of iron, and in the shape of an egg (Calvino 133-134). Apparently, the home of such fantasy constructs must be a segregated outpost, even if imaginary. What is impossible, even absurd, in the mainland can be imagined as plausible upon the insular space of a remote island.

Variety

When we consider the bewildering variety of this topos in literature – be it replication of an actual island or creation of the artist's imagination—, it seems 'God's plenty', to say the least. If we look at the domain of epic, there are the Homerian islands of the Odyssey with their eternal fascination for the adventurous as well as the imaginative type of readers; the same applies for Swarnalanka in the Ramayana, which has acquired symbolic significance for the spiritual as well as the earthly mindset.

Islands abound in folk tales and legends, not only of the islanders (which is but natural), but the mainlander has also woven tales around them; for instance, the exotic islands in the Arabian Nights, - the 'Black Island', the seven fantasy islands Sinbad visits on his seven successive sea-voyages - or the magic isles amidst real turbulent seas in the Japanese folk tales about the 'Eight Islands' of ancient Japan, supposedly offsprings of the union of heavenly deities.

The island of Prospero/Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest carrying a reflection of the excitement of the early voyaging era, has invited as much critical and literary attention as to constitute a library, with its endless intertextual production and reproduction by the mainstream as well as African, and Caribbean writers like Lamming, Césaire, Mannoni, et al. It is enough to browse through Chantal Zabus's Tempests After Shakespeare to get an idea how even one single island of Shakespeare has stirred creative imagination through centuries and to what extent, and in how many directions. Writers of diverse ideological, cultural, racial, and sexual persuasions have undertaken to rewrite The Tempest After Shakespeare. Its particular resonance results from the unprecedented conflation of postcoloniality, postpatriarchy, and postmodernism. The Tempest thus emerges as the only viable site of contest and negotiation for such various discourses at this point in time, from countless subjectivities, and over multiple spaces (Zabus 7).

Though an imaginary site, the projection of the isle in The Tempest anticipates the tension between the imperial and indigenous claims upon an island-space, which will be further accentuated in subsequent centuries. The islands written during the imperial centuries have come to constitute a sub-genre by themselves— so attractively had they been drawn up by canonical writers like Defoe, Swift, Stevenson, Ballantyne, et al, and such have been their infinite repercussion on the literary scenario of their contemporary as well as subsequent eras in the form of a variegated spectrum of the Robinsonade genre, right from The Swiss family Robinson to the counter-discourse of post-imperialism in Golding's Lord of the Flies and still further newer speculations of postcolonialism-feminism- [inter]textuality as in Coetzee's Foe, which shows a postcolonial reversal of the Robinsonade that had been flagged off centuries ago by Defoe's superb imperial confidence. Evidence of the tremendous popularity of Robinson Crusoe lies scattered in all categories of English literary texts in the subsequent centuries. Gabriel Oak, a shepherd in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, who never steps out of Wessex, yet carries a copy of Robinson Crusoe among his few belongings his few utensils and the seven books... which made his library (83) as a special favorite. During the colonial days the 'textuality' of an island attained remarkable popularity. An early tremor of the departure from the imperial paradigm, which surfaced by the beginning of the twentieth century, can be felt in Conrad's bunch of island novels, Victory: An Island Tale, Nostromo, The Outcast.

The Outsider's Island

The imperial islands, as also the ancient epic islands, were the creation of outsiders. R.S.Patke's illuminating article on 'the islands of poetry' concludes with an empirical definition which exclusively reflects the outsider's perception: An island, in the end, is no more and no less than the place we stand on, as a place to stand by. It is whatever keeps you from drowning; that is a spot amidst the vast sea to land on, to survive thereon, to draw nourishment from, and also usually to sail away from after the brief interval.

William Grey, in his 'Introduction' to 'the top islands of the world', tries to understand the secret of the inexplicable charm that a remote island exercises upon the imaginative and adventurous mind of the world outside.

Islands are enigmatic and irresistible. They have always captivated travelers, from ocean-wandering Polynesians and Arabian traders to great navigators like Magellan and Columbus. Of course, there are no longer any islands awaiting discovery – humans have laid claim to the remotest speck and mapped each one from space. But still they fill our daydreams as places to escape the hectic cycle of modern-day life. No matter how many people have made landfall before you, there is always that tantalizing and pioneering sense of exploration when you travel to an island. (Grey 9)

Grey further contends,

Ultimately, however, the lure of islands is not so much their wildlife, culture or history as the subtle pleasures of being somewhere remote and detached. There is nothing more invigorating or liberating than to shun the mainland for a spell on an island.

(Grey 9-10)

The island as a geographical phenomenon has never ceased to interest/stir human imagination, and thus has surfaced as a trope or better to say a variegated range of tropes; especially the idea of a remote island in the distant sea has continued to fascinate literary imagination across lands and ages. Inhabitants of the mainland have all along looked wistfully, or fearfully, or with a mix of both, towards the isolated spots in the distant sea. It had been so even in the ancient times, in the times of Homer, or the even more ancient times of Valmiki; the remote, and often imaginary island was then a domain of strange, fantastic creatures, flora and fauna, an ‘Other’. As an 'Other' it could even pose a threat, rarely though, to the mainlander, as is suggested by Valmiki in his vision of Swarnalanka in the Rāmāyaņa.

The perception changed with the inception of the modern voyaging era and the discovery of actual islands, which eventually led, through tumultuous centuries, to the complex discourses of 'overlapping territories and intertwined histories' 1 of our times.

Voyage

"We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea..." —Coleridge

" Then felt I... like stout Cortez, when with eagle eye

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent upon a peak in Darien " —Keats

It is this inexplicable attraction of the island, which may account to an extent for the phenomenon that the paradigms of voyage, along with the dream of a promised island, and the actual fulfillment or denial of that dream, figure in literatures across geographical, cultural, historical spaces since the earliest literatures.

Robert Foulke, while attempting to condense more than two millennia of Western sea voyage narratives into generic description admits: almost every coastal culture has its own traditional tales of adventurous seafaring... While the Greeks were hugging the coasts of the Mediterranean and sailing from island to island by line of sight, Polynesian navigators spread across the vast empty spaces of the Pacific, finding tiny atolls and larger islands sometimes thousands of miles distant (Foulke xv); this is in addition to the oral and literary voyage narratives of other cultures (Foulke xv). If we take into consideration just a few instances from European, Indian and American literatures even of a limited period, say around two hundred years (from the eighteenth to the twentieth century), we can enter a site where the paradigms of ‘voyage’ and ‘island’ delightfully intersect each other, reify each other, clash and cohere with each other and lend wonderful insights into each other, as the points of contraction and coincidence explode into meanings under the purview of comparative study.

'Islomania'

" Still islands, islands, islands. After leaving Cape Bougainville we passed at least 500, of every shape, size, and appearance...Infinitely varied...wild and picturesque, grand sometimes almost to sublimity "

—Jefferson Stow. Voyage of the Forlorn Hope (1865)

The ideas of voyage, home and island have been interrelated in human imagination, and this has found infinite expression in literature all over the world since the ancient times till date. John R. Gillis holds: They (the 'idea' or 'constructs' of island) figured prominently in ancient mythical geography, and [it was] the legendary isles of late medieval 'insular romanticism' [which] inspired a surge of island finding that led to the opening-up of the Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Olschki 1937)" [Gillis 19].

Gillis uses the term 'islomania' to convey the obsession of the European mind with islands in the far seas during the four centuries from the 15th to the 19th:

...it was in the period roughly 1400-1800 that islands of the mind played the most prominent role. So powerful was the European islomania at this time that even lands that were later to be recognized as continents, the Americas and Australia, were conceived of in insular terms. In the course of the seventeenth century, islands became the favored places for locating paradise and utopia. It was on an island that the fiction of the modern individual was first represented. In time, however, these imagined islands were gradually displaced from the charts by those whose values were more economic than speculative. In the seventeenth century, mainland colonies of plunder and extractions were overshadowed by sea-borne empires in which islands played a central role economically and strategically. By the end of the eighteenth century virtually every Atlantic island had been found, explored, and exploited to the fullest extent possible. At this point, the insular imagination moved on to the Pacific, where a whole new mythical geography was in the process of formation".

(Gillis 19-20).

Umberto Eco's book, The Island of the Day Before, bears artistic witness to the same European 'islomania' around the late seventeenth century in its detail.

Domain of Mystery & Fear

The association of islands with mystery and fear can be traced back to the ancient times which perceived the islands as strange and potentially fearsome, terrible. Examples abound in the Odyssey itself. The Greeks' 'bitter homecoming' at the end of the Trojan wars, dragged through ten years on the seas, had brought them to the series of islands which belonged to the domains of demons, monsters or beautiful witches. All these islands have become part of a rich mythology which has been used and re-used in literature to nay extent in subsequent centuries. In the ancient Indian epic, the Rāmāyaņa a remote and inaccessible island poses threat to mainland people. While alone in her hut in the forest, Sita, wife of Rama, the exiled prince, is kidnapped by Ravana, the king of Swarnalanka, in the guise of a mendicant. It is a revenge, not an eye for an eye, but instead a body for a nose, Ravan had a chariot by which he could fly. He made a bee-line for his island.

Although it is island versus mainland, actually the islanders turns out to be far stronger and embattled in their own seclusion, whereas the mainlanders have to go a long way and cross the sea to get access. The sea guards the island of Swarnalanka, which is fabulously rich, fortified, sophisticated, and can obstruct the outsiders at ease, who are by far hopelessly inferior in wealth or weapon. The assault upon the mainland in the epic had come from a remote island. Being the dwellers of an island, the demon king and his retinue are safely ensconced in their island solitude, and made immune to any counter-attack from the mainland. At least they thought so. Ultimately, however, the infuriated husband organizes his motley army, manages to make inroad to the island and vanquish the king, to get back his wife, and things are settled satisfactorily for the time being, with victory of the righteous and defeat of the evil. Indeed, it is to be the triumph of the right and the defeat of the wrong. Hence this tilted balance between the island and the mainland. It is the discourse of ethics, oriented in the emphasis upon the superior value of right and justice that ultimately necessitates the defeat of the island as a way of ensuring poetic justice.

Anyway, since the ancient times till the early phase of the voyaging era of Europe the remote small island was usually perceived as the domain of awesome mystery and terror, which were unlikely to accrue around a space on the mainland. The medieval Irish folklore about 'Hy-Brasail—The Isle of the Blest' (Griffin 192), or 'The Phantom Isle' (Cambrensis 193) underline the dangerous, indeed deadly lure of the inaccessible islands in the far seas, which seemed to lie on the borderline between the real and the illusory. The isles were envisioned as potentially mysterious places containing the possibility of any eventuality and therefore fearsome. Anything might happen there, which could not in all possibility happen on the mainland. Even during the early phase of the voyaging era For 300 years, islands were to be the refuge, not only of Europe's most compelling dreams, but also of its greatest nightmares. In European minds, islands were the resort of cannibals, monsters, demons, and witches, visions which were no longer allowed to range within Europe itself but now took up residence on Europe's new frontiers, always just sufficiently removed to be credible (Gillis 26).

The 'Other'

Indeed, islands have always been perceived by the outsider/mainlander in terms of the Other. In the binarial perception they have been imagined/seen as essentially different from the mainland. In the words of Vanessa Agnew: Before Donne asserted that no man is an island or Darwin posited the mutability of species, far-off islands were populated with tailed and winged humans, giants, man-apes and a bestiary of other creatures that imagined the island as the locus of otherness, a site that was topographically, morphologically, culturally and socially distinct (Agnew 81).

The tradition continued till the age of modern exploration and made its appearance between the lines of the European imperial discourse. Thus the fearsome attraction of the 'Other' is reflected in Stevenson's Treasure Island, where the place is perceived as a flat dragon standing up (Stevenson 45), thus evoking an archetypal image of the great serpent, and evil. The act of naming the other as 'skeleton island' in Treasure Island. Reflects the association of the faraway colonies to the English mindset - savagery, morbidity, disease, death. 'Skeleton', suggesting death caused by 'Unknown' factor and the consequent scare indicates the typical association of the far-flung islands to the colonizer's mind. They exhibited the fear and mistrust of a remote 'Other', though sometimes possessing the lure of fabulous 'treasure'.

Apratim Kundu points out in his perceptive essay, 'Treasure Island: Mapping the Other', how in British imperial discourse island as perceived by the mainlander was the obverse of England, in the pattern of the following set of equations:

[England/Island] = [metropolis/ forest] = [civilized, disciplined/ violence, chaos] = [stability/insecurity] = fine healthy people

[including a doctor, landed gentry, strapping youth / deformed, depraved persons without eyes, one legged, etc.]

Lighthouse-island

The lighthouse in a remote island, an island within an island, or dominating the entire island as the case might be, has always had a special attraction for the imaginative mind.

An island with a lighthouse has figured with varied significances and overtone in different contexts. But this too has often been associated with mystery and even terror. W.W.Gibson's (1878-1962) poem 'Flannan Isle' is a case in point. Gibson's 'Flannan Isle'. - a small lonely isle with its lone lighthouse—signifies this evocation of fearful mystery. The keepers just disappear and it remains an unresolved enigma.

At least two remarkable stories have been written, under the inspiration of Poe’s last work, a fragment about a lighthouse. One of them is Joyce Carol Oates's "Poe Posthumous, or the Lighthouse' in her story collection Wild Nights (2008). In this story she goes back to the aspect of mystery and terror of the remote lighthouse, which again was supposed to be a corollary to Poe's artistry.

Again, a lighthouse-island has also been seen as man's Promethean challenge of light across dark waves, being repeatedly thwarted by grim nature and mysterious circumstances which overpower the puny things.

Mystery & Charm: Explorable Space

In the romantic perception the island became the epitome of the charm of the mysterious distant - ‘charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn". Since the post-renaissance era of sea-voyaging, discovery and re-mapping islands became real geographical spaces, though still retaining a degree of the old aroma of fantasy of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century); with the emergence of imperialism voyaging and landing, more often than not crashlanding, began to acquire new significance. Recent historians have recognized that in the Victorian years down to 1880, British overseas expansion went on apace.

During the colonial days the notion of a remote island as an explorable space was accepted and respected by and large, be it blissful or terrible.

Towards the late 18th century the inhabited island, as Agnew points out, had been brought into the ambit of the credible... In a period of government-sponsored scientific voyages and expeditions, it was European encounters with the Pacific that gave rise to a wealth of new data about islands and island peoples... This renewed interest in islands spawned an array of literary treatments, from Defoe to Diderot and Kotzebue... (Agnew 81).

There was again a shift from real geographical places to literary spaces, imbued with new meanings arising from the new imperial discourse. Actual voyage was now connected with the hope of discovery, its thrill and excitement. Consequently the voyager, discovering an island, emerged as an iconic/paradigmatic figure.

What should we do but sing his praise

That led us through the wat'ry maze,

Unto an isle so long unknown.

And yet far kinder than our own?

(Andrew Marvell, 'Bermuda', Selected Poetry. ed. Frank Kermode, NY: Signet, 1967, p. 59)

It is common to find the explorer as a celebrated figure for his motivation; optimism; adventure, and this explorer/voyager is supposed to be journeying towards islands, his motives being discovery, expectation, voyager's/explorer's/adventurer's lure. A common feature of the English 'island' tales of the colonial centuries is the perception of the island as 'other'. The other island is apparently the focus. But England always looms large in the background as the [i] starting point, [ii] the final destination; [iii] the measuring standard; [iv] the disseminating culture - including religion, morality, civilisation, etc. In these tales England brackets the other island and finally triumphs over it.

In yet another basic binary of colonial literature—constituted by the counterpoints of home and the frontier/ periphery/margin - the remote island obviously belongs to the latter. In this binary the island constituted the frontier—a counterpoint to home, the centre, the observatory tower of the panopticon.

Desert Island

"...Whilst the unquiet sea

Shakes the whole rock with foamy battery....

Whilst you behold true desolation." (Marston: The Malcontent)

A pristine island, an unpopulated land, a desert island: all these are part of the myth of possession and solitude figured by Robinson Crusoe (Gillian Beer 33).

The desert island sub-genre is a by-product and reflection of the paradigm of voyage and arrival through shipwreck and the predicament of the castaway negotiating with the unfamiliar in order to survive. This is envisioned as a kind of new birth as it were on a new locale. The same block of stone can potentially contain all the statues—from Minerva to Athena, from Dionysus to Apollo, and in the context of the present study, from Odysseus to Crusoe. Thus the same desert island adventure has been and will be written over and over again across lands and ages. Stanley Edgar Hymen writes: The history of ideas is the tracing of the unit ideas of philosophies through intellectual history, and just as it finds its chief clues in literary expression, literary criticism can draw on it for the philosophic background of literature [cited by Guerin, et al 316]

The desert island is one such unit idea that has persisted through literatures across ages, and particularly in European literature since the last four imperial centuries. The idea has resurfaced especially in fiction, with notable frequency, and it is interesting to note the continuous intertextual reworking or recycling of the same idea from text to text. The entire range of Robinsonade can be thus considered as recycling of the same unit idea through changing and evolving discourses. Seen in this perspective Golding’s Lord of the Flies appears to have sent its tentacles backwards not only to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, but also to Stevenson’s Treasure Island, to Swift, to Defoe, and the whole spectrum of the desert island fiction as such.

Colonization & desert island

Said claims: Robinson Crusoe is virtually unthinkable without the colonizing mission that permits him to create a new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific, and Atlantic wilderness (75); and Crusoe is explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas expansion - directly connected in style and form to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century exploration voyages that laid the foundations of the great colonial empires (Said E. Culture and Imperialism 83).

The very boundedness of the island made it vulnerable to colonial schema for invasion and possession: as Bougainville and Shakespeare both understood, islands seem to be natural colonies.... because islands, unlike continents, look like property (Edmond & Smith 'Editors' Introduction' 1)

The colonialist fiction too, necessitated a virgin/isolated/wild territory, for which an island in a distant sea could stand for a perfect epitome. A blank space could offer a good page to be inscribed upon. Dening underscores the 'marvel' of a first voyage to them [the voyagers] and the transformations that follow a first landing (203). He claims: All these empty land spaces in the vast ocean are made into new/old islands by the seed of those 'first' voyages (Dening 204). Islands particularly suited the dreams of imperial control.

Arrival/ Departure

'Elem natun deśe' (landed at last on strange shores) -Tagore

Voyage towards an island involves a two-pronged process, with arrival and departure constituting its twin poles. Reaching can be a great pleasure, as also a terrible shock. Starting right from the Odyssey onwards literature has registered this duality. From Odysseus's time to that of Marquez's 'shipwrecked sailor' of 1955 (published in 1970) reaching an is/land by chance, after shipwreck, has been the commonest paradigm of man's struggle and survival. The ‘castaway’s struggle and application of ingenuity to survive has helped him attain the stature of a hero, be it in the palace banquet halls of ancient kings, or the mazy corridors of social media in the late 20th century. But the stay on the strange shore has been usually a mere interval to be followed by departure before long.

Gillian Beer concludes his essay, 'Island Bounds', with the insightful comment: Castaways come and go: the triumph of most island fiction is, after all is said and done, to leave the island. The sojourners sail back to Naples, or England, or Africa. They go home, however much, for the duration, the island has been figured as body, house, theatre, self. (42).

... at length homeward bound...

Even so long ago as in the Odyssey we find a series of arrivals and departures in and out of a series of unlinked islands. The outsider's voyage to the remote island involved both arrival and departure. The departures were compulsive, sometimes enforced by fear, at other times spurred by longing for 'home, sweet home', and the prospect of joyous return voyage, though may be occasionally tinged with a degree of mild sadness.

The first-person narrator of Stevenson notes happily at the end of Treasure Island, to my inexpressible joy, the highest rock of the Treasure Island sunk into the blue round of the sea (254). This can be compared to the ending of The Coral Island, that too about boys leaving the island for home. They left with hurrah for dear old England (Ballantyne 189), and a thrill of joy, though slightly tinged with a fine sadness: for we were at length 'homeward bound', and were gradually leaving far behind us the beautiful, bright green coral islands of the Pacific Ocean (Ballantyne 192). At the end of The Coral Island the three heroes return to 'civilization' - obviously meaning Europe - wiser, matured, even as they tear themselves with difficulty from the dear island - When the quivering lips pronounce the word - Farewell (Ballantyne 190).

Ballantyne's book belongs to the other world of the other island, the world of 'innocence', and thus hails back to a glorious line of such worlds of 'innocence', of utopian vision, of charming optimism, - the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches (Golding: Lord of the Flies 248) of the 'text-ed' 'treasure' islands of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, and other celebrated adventure-heroes of British literature in the heyday of the imperial era. Still it remained unmistakably the 'Other' - an occasional site for adventure and possession, but not 'home'. 'Home' was England.

This paradigm of arrival at and departure from the island for the real 'home' has a long tradition behind. In the words of Gillis: The Greeks and Romans ultimately mastered the Mediterranean, domesticating its islands in the process, but their voyages offshore were invariably heroic journeys, the ultimate purpose being a glorious return home to the safety of that bounded place, the polis... Oceanus remained for them, as it did for the Celts, a mysterious place, the location of legendary isles and the resting place of deceased heroes, but off limits to ordinary men (21).

This emphasis on the longing for return continued even in the age of discovery.

As Gillian Beer puts it: "Remote islands, exotic islands, are remote and exotic only when you are not an inhabitant of one. Remote Europe, exotic Europe, is taken to have re-established its authority before the writing begins… The reader and the first person of the narrative are twice incomers, singletons, moving between island and native land. Reader and narrator explore the island bounds of the book but never can be its permanent inhabitants… That sense of exile corrects the reader’s hope of possession. (Beer 2003:42)

This is departure from the island in the colonial context whereas we find a very different kind of departure, in the post-imperial context in Golding's Lord of the Flies.

Elizabeth Bishop's poem, however, envisions the difficulty of a psychological rehabilitation of the former castaway islander in the original mainland as a difficult and ambiguous prospect at best. However commonly for the outsider who could be invader/castaway/ investigator, leaving the place after a brief stay involved great relief; after having annexed the coral island to the British Empire Ballantyne's boys leave happily. On the other hand, after having succumbed to the traumatizing experience on the same coral island some four centuries later, Golding's boys shed tears of remorse and relief.

Anyway, Departure from the island can carry varied and contrary implications depending on the cultural location of the subject. Thus Jean Rhys would depict over and over again