On “The Burning Beach”: Immersion, Errantry, and Caribbean Relation

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1980s and early 1990s, as relational psychoanalysis was gaining ground in the United States, French Caribbean poet and writer, Édouard Glissant, used the same term, Relation, to describe his creolized human experience of the flow of the world. Glissant’s relational subject is a beachwalker, parsing the shoreline with his footsteps, traversing the edge between land and water in a mixture of grounding and flow that he also termed errantry. In Stacey Novack’s discussion of Marion Milner’s psychoanalytic account of creativity and self-immersive states in her 1950 work, On Not Being Able to Paint, a sense of aliveness that comes from an experience of the relational flow of the world is likened to the plunge into a body of water. For Glissant, however, the sea is part of a landscape that is corrugated, punctuated, staggered and staged. Even the most inward state is lapped and tickled by the tendrils of the Other, and this interlapping interplay is generative and creative. Novack’s discussion offers an occasion for thinking about how both Caribbean and psychoanalytic relationality understand immersive inward states, as frightening, oceanic, and boundless or as a staged descent, a dipping one’s toes in-and-out of the waters on, as Glissant termed it, the burning beach of reality.