terminal beach

"This obsession with strange, liminal zones of possibility is explored often in Ballard’s short fiction, notably ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1963), These beach fictions, in which the beach is figured as a marginal zone: ‘I think the psychological role of the beach is more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea’..."