4th International Seminar on Liminality and Text

Manuel Aguirre
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Liminal Terror: The Poetics of Gothic Space

Gothic fiction is concerned with space and spatial arrangements — witness its paramount symbol, the castle. But its castles are either ruinous or labyrinthic, or else contain mysterious, unaccountable spaces. So are its abbeys dark and dim, its convents notorious for their secret vaults, its mansions for their hidden recesses. Clearly Gothic fiction goes beyond the functional use of spatial coordinates and evinces a preoccupation with defining a certain kind of space. This is because it seeks not merely to ground itself -as all fiction must needs do- on everyday settings but to delineate the structure of the numinous realm. Since this latter is conceived as different in kind from mundane loci, the geometries of Gothic take recourse to imagery and arrangements suggestive of numinosity. In the exploration of the formal aspects of the geometries of the Other, thresholds and, more generally, liminal conditions will be found to play a crucial role in the construction of terror.

Ineke Bockting
University of Paris

Haunted Borderlands:
The Sense of the Gothic in Texts of the American South

It is astonishing how often the term “haunted” appears in texts of the American South. Anne Moody, for example, begins her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) with the words: “I am still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation”;(1) Eddy L. Harris starts his travel narrative South of Haunted Dreams (1993) by explaining: “These many years later, the South still owns my nightmares and haunts my memories,” (2) and Lillian Smith’s autobiographical cultural critique Killers of the Dream (1940) contains the following opening passage: “Even its children knew that the South was in trouble. No one had to tell them; no words said aloud. To them it was a vague thing weaving in and out of their play, like a ghost haunting an old graveyard… This haunted childhood belongs to every Southerner my age.” (3) Through terms like ghosts, graveyards and haunting nightmares, these southerners clearly situate their cultural identity within the domain of the Gothic.
Elizabeth MacAndrews has defined the Gothic as “a literature of nightmare,” which uses “the stuff of myth, folklore, fairy tale, and romance” to give shape to universal fears (1979:3). (4) These universal fears can be said to be existential, connected as they are with threats to our human existence and sense of identity. If these threats originally came from the outside, in the form of different sorts of monsters, over the years they have moved more and more to the inside, as threats to our human sense of self. Perhaps this is especially so in the United States, the land of immigration with the threat to a secure sense of selfhood that this may entail.
Typically, the Gothic explores various borders and border states, such as there are between life and death (ghost stories), between man and animal (werewolf stories), between man and machine (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), but also between the strange and the familiar, dream and reality, madness and sanity, innocence and guilt . . .

Although the Gothic as a genre has usually been defined in terms of universal fears, I will argue here for a specific “southern” form, which uses conventional features yet explores specifically “southern” border lines and border states, and entails a pointed critique of southern society.

1. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dell, 1979; first published in 1968.
2. Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride Through Slavery’s Old Back Yard. New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
3. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream. New York and London: Norton, 1994; first published in 1940.
4. Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

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Ana Manzanas
Universidad de Salamanca

At the Church Gate:
Emptying Out the Premises of Realism in Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water

Just like Bartleby occupies the premises of the law in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to open a space of incomprehensible volition, Thomas King’s novel Truth and Bright Water interrupts a history of occupation and dispossession through its peculiar use of trompe l’oeil and simulacrum. If Bartleby refuses to copy as an act of disobedience “to every prescription in his culture’s ‘general text’” (Jay 1990: 21), King’s novel is going to copy reality as he subverts the premises of a mimetic theory of art. The agent in charge of this particular revision of mimeticism is Monroe Swimmer, who is presented in the novel as “the famous Indian artist” requested by museums all over the world. Just like Bartleby becomes a literal and ideological squatter as he makes of the law offices his temporary abode, Monroe Swimmer occupies the old church in Truth to make it his new ambitious project and his home. Monroe’s work on the church turns out to be an extreme case of restoration or, to use another term, of disinscription, for the building is literally restored to its truly original condition and is painted invisible. By the time Tecumseh, the narrator, takes a look at the church after Monroe’s arrival, he remarks how “the entire east side is gone.” ‘I don’t know how Monroe has done it,’ he comments, ‘but he’s painted this side so that it blends in with the prairies and the sky, and he’s done such a good job that it looks as if part of the church has been chewed off ” (43). Painting for Monroe becomes a way of conferring invisibility, a kind of mimetism through which the church mirrors nature. If the imitation of nature has been the premise of the mimetic theory of art since the Greeks, King presents us with this imitation which carries invisibility and disappearance. But then the question is what stays? Is the old church still real? Does it exist under a layer of painting? Where is the new “real” located? Tecumseh explains that he had to walk around the church a couple of times before he could notice it did not have a door, for the part of the church where you would expect to find a door had been painted away (44). The door is still a door, yet the old coordinates are gone. Interestingly, the conventional door as threshold or gate separating different realms, the real/unreal, the civilized/savage, the converted/unconverted is gone. The new threshold has been deterritorialized and misplaced, and now appears hanging in the middle of the prairies, just like a “door hanging in space” (44). This gate hanging in space opens to a revision of mimetic art theory for, if some critics held that painting was a practical manifestation of the ideal rationality of nature and the mirror of all wisdom (Bozal 99), Monroe’s painting the church invisible can be taken as a radical act of what can be termed “naturalism” which empties out the premises of mimetic theory. Monroe is, in fact, doing trompe l’oeil painting, a French term which literally means to trick or deceive the eye. Obviously, painting the church invisible “as if [it] had never existed” (237), as well as his next project, the nailing the buffalo into the prairies, are just part of an illusion of a past that is now long gone. The trompe l’oeil, even if informed by a deep understanding of Native history and reality, cannot make up for the centuries of subjection and genocide, and for the facts that the characters seem to ‘casually’ mention throughout the novel. Even if the church is painted invisible and the fabricated buffalo are interspersed on the prairie, the past as a primeval state previous to the contact with whites is simply not recoverable. But the trompe l’oeil, like the simulacra of the buffalo can open a new space beyond the gate of the real and beyond the expressive means of realism where a displaced or removed past has a major, if intermittent presence. Through Monroe’s art King opens the door to a locus of intersections, where the past and the present intermingle, where the historical and the fictional create a seamless texture, where the real and the spectral meet, and where the concept of “the real” acquires a variety of nuances.

David Murray
University of Nottingham

Liminality, Hybridity and Identity in Native American Texts

The paper will first outline the historical, legal and cultural contexts which have produced the paradoxical forms and definitions of Indian identity. It will then look at ethnographic and literary texts which explore these paradoxes and attempt to move beyond them, by entertaining and embracing aspects of liminality and hybridity rather than purity or univocality. Authors to be referred to will include Gerald Vizenor and Leslie Silko.

Alan J. Rice
University of Central Lancashire, Preston

Sea Shore/Sea-borne Texts: The Racial Politics of Liminality in Black Atlantic Discourses from Sambo’s Grave (1736) to Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004).

This paper will traverse the visual and scriptural landscape of texts that remember the fracture of what Paul Gilroy has called the black Atlantic. It will foreground Sambo’s Grave at Sunderland Point, Lancaster as paradigmatic of a dynamic lieux de memoire which combines evolving textual and visual dynamics that reflect and comment on changing ideologies from univocal late eighteenth century sentimentality to the bricolage of postmodern remembrance which the site exhibits in the early twenty-first century. This liminal space speaks of ghostly presences that disrupt national and nationalistic narratives, describing instead the intercultural and transnational modes that shadow even the most seemingly monoglot geographic space. I will use the contemporary poetic work of Dorothea Smartt whose work Lancaster Quays (2003) was specially commissioned to speak to these complexities to bridge my discussion to contemporary Visual Arts. Thence, continuing work on Lubaina Himid begun in Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, I will exhibit the importance of the multi-genre nature of her work combining text and image. This textuality is key to a full understanding of her work which increasingly moves against gallery owner’s attempts to pigeonhole it through accompanying texts by providing her own textual messages. These, often found or adapted texts, allow Himid to use the personal testimony of workers and slaves, and powerful poetic fragments to enhance the visual message of her work. I shall discuss texts from her 2002 show Cotton.com which have never been discussed. These unexhibited texts are used to link nineteenth-century cotton workers in the Carolinas and Manchester through the materiality of cotton. The stress on the material and on actual relations across the racial and class divide highlights Himid’s work as engaged in exhibiting the politics of the liminal. This emphasis is continued in Naming the Money (2004) where 100 slave/servant cut-out figures are accompanied by texts written on accounting paper which talk to the marginality of the figures, but also their retention of past lives despite their new service function miles away from home. These hybrid works of art/literature are glossed by Himid’s own comments in an interview with me and by lectures on memorials that interpret the politics of the threshold as governed by a politics of representation that works against effective memorialisation and that question the very status of her work as in the tradition of the Visual Arts.

Robert Samuels
The Open University

Music as Narrative’s Limit and Supplement

This paper considers issues surrounding the narrative analysis of music. The proximity of music and literature was a constant theme of writing in the nineteenth century, and it is music of this period which is principally in question here. Rather than focussing on programme music, this paper looks at the applicability of narrative as a means of analysing form in ‘absolute’ musical genres, in particular the symphony. Narrative, poetry or literature are the names under which writers of the period could assimilate the ‘excess’ displayed in these works to received models of musical form.
These questions are interpreted in the light of Derrida’s concepts of supplement and limit, as music and text are seen to stand on each other’s thresholds.

Isabel Soto
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Strategies of Doubling in African American Narrative

This paper departs from two propositions that have acquired an almost axiomatic status over the period during which this research group has been doing its work, namely, that

a) the limen is generated by two or more discourses, systems, and
b) African American narrative acquiesces to a significant degree in discursive doubleness, expressive of what Paul Gilroy describes as the ability “to look in more ways than one”.

The paper will explore instances in which a threshold (which, much like the sign, is always-already there) unleashes a certain signifying process: the text means, or signifies, in relation to the presence of a limen or limina. Thus, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative illustrates the paradox of autobiography, which summons a breach as well as a dynamic between the author as subject, and the author as teller of the narrative. Further, Douglass’s text exemplifies a certain narrative practice of (ex-) slave authors, the story-within-a-story or self-referential strategy of the mise-en-abime, where meaning is generated intra-systemically across narrative thresholds.

Philip Sutton
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Beyond the Looking Glass: Liminality and Screen

The fantasy of passing through a mirror has clear links with that of entering the world which lies on the other side of the cinema or TV screen or video monitor. Contemporary film theory has drawn many parallels between the pleasures of spectatorship and the joy of self-misrecognition felt by an infant entering Lacan’s mirror phase. At the same time, both mirror and screen may be classed as threshold sites on the basis of liminal theory. This paper proposes to examine the function and spatio-temporal geography of what might be termed trans-specular liminal fantasy. The historically shifting connotations of a journey through a looking glass or beyond a screen will be explored through an analysis of representations of the motif in various media.

Hein Viljoen
Potchefstroom University, South Africa

Figuring the Liminal in Breyten Breytenbach's Prison Poetry

Being in prison can surely be considered to be a liminal state: the prisoner is in a different space and time and in a state of limbo, waiting for the end of his time. The question I want to address in this paper is how the poet figures this state. Breytenbach regards himself as a denizen of the Middle World and his poetry often describes in-between states, like the state between sleep and being awake; the state of awakening. A preliminary investigation of the prison collections Lewendood (Lifeanddeath, 1985), Buffalo Bill (1984), eklips (eclipse, 1983) ) and ('yk') (1983) indicates that many poems describe dreams, daydreams, imaginary states of affairs and flights of fancy as a means of escaping and keeping the memory of the outside world alive. In this sense two spaces of the inside and the outside always come into play. The mirror seems to be a powerful symbolic threshold for entry into other worlds. In using material from popular culture like popular magazines, folk songs and even crossword puzzles as material for his poetry the poet also seems to open up generic liminal spaces. These matters will be analysed more systematically in the paper.

Manuel Aguirre
Departamento de Filología Inglesa
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM)
Cantoblanco, 28049 MADRID, Spain
manuel.aguirre@thegatewaypress.org