The New York Review of Science Fiction
ISSUE #291 November 2012
Volume 25, No. 3
ISSN #1052-9438
ESSAYS
Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Liminal Places and Liminal States in John Crowley’s Little, Big
Darrell Schweitzer: Excavating Ourselves: A Short History of Archeology-of-the-Present Books
Mike Barrett: Shadows of the Evening Star: Leigh Brackett’s Tales of Venus
Graham Andrews: Popcorn Poe: Roger Corman’s Poe Films and Tie-In Books
Michael Bishop: Hyping Brittle Innings: A Book Giveaway at Golden Park in Columbus, Georgia, Spring 1994
REVIEWS
Motherboard, written by Adam Scott Mazer, directed by Will Fulton, reviewed by Jen Gunnels
PLUS
Photos from Albacon
Screed
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Bernadette Lynn Bosky
Liminal Places and Liminal States in John Crowley’s Little, Big
Introduction: Theory and Thesis
Especially over the past fifteen years, the terms “liminal” or “liminality” and “interstitial” have become increasingly popular in discussion of the arts. Some of these discussions, such as the mission statement of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, seem to use the term primarily in terms of work that crosses the borders of, and/or exists in the interstices between, different genres and art forms (also see Gordon 9). The conference on “Liminality in the Humanities” at the University of Utah takes the term a bit further, presenting papers at the borderlands and interstices of various disciplines. However, that conference also uses the term as it will be used in this study. So, even more strongly, does The International Seminar on Liminality and the Text and its associated journal and books published by Gateway Press.
This use of the terms is based on their origins in anthropology, referring to the borders of and spaces between categories much more fundamental than genre or even different arts. Towards the beginning of the last century, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep stated that rites of passage generally have three stages: “preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation)” (11). In the 1960s and 1970s, Victor Turner expanded and somewhat adapted van Gennep’s work, concentrating on the liminal stage. As summarized by Richard E. Palmer:
Limen in Latin means threshold, and anthropologists like Turner have become interested in a certain state experienced by persons as they pass over the threshold from one stage of life to another. For instance, Turner notes that the rite of passage at puberty has three phases: separation from one’s status as a child . . . , then a liminal stage, and finally reintegration into society as a full and independent member with rites and responsibilities that the initiate did not have before. During the liminal stage, the between stage, one’s status becomes ambiguous, one is “neither here nor there”[;] one is “betwixt and between all fixed points of classification.” (1–2)
Two clear examples of a liminal state in modern Western culture are divorce and, even more so, marital separation. The couple isn’t joined anymore, but they aren’t separate. (Note even the switch from single to plural verb.) Rules from neither state apply; one is betwixt-and-between. Many people find that some others avoid them in such a liminal state, not knowing what to say or do. Another example is graduate school, an often arduous and curiously protracted liminal state. Graduate students aren’t professionals or students, yet they are both. They are expected to be bold as if the professors are colleagues but submissive as if they are only students; they are paid to teach but not paid much. Many of us would have preferred to be locked in a hut and fed only with implements that would be disposed of afterwards, a more common cultural response to such liminal states.
Places as well as times may be liminal. Crossroads are a meeting of two places and hence not fully either one; they are also, like the liminal stage of initiation, a place of possibilities and choices. Thus, it should not surprise us that the liminal figure of a vampire (neither alive nor dead, yet both) may be slain or buried there (see Clements, “Ogre” 39). Within a house, stairs, landings, and hallways are liminal areas—places we pass through, not generally places where people live. Unsurprisingly, landings, hallways, and stairs are among the most popular places for sightings of ghosts (us and not us, not alive or dead). Two even more popular places for ghost sightings are windows and doorways, which are quintessentially liminal, existing purely to separate yet join areas of room vs. room, room vs. hallway, inside vs. outside.
Here a distinction must be made between boundaries and thresholds, but a connection must be made as well. As stated by that quintessentially liminal figure, Hedwig of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, “Ain’t much difference/Between a bridge and a wall.” On the simplest level, that which separates is often also that which joins; one example is the semicolon.
More mythically, one of the goals of ritual is to turn boundaries into thresholds, as when a shaman crosses the barrier between our world and the other world and then personally forms a bridge between them or as a culture hero makes those boundaries less impermeable (Ellis). Roads and paths can be liminal also; they lead from one place to another, joining them, but also help define, for instance, what is safe versus what is not, as in the story “Little Red Riding Hood.” Finally, liminality is also connected to the idea of hybrids—that is, places, people, events, and things that take part in two categories that are thought of as being not only separate, but dichotomous, such as the ghost or vampire.
Note that many processes have a pattern of departure, entry into other realms, and return—Joseph Campbell’s pattern of the hero, for instance, and shamanic initiations. The difference here is that when it is defined as liminal, the middle stage presents not only physical, mental, and/or spiritual danger but also social and epistemological danger, as its very nature challenges the concept of categories of behavior and thought as absolut
e. In fact, at their most radical, these liminal areas challenge the binary nature of dichotomies that are supposed to be all encompassing: man/woman, human/animal, human/divine, approved/prohibited, life/death. Because it challenges these dichotomies, liminality is a source of great potential, but also at best uncanny and at worst abject.1 Liminal phenomena are taboo, again in the more technical sense—taboo things and processes are hedged with prohibitions, regarded as excluded and dangerous but still having great magic, religious, and/or social power. When William Clements discusses the work that Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach have done in this area, he concludes that liminal things and processes often inspire dread, perhaps because they “invite chaos by revealing the inadequacies of the ordering system that cannot accommodate them” (“Legends” 83). Those who understand the ordering system as inherent in life rather than constructed feel a different fear because then the anomalies become examples in themselves, or at least omens, of catastrophic rupture in the world itself (see Purcell).
Critics have commented on the mixing of genres in Little, Big. Thomas Disch remarks upon its “incredible tightrope act” between realistic human events and magic (159). James Hynes wittily describes the novel as “a long, gorgeously written picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies” (1). (Actually, the hint of an abrupt change within the book is vastly unfair: early indications of the presence of fairies may often be baffling to the first-time reader, but they are undeniable.) However, Little, Big is also a liminal book in a deeper, more mythic sense. It is about transitions, which are repeated on multiple scales and on multiple occasions: the turnings of the seasons and of the history of the world, the personal changes of the many characters and the overarching Tale of their final crossing-over from the world of human beings to the world of the fairies. Much of the book is about the peril and potential of these turning points. Boundary-crossings and the interstitial time between the old and the new are reflected in the novel’s nigh-ubiquitous use of liminal places, times, and processes. Characters generally do well or poorly based on their ability to live in, or at least accept, various degrees of conjunction of our world with that of the fairies.
Note that the world of the fairies is not, in itself, liminal. In fantasy, there is the place one gets to by crossing a threshold: the world of fairy, or Oz, or Shangri-La. Then, there is the place or time or condition that is the threshold itself. In most fantasies, the emphasis is on the former, while in Little, Big most of the pages and most of the emotional energy of the novel goes to the latter.
Liminal Space, Liminal Time
Many reviewers note that Edgewood, the family estate built by John Drinkwater, is itself a portal to the fairy world. Brian Attebery adds that it “functions as a stand-in for the story itself,” a different kind of portal to a fairy world (43). As Violet Bramble in the novel writes, “the house is a door” (107). The name “Edgewood,” of course, shows its liminal nature. The most obvious liminal characteristic of the house is that it was built to have five faces, each a different architectural style. It is not only a combination, but somehow more and less, as ineffable as liminal experience usually is: Smoky Barnable reads in Upstate Houses and Their Histories that Edgewood is “quite literally impossible to describe” (32). Moreover, the various fronts with their various styles are not clearly separated but transform into one another (30–31, 50). Edgewood is also full of liminal spaces, microcosms to the house’s macrocosm: when Violet Bramble enters Edgewood for the first time, she sees “beyond the vestibule” a hallway with “a vision of doorways, long lists of arches and lintels,” light from “unseen windows” (50). Characters often are heard on the porch, go up and down stairs, stare out of windows, stand or walk in hallways.
Brian Attebery calls the opening scene of the novel, in which Smoky approaches Edgewood from the City by foot, “a classic fairy tale threshold crossing.” One has to read the full scene to realize just how fully Crowley has packed one descriptive passage with liminal imagery. Around noon, a temporal point of transition from morning to afternoon, Smoky crosses a bridge, “into the named but boundaryless towns on the north side of the river” where life seems “gloomily peripheral.” He passes the limits of town and residential areas, which first become “disordered, thinning like the extremes of a great forest” as buildings intermix with “weedy lots.” He thinks of the oxymoronic “industrial park,” which he thinks of “as between the desert and the sown.” To rest, “He stopped at a bench where people could catch buses from Somewhere to Elsewhere” (3).
Later in the same journey, Smoky walks between farms on each side, “between guardian trees neither farm nor road” (19). At sunset, a time liminal between day and night, he arrives at the Junipers’ house, at which he rests along the way; there and at Edgewood, he encounters gates, vestibules, all kinds of places of entry (19–20, 25, 28). With simple emphasis, Crowley writes of Smoky’s arrival at Edgewood, “He stepped across the sill. He was inside” (28). The moment when he enters the property is another moment ripe with liminal symbols, not just for him:
When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. (24)
He arrives at Edgewood, as he arrived at the Junipers’, just as the sun is setting; the sun in the Traveler, a card in the Least Trumps that represents him, is either “setting or rising”—but which one, Nora Cloud “had never decided” (19).
The other main setting of the novel, Old Law Farm, is equally liminal. Essentially, it is a farm in the center of Manhattan:
All the buildings, mostly empty, on the block his family owned in the City . . . combined and sealed up to make an enormous, impenetrable curtain-wall—like the hollow wall of a castle—around the center of the block, where the gardens were. The outbuildings and stuff inside the block . . . torn down and all the garden-space transformed into a single pasture or farm. (151)
The near-future decay of our world’s infrastructure makes this paradoxical construction both possible and desirable. Yet the bizarre conflation of inside and out, farm and abandoned but still furnished city dwellings, is still absurd, including the incredible image of a chicken nesting in an “exploded sofa” in “the goats’ apartment” (260). The jerry-built and jury-rigged architecture, too, is as confusing and confused as that of Edgewood; and it also is rife with thresholds. We first see it when George Mouse goes down to his hidden treasure, which is, as Brendan Foreman notes, not gold but hashish (2). He steps “out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building” (185). Like that at Edgewood, life at Old Law Farm abounds in stairways, hallways, doorways, windows, and other passages and thresholds. When we first see Sylvie, she is “going carefully up and down the wrought-iron fire escapes in and out of frameless windows” (205).
However, while Edgewood is a place of openings and passage, Old Law Farm is a place of locks and the required keys (185–186, 214, 314, 339), boarded-up windows and stopped doors (204, 260). There could be at least three reasons for this difference. On the level of plot, it emphasizes the contrast between the seclusion and safety of Edgewood and the danger of the city. Auberon Barnable muses that the City is the real dangerous woods of myth, with wolves and other menaces: “you barricaded your door against whatever fearful thing may be Out There” (333). Second, the images of Old Law Farm as a castle or fort suggest that it may be linked to the idea of a war among the fairies, which might or might not be happening, and which might or might not be the war that Russell Eigenblick constantly speaks about. Finally, Old Law Farm is certainly a place of liminal waiting for Auberon, a part of his transformation, but the locks may emphasize that it is a place of preparation only, and he does
not progress in his initiation until he leaves. When all aspects of Auberon’s interim life are over, when Lilac comes to Old Law Farm to guide George Mouse and Auberon Barnable to Fairy, George is said to have left a door standing ajar (463).
Auberon Barnable’s other place of waiting and transformation, a park in New York City built by “Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900,” is also an enclosure, a far less haphazard one. Already homeless, Auberon stays in the park all day, learning and practicing the magical Art of Memory, which he learns from its last magus, Ariel Hawksquill. The park is privately owned by nearby buildings, and he needs a key to enter—a fact that he rages against until Hawksquill opens the lock for him and gives him her key (350–351, 356). When he leaves, guided out by the imaginary Lilac as he had been guided in by Ariel Hawksquill, he locks the gate behind him. “It was necessary to unlock the wrought-iron gate in order to leave, just as it was in order to enter” (386). The locks associate the park with Old Law Farm rather than Edgewood, which remains a liminal site but becomes his home.2
Aside from these three major settings, many of the novel’s most important events happen in liminal spaces, occasionally literal thresholds but more often passages between places, such as stairs and hallways. Smoky Barnable and Daily Alice’s first kiss is on the stairs, as he is coming down and she is going up (11). The conversation between John Drinkwater and Violet Bramble that defines their relationship is on the landing of a flight of stairs (44). Amy Flowers and Violet sit on the stairs, “halfway to the landing,” to discuss Amy’s pregnancy with August’s child (124). August’s tryst with Margaret Juniper, his final assignation, takes place in his car, at “the shuddering, shaded crossroads” (122). Coming to Old Law Farm for the second time, Auberon Barnable meets George Mouse on the building’s stoop (415). The inhabitants of Edgewood, especially Smoky, often cross or pause by bridges, and as we have seen, George Mouse takes the “covered bridge.” Lacking a bridge, on their wedding day Smoky and Daily Alice must cross water in an aging swan boat to reach the island where the ceremony is held (63). However, perhaps the strongest image of a bridge is a standard kitschy religious picture hung in both La Negra’s apartment and the kitchen of Old Law Farm: “the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely” (293). The danger and safety of crossing over to the world of the fairies is, of course, the main drive and basic matter of the novel.
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