Other places in the novel concretize the idea that liminal time is a hiatus outside the general flow of life. According to Naomi Hamer, James Clifford “discusses the liminal qualities of places ‘of transit, not residence,’” exemplified by “hotel, a station, airport terminal, hospital and so on, somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary” (Clifford 96; Hamer 2). Hamer adds to this list trains and the subway system, quintessentially places of transit (3). In Little, Big, Grand Central (always called “the Terminus”) and the subway are places for meetings both chance and planned, as well as for travels with strong mythic resonances (209–213, 300–302, 337–338). Ariel Hawksquill’s first meetings with Russell Eigenblick, as she pretends to be a journalist, are “on the road, in hotels, on planes” (200); their final confrontation is also on a train (506–510). Sitting in the room from which Winged Messenger Service messengers are dispatched, Sylvie thinks that it was like “too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced by others” (326).
Little, Big is as full of portentous and liminal times as it is replete with liminal spaces. George Mouse visits Edgewood—and plans Old Law Farm (151) and has his fateful tryst with Sophie (156)—on “the first day of winter,” the “seventh winter solstice of Smoky’s married life” (147). That married life, of course, began on the summer solstice (18). Sophie’s child Lilac is born “after the equinox came with a frost that left the woods dusty and gray but let summer linger” (175) and she is stolen by the fairies at midnight on the winter solstice (178). Auberon Barnable first finds the park in which he will live and learn the Art of Memory, at dawn on May first (349). The final passing-over into the lands of the fairies is on Midsummer Day (484). All of these days connect the events to the cycles of nature, another theme in the novel, but also serve to mark the boundaries of seasons and hence to mark the crossing of these boundaries.
The turning of the seasons is indicated by social holidays as well as the geophysical solstices and equinoxes. John Storm Drinkwater, writer and liminal figure who can communicate with the world of animals (192), significantly identifies Christmas as a spot out of time: “a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn’t seem to succeed the day it follows. . . . Every Christmas seemed to follow immediately after the last one; all the months between don’t figure in” (161). That is, the holiday is a liminal time in the technical sense, just as the period of transition in the ritual entry into adulthood has more in common with all other periods of transition, in such rituals back across the years, than to the initiate’s time before as a child and time after as an adult; and all of these out-of-time experiences are somehow the same time.
The novel also abounds in social rites of passage; the first is Smoky Barnable’s marriage to Daily Alice Drinkwater, and the last is his funeral. In between there are births and deaths, beginning with Auberon Drinkwater’s funeral, so soon after Smoky and Daily Alice’s marriage that some of the attendees from town wear “the same clothes they had worn for the wedding since they hadn’t expected another Drinkwater occasion so soon” (92–93). Auberon Barnable’s three weird sisters—Tacey, Lily, and Lucy—are by nature attuned to “the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death.” These are stages of life but also life’s turning points, as the text makes clear: “As they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down on the lives around them” (194).
In a highly liminal, magical sense, “here time becomes space,” as the first act of Wagner’s Parzival says. Edgewood itself is the embodiment of the year: 365 stairs for the days in a year, seven chimneys for the days of the week, fifty-two doors for the weeks in a year, four floors for the seasons in a year, and for months in the year, Nora thinks, “twelve what? There must be twelve of something, he wouldn’t have left that out” (216). Perhaps it is the twelve windows in the Gothic bathroom (24), or perhaps not. Ariel Hawksquill gives an intriguing lesson on the mutable, almost interchangeable, symbols or systems of space and time (308–309).
Characters, Liminal and Other
Smoky is, as he is named by a card in the Least Trumps, The Traveler. He wandered as a child with his father after his mother left them (5–6), and his quirky education by his father makes Smoky an outsider wherever he is (see Attebery 138)—until he comes to Edgewood. Daily Alice frees him from his congenital state of anonymity, and, in a very strict parallel to the stages of initiation, at Edgewood he must leave that liminal state and decide what he will be now that he is emerging: “But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. . . . Anonymous, he had been as well everything and nothing; now he could grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes” (95). He makes some wrong turns along the way, considers leaving Daily Alice (142), and instead develops a ménage à trois with her sister (159–160, 165–173, 177), but after confessing to his wife he is healed (165–173).3
Smoky’s attitude towards the fairies is interstitial between skepticism and belief. He has had no direct experiences with them himself and can never cross the boundary into full acceptance like his wife’s. However, he passes out of full skepticism by two means: his own act of will, likened to make-believe; and his acceptance of Daily Alice’s childhood, which does include such experiences (16–17, 75; 69–70). This liminal state, between belief and doubt, is enough that he can actually visit the fairies, but not enough to remember it afterwards, or to keep his fairy gold from turning to forest detritus (86–91). However, his ability to believe in this conditional way increases: his conviction that having entered Edgewood “he had never again left” is something of which “he had grown increasingly certain (not because it was sensible or even possible)” (136; see also 290).
When Auberon has returned home from the city and asks Smoky if he believes fairies exist, Smoky states flatly that he does not. Yet he is driven to it by Auberon and still qualifies it. First, he tries his usual conditional strategy, audible doubt-quotes: “Well, . . . ‘believe,’ I don’t know; ‘believe,’ that’s a word. . . .” Smoky says “no” only when Auberon says he wants a straight answer and says, “I never wanted to spoil anything by not—not joining in.” Then, paradoxically, he concludes, “And it didn’t seem that they minded, that I didn’t believe in them” (403–404). Unless pushed, then, Smoky is, in his bemused way, often baffled but happy enough in this permanent Todorovian hesitation.
However, when the state of liminality ends, there must be a resolution—and as Smoky realizes about developing a presence, choices are limiting and may not be for the best. As the time approaches, Daily Alice realizes that the new life in the world of the fairies will be very hard on Smoky (489); he realizes he doesn’t want to go. Finally, Lilac appears and Smoky packs to go, taking the gifts the fairies had given him long ago, and goes to his wife (528–530). However, he neither crosses over nor turns back. Dying of a heart attack, he also feels his heart open, encompassing everything he has loved: Edgewood, the people, the Tale. He seems to find an eternal spot of time, outside the gate of Edgewood but on the “borders” of his wife’s landscape of the new fairyland, able to look back and see the whole unfolding of the now-finished Tale (532). His fate includes a tragic death, a permanently frustrated arrival, and a severed marriage. It also leaves him in a moment of constant presence as liminal and as sanguine about that state as his life has been. His body is buried in the realms of fairy land (533, 536), while he impossibly lives on the edges of our natural world (see Attebery 64, 140).
Smoky’s attitude towards the possible reality of the fairies is contrasted to that of Auberon Drinkwater, whose driven need to resolve the issue—to come down on one side or the other on the question of the reality of fairies—haunts his whole life, making him miserable. When we first see him, he is “stalking across the lawn with his cam
era as though seeking something to strike with it” (55–56). At Edgewood, he is in some ways a liminal figure. He thinks to himself that he is “outside in every way,” an illegitimate child of Violet’s raised as a Drinkwater, “almost” a virgin but not even that (32–83). As an old man he lives separately in the summer house, which his careful maintenance delimits from the wilder vegetation around it (61). He is also isolated by his sexuality, his photos of naked children more dangerous and precious to him than those that may show fairies. Yet his mind insists on structure: order (77), reason, and common sense (79). His goal is to finally set the fairies into one simple category, either truth or falsehood, using photography as “not an entertainment but a tool, a surgical instrument that would slice out the heart of the secret and bring it before his scrutiny” (81). Perhaps, as Auberon Drinkwater imagines as he crosses over into death, his doubt was somehow required by the fairies for their unknowable agenda as a counterbalance to the belief of others (86). Or perhaps his two-valued mind kept him in a liminal state but unable to transform himself into someone who could indeed travel between two worlds, one natural and one that of the fairies. In any event, much later, Nora thinks of “the times when Auberon could photograph them” as a “close connection, or easy access to” the fairies (257), although Auberon never could conceive of the photography sessions that way.
When young, Auberon Barnable, Smoky’s son, recapitulates Auberon Drinkwater’s mixture of distinction-making reason and liminality, but in a more productive way. In one scene from his youth, he goes to the summer house, where “his namesake had lived and died”; as Auberon Drinkwater has his photographs, Auberon Barnable has a diary in which he records evidence that some secret is being kept from him (276–277), and later he searches those equivocal photographs with no more luck than their maker’s (280). As with the other Auberon, the more evidence Auberon Barnable accumulates, the less sure he is.
He is saved from his namesake’s sad and sterile fate in three main ways. First, he leaves Edgewood, whose mysteries can only frustrate him. (In a trope basic to the novel, he must go away to come closer.) Second, he had his cousin/sister Lilac as an imaginary playmate when he was young (228, 230–241, 262). Perhaps more importantly, he was her imaginary playmate as she grew up among the fairies (275). That is, he has not only lived with an experience that was interstitial between fantasy and reality, but he also has existed, in a way, on both sides of that dichotomy at once. Finally, he falls genuinely and totally in love with Sylvie. Like his father’s and his grandfather’s, Auberon’s opening to acceptance of the fairies is by marriage (of heart if not by law)—a rite of passage through which we pass and come out in some senses remade. However, while John Drinkwater processes the acceptance intellectually and Smoky Barnable by an act of imagination and will, Auberon is simply swept to a state of distraction from everything else by attraction to Sylvie. While they are in bed together, Auberon tells Sylvie about the real Lilac’s disappearance; when he realizes the gaps in the story, “If he had been capable just then of any emotion other than that directed towards Sylvie and his plans for her in the next moments, he would have felt anger at his ignorance.” As it is, it genuinely ceases to matter to him (262–263). Of course his love for Sylvie leads him to learn the magical Art of Memory (365–367); and when Lilac returns to Old Law Farm to gather him and George Mouse for the crossing-over to the lands of the fairies, Auberon refuses until Lilac tells him that Sylvie will be there (465).
In fact, Auberon Barnable’s travails and tensions do not ruin him, as they ruin Auberon Drinkwater, but test and reconfigure him for his role of prince in the Tale. Like his father, he must travel in order to come home; unlike Smoky, he does not discover a new home but returns home once he has changed appropriately. Smoky is right that he himself is a minor character in the story (96); his son Auberon is, if anyone is, the protagonist. Auberon’s time at Old Law Farm involves the initiatory withdrawal from society that defines the liminal state, and so does his time as a homeless man. Upon meeting him, Ariel Hawksquill thinks, “people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses”; they have “a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled” (353). Auberon feels that his “long drunk” has increased his perception of things that others take for granted. As he actually crosses over into the land of fairy, at the end of the story, guided by Fred Savage, he realizes,
the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—these skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. (494)4
As in any initiation, during this liminal time Auberon Barnable has changed and acquired new skills he will need for his future role.
Besides being willing to live without definitive answers, he also acquires a more obviously magical set of skills, the Art of Memory, taught to him by Ariel Hawksquill. When Auberon arrives in the other world, “it was a deserted kingdom.” His job is to construct a new world through his trained memory and imagination: “He would have to start all over again, that’s all,” Auberon thinks. “He must make order here where there was none” (520). In fact, Ariel Hawksquill had taught him, ordering experience is what the Art of Memory is for (353). Within the new world—in fact, as the substance of the new world—Auberon sets up the park in which he learned the Art of Memory, which also includes the earthly passages and markers of the seasons and compass directions (520). His mother can see two stigmata of Auberon’s transformation. His eyebrows have grown into one single line (395), a trait of Violet’s that was inherited by those able to contact the world of the fairies. She also sees the price of that initiation: “that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the back of his hands” (395).
In contrast to the men in Little, Big, the women are usually capable of a worldview in which our world and fairy can coexist, a worldview that comes naturally and can somewhat be shared with those they are joined to in marriage. This double consciousness, in which the boundary between worlds is permeable because it doesn’t really matter, characterizes at least some boys as well as the girls (judging from August Drinkwater) but exists as a stable state only in the women.
While Smoky is The Traveler, Daily Alice is a stationary goal: she does not need to travel to cross thresholds because she is and always has been comfortable with both our world and the world of fairy. In fact, she and the other girls—Nora, Timmie Willie, maybe others (84)—are, if not doors to the other realm, at least windows in that Auberon Drinkwater finds he can only photograph fairies (if he could only be sure those images are fairies) with them around. As Daily Alice grows older, she feels she has lost the connection to the fairies that she had in childhood: “Come hither, come hither, they had sung in her childhood. Now she was stationary” (137). However, she then realizes, “perhaps they had stopped teasing her to follow them only because she had long since arrived wherever it was they had been teasing her to come. She hadn’t lost them, and yet needn’t follow any more because here she was” (171). Permanently liminal, she does not need to cross boundaries to visit the fairies, as Violet Bramble did (51–53), as Smoky did once and then forgot (87–91), as she used to walk away in order to catch the rainbow (15–16). In the other world, she becomes Mother Earth, the most static yet changing figure possible (532, 536).
This dual experience without apparent conflict also characterizes Nora Cloud, whose work reading the Least Trumps is often done on the porch (19, 26, 91, 75), an architectural space that is neither inside a house nor outside but both. Nora does not live in both worlds, but she is a messenger between them through her reading of the fairy-transformed (126) Least Trumps and calm acceptance of what they say. When she is younger, she is satisfied with the limits of what she knows and a
ccepts them (26); when she is over a hundred years old, she sees great events, the end of the Tale, her own death—and accepts those also:
How that could be . . . why behind a fall that showed a grand Geography—empires, frontiers, a final battle—there should appear one old woman’s death, she couldn’t tell; perhaps, probably, it couldn’t be told. (257)
Her cards reveal events in the lives around her, and she receives that information and disseminates it to others. At the end, she can share her awareness of the end of the Tale only with Sophie.
Sophie, Daily Alice’s sister, is marked as liminal in two main ways: first, by her love of sleep (a state sometimes connected to death but still a kind of life) and dreaming; and later, by her connection to her daughter, Lilac, which provides a tie to the realm of the fairies. Dreaming can itself be considered a liminal state. It is a withdrawal from waking life—a state neither fully awake nor as oblivious as dreamless sleep—yet may be a portal to supernatural realms, though a limited and temporary one. More than that, Sophie’s love of dreaming is often expressed in terms of slipping into the dream, “the moment of passage.” In fact, “she found she was one of those who could awake, leap the gap of consciousness, and arrive back at the same dream she had awakened from.” She calls her dreams “her journeys,” and she is an expert traveler (153). Then, after Lilac is stolen by fairies, over the years Sophie retains a sympathetic connection to her that is more than human imagination; for instance, Sophie imagines Lilac failing to grow older, which is not a mental error but a fact, since over in the realm of fairies Lilac is asleep and unchanging in Father Time’s lap (290, 312). When the real Lilac returns to Edgewood, she “looks just like Sophie had imagined she would” and is the age that Sophie envisioned (453–454). Finally, Sophie is a messenger like Nora: she learns the art of card-reading in order to find Lilac, though it leads her to other awarenesses and wisdoms as well and enables her to gather and instruct those who are ready to cross over into the world of the fairies (442–443, 473, 474–477).
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