28 June 2004
Sand
When a politician wants to tell you that some scandalous sequence of events is over - or some uncomfortable treaty has been aborted, or a minister sacrificed - they say that they have drawn a line in the sand.
It's an interesting expression ...
Draw a line in the sand and you are making an arbitrary mark. There is nothing to determine where the line should be; no rivers, no mountains. One dune looks quite like another.
At the end of the 18th century - was it 1797 - Napoleon Bonaparte signed the treaty of Campoformio. He had been victorious; fighting on the orders of the revolutionary government in Paris, against real or imagined enemies in what is now Italy. At the signing of the treaty, Bonaparte - who was never backward in coming forward - more or less redrew the borders of the defeated country.
The years that followed the French revolution were studded with battles of this sort - in the Netherlands, in Belgium, in the disputed territories of eastern France along its border with Germany. Look at today's map of Europe and you can follow those organic, crinkly lines, round hills and rivers, along valleys and coasts ...
But the line in the sand is another thing.
After World War I, Churchill - among others - drew the lines in the sand that shape modern Iraq, a vast country where before there were several countries. Look at the long straight lines, drawn not by people's lives, their trade routes and their family or tribal affiliations ... but with a ruler.
Look at north Africa and the absurd arbitrary borders of southern Libya or Algeria ... unnatural. You might almost say: 'Asking for trouble!'
In your fiction, you cannot make arbitrary decisions like this either. You cannot draw a line in the sand of your narrative if your characters want to go further. You cannot plan ahead for the moment when your hero reveals their secret to their enemy, if the character you have created to be their enemy isn't persuasive enough.
The story grows out of the characters. It cannot be imposed from above.
A line in the sand can be simply blown away.
Unlike the Labyrinth.
