It’s my own damn fault.
– Jimmy Buffett, “Margaritaville”, 1977.
Many, many years ago a scholar named D. K. Crowne published an article titled “The Hero on the Beach: An Example of Composition by Theme in Anglo-Saxon Poetry”. The years was 1960. I was still at least a year away from the day of my birth. Twenty-seven years later I published an article titled “The Critic on the Beach”. In the almost three decades (the almost three decades of my life to that point) between Crowne’s article and mine, a surprising number of papers were published relating to this “theme” or “type-scene” of “The Hero on the Beach”. It became something of an academic cottage industry to write articles about “The Hero on the Beach” in everything from the poems of Homer, throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry, and on into every Medieval Germanic literature from Norse Sagas, to the Nibelungenlied, to the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I made my own little contribution in “The Hero at the Wall in The Wanderer”, accepted for publication before, but published after “The Critic on the Beach”, perhaps fittingly, in the same journal as D. K. Crowne’s piece that started this whole little industry. After “The Critic on the Beach” appeared, the industry ended, a victim of its own success, one might say.
Here’s the thing: “The Hero on the Beach” is what they called a “theme” or a “type scene”; it’s kind of like Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but this is a hero on a beach with his companions in the presence of a bright or flashing light at the beginning or the end of a journey. What became clear over the course of the theme’s development in scholarly literature is that the beach could be any “liminal” position, that the light and even the companions could be implied – at times quite vaguely, and that the journey is something everyone, everywhere, every moment is beginning or ending. So, in “The Critic on the Beach” I pointed out examples in Hamlet, in Dante’s Inferno, in Virgil’s Aeneid, and in a Canadian pop song. Shortly before my article appeared, some associates published a brief note suggesting the “theme” to be present in Virgil’s first Eclogue with a beech tree, by an ingenious and somewhat prophetic bilingual pun, filling in for the Hero’s beach.
I concluded “The Critic on the Beach” with what I still think to be a quite nice universalizing paragraph (even if it did bring an end to what had been a quite productive field for those who feel the need to publish or perish):
The fundamental problem is that no longer is the theme “a stereotyped way of describing (l) a hero on the beach (2) with his retainers (3) in the presence of a flashing light (4) as a journey is completed (or begun).”[as Crowne first described the theme] The so-called “Hero on the Beach” has become simply a description of a threshold situation; the free substitutions suggested by scholars have removed the “theme” from the stereotype, allowing a range of variation beyond the limits of a single tradition. A danger in this development is that the history of the transmission of traditions is clouded for scholars. One must ultimately ask why an occurrence of certain details in Gawain is “theme survival” but a similar occurrence in Hamlet is merely coincidence. The proper response to the hero on the beach is likely not a recognition of familiar literary convention, but the recognition of a situation intimately known to every individual – for every [one] is at some point in [their] life “on the beach.”
I feel fortunate to have brushed up against Academia and escaped relatively unscathed. I feel blessed that I am able to follow my research interests without any quasi-lethal pressure to publish the things that come across my fancy. It has been a wonderful experience to be published in peer reviewed journals, particularly in two which published so many of the “Hero on the Beach” studies: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen wherein were published Crown’s “The Hero on the Beach” and my “The Wanderer at the Wall”; and Neophilologus, where “The Critic on the Beach” drew the curtain down on a tremendously stimulating, if terribly narrow, period of scholarship. It has been a wonderful privilege to live in a bit of an ivory tower above the Ivory Tower: I got to do the scholarship; I got to publish when I felt like it; but I got to be outside in the fresh air of the rest of the world. I can read what I want, I can write what I want, more so as time goes by! For example, I can read Spanish Drama or schlocky Science Fiction or the greatest obscurities you can imagine; and I can write:
Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is a textbook example of “The Hero on the Beach”! Listen: “Watching the sun bake all of the tourists covered with oil” – what light is brighter than the sun?; “On my front porch swing” – liminal position, a metaphoric beach; “She’s a real cutie, a Mexican cutie, and how she got here I haven’t a clue” – the companions or retainers (the oil-covered tourists baking in the sun fulfill this requirement as well); and
I blew out my flip flop
Stepped on a pop top
Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home
– he’s walking on the beach, a journey, beginning and ending, going out and then back home because of the injury caused by his damaged bit of beach footwear. But the more important journey in Margaritaville is the journey of self-reflection and self-discovery, from childlike irresponsibility to adult responsibility, from the stagnation of “it’s nobody’s fault” to the life-changing growth of “It’s my own damn fault.”
The deepest response to Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” is certainly not the recognition of some made-up “Oral-Formulaic Theme”. The deepest response is likely not the recognition of a fun pop song, or the yelling of “salt, salt, salt” during the chorus, or calling for another round – the deepest response may be the recognition of a situation intimately known to every individual – for every one is at some point in their life, in Margaritaville.
My article, “The Critic on the Beach” has been gathered together with my other scholarly publications in a little volume called Old Papers About Old English which is available from Amazon and some other online booksellers.
Behind the Hedge 