Jesús Benito and Ana Mª Manzanas, eds., The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations, Madrid: The Gateway Press, 2006
The essays collected here, written by scholars both from within and outside Spain, are the result of a seminar held at Madrid's Autónoma University in March 2005, and represent a further exploration of threshold dynamics in a variety of literary representations. The authors examine the idea of the threshold via familiar cultural artifacts such as essays on film (Philip Sutton), music (Robert Samuels), sculpture and two-dimensional monuments (Alan J. Rice), and literature (Hein Viljoen, Isabel Soto, David Murray, Ana Mª Manzanas and Ineke Bockting). All the papers trace the unpredictable dynamics of the threshold and its variable spatial and temporal dimensions. For the limen as presented in this selection of essays is an ambiguous site, "a sort of void", as de Certeau would have it, dominated by the logic of ambiguity.
In terms of narrative technique, Aguirre explores the continuous distancing or postponement of an event, which expands the liminal space to such an extent that it swallows or absorbs everything like a black hole - rather like the lake in South Carolina that Bockting expands on. Like Bockting's foray into the specifics of current events and biology, Manzanas and Aguirre take the threshold away from the usual metaphors of time, space, and borders, in order to define it as an (almost) all-encompassing situation. In terms of the history of Christian thinking, Manzanas traces the introduction of Purgatory, the liminal space between Heaven and Hell, into theology. Purgatory is so huge, so non-geographic, non-material, and generally unlinked to time as to be overwhelming. But what happens when a people such as Native Americans find themselves actually trying to live in a liminal condition? That is, in fact, the question David Murrary posits in his article. It is one thing to explore and discuss and write about the workings and location of the liminal space, and another to live it. Murray argues that those who actually inhabit that threshold are the powerless or the disempowered. So the questions return. What can and cannot be done by or in the threshold? Can it, as Viljoen suggests, enable survival? Can it unleash creativity and new thinking? Can it transform reality? Can it itself be transformed? How does it feel to be at the crossing of different cultures? Can an intercultural and diasporic experience redefine imperial notions of race, nation and identity (Rice, Soto)? And what if we carry the threshold to other incursions such as the other side of the cinema or TV screen (Sutton), and the liminal territory that musical and literary narratives share (Samuels)?
The volume contains the following contributions: Jesús Benito and Ana Mª Manzanas (Valladolid and Salamanca) " Of Walls and Words: An Introduction"; Manuel Aguirre (UAM) "Liminal Terror: The Poetics of Gothic Space"; Ineke Bockting (Paris) "Haunted Borderlands: Gothic Liminality in Texts of the American South"; Hein Viljoen ( Potchefstroom, South Africa) " (Re)Figuring the Liminal in Breytenbach's Prison Poetry" ; David Murray ( Nottingham) "Liminality, Hybridity, and Identity in Native American Texts"; Ana Mª Manzanas (Salamanca) "At the Gate: J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and Thomas King's Truth and Bright Water "; Alan Rice ( Lancashire) " Sea Shore/Sea-borne Texts: The Racial Politics of Liminality in Black Atlantic Discourses from Sambo's Grave (1736) to Dorothea Smartt's Lancaster Keys (2003), and Lubaina Himid's Cotton.Com (2002) and Naming the Money (2004)"; Isabel Soto (UNED) "Strategies of Doubling in African American Narrative"; Phillip Sutton (UAM) "Beyond the Looking-Glass: Liminality and Screen"; Robert Samuels (Open University) "Music as Narrative's Limit and Supplement"; Miriam Mandel (Tel Aviv) "Afterword".