Introduction: Borders and States of In-betweenness in Irish Literature and Culture
Irene Gilsenan Nordin and Elin Holmsten
Liminality, if interpreted as a concern with borders and states of in-betweenness, is a widespread theme in Irish literature and culture, which is perhaps not surprising considering the colonial and postcolonial background of Ireland. As Michael G. O’Sullivan points out in the first chapter of this study, this theme of liminality has been analysed by many Irish Studies scholars from a postcolonial point of view. This volume, however, widens the scope to include not only socio-political and historical analyses, but also explorations of the existential aspects of liminality in Irish literature, art and culture. Thus, the liminal, from the Latin word limen, meaning “a threshold,” can be broadly defined as a transitional place of becoming, a
state of flux between two different states of being. It is characterised by Victor Turner in anthropological terms as a rite of passage, involving a process of change on the part of the participant. It is a borderland state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, a transformational state characterised by a certain openness and relaxation of rules, leading those who participate in the process to new perspectives and possibilities. Physical places that are often associated with the liminal, for instance, are borders and crossroads, as well as physical features, such as rivers or the shoreline, and liminal thresholds like windows and doors. Liminal beings studied in this volume are, for example, illegal immigrants in the process of transit from one country to another, as explored in the chapter below by Cheryl Herr. In a similar way, cyborgs, hybrids and shapeshifters can be considered as liminal creatures, since they are in a state of transition, as explored below by Katarzyna Poloczek.
Liminal Borderlands in Irish Literature and Culture examines the theme of liminality in
Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity. The study is a collection of articles which focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts. The book is divided into four sections; Part I deals with theoretical aspects of liminal states; Part II focuses on liminal narratives; Part III explores drama as liminal rites of passage, while Part IV, the final section, examines transformative spaces in contemporary Irish women’s poetry.
Michael G. O’Sullivan’s chapter, “Limning the Liminal, Thinking the Threshold: Irish Studies’ Approach to Theory,” begins Part I of the volume. In this chapter he discusses the prevalence of poststructural terms such as liminality in postcolonial analyses performed by Irish Studies scholars. O’Sullivan contests that Irish Studies’ engagement with these terms tends to lack the rigorous examination of signification which can be seen, for instance, in Derrida’s explorations of liminality through tropes such as the hinge, the hymen or the trace.
Instead, Irish Studies often presumes a direct and unproblematic mediation between language and experience, even when using tropes that derive from poststructuralism and deconstruction. The result, O’Sullivan claims, is that the potential for questioning inherent in terms such as liminality risks being reincorporated in a logocentric view of history and cultural identity, a view which is unable to extricate itself from the place-logic intrinsic to the notion of nation. The way forward for Irish Studies, he argues, is to take the deep structures of language into account. O’Sullivan concludes his chapter by examining a short poem by Samuel Beckett to illustrate the possibilities of analysis which is sensitive to the lessons learned by a careful examination of signification.
Whereas many critics view liminal spaces predominantly as potential sites of liberation and change, Cheryl Herr’s chapter “Images of Migration in Irish Film: Thinking Inside the Box” examines the darker side of the concept of liminality. In her phenomenological
examination of human beings as cargo in films, she discusses the terror and uncertainty experienced by individuals who are passively transported in enclosed, dark spaces. As Herr demonstrates, these individuals occupy a certain limit situation, since they are suspended in the void between the society left behind and the community yet to be encountered. This dislocation, as seen in the films In This World and Zulu 9, where migrants are placed inside closed, locked spaces, results in a radical “unmaking of the world,” as immigrants are stripped of agency and all ties to familiar surroundings. For these migrants, Herr argues, the world is not disclosed, as in Heidegger’s sense of “world-disclosing,” but rather evacuated, as the past seems to be erased, and the individual’s embodiment becomes a burden.
Part II, “Liminal Narratives,” begins with Heidi Hansson’s chapter “History in/of the Borderlands: Emily Lawless and the Story of Ireland,” which explores the indeterminate nature of Emily Lawless’s history Ireland (1885). Lawless’s Ireland was published at a time when history as an academic subject was engaged in the debate between a narrative and a scientific approach, when women’s issues were on the agenda through the activities of the burgeoning Suffragette movement and the writing of the New Women, when the Irish Land War had entered its second phase through the Plan of Campaign and the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and their way of life was under considerable pressure. These different contexts all contribute to making Lawless’s work a history of the borderlands. Hansson argues that, in contrast to histories which either tell the story of Irish suffering as a consequence of English oppression, such as A. M. Sullivan’s The Story of Ireland (1867), or the story of benevolent English intervention, as Standish O’Grady’s The Story of Ireland (1887), Lawless avoids easy political categorisation. Lawless achieves this through several means, such as a non- authoritative style, irony, allusions, numerous digressions and a preference for myth. Her vision of Irish history corresponds closely to her image of the country itself as an interspace that cannot be described in rational terms: pluralist, complex and frequently confused.
In her chapter, “The ‘Other’ that Moves and Misleads”: Mapping and Temporality in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s The Dancers Dancing,” Susan Cahill explores the liminal as a productive space where history, identity and memory can be reimagined and rearticulated. Cahill focuses on temporality, mapping and historiography in Ní Dhuibhne’s novel The Dancers Dancing (1999). She argues that alternate temporalities and an interrogation of history and the past are played out in the novel through Ní Dhuibhne’s combination of folklore and fairytales with an explicit concern with bodies, particularly in relation to health and disease. Drawing on Derrida and De Certeau, Cahill examines the metaphor of mapping and its relation to time and space. In Ní Dhuibhne’s fiction, she argues, alien presence is allowed to seep through the map, there by undermining its authority. Further, she shows the central position of the burn as a liminal space in the novel, since the burn is associated with temporal ambiguities and otherworldly presence. The Dancers Dancing, Cahill concludes, eludes spatial, temporal, and historical containment and instead facilitates and acceptance of the other through the productive engagement with the liminal.
Part III of the collection, “Drama as Liminal Rites of Passage,” begins with Lotta Palmstierna Einarsson’s chapter, “Movement as Text: Text as Movement: The Choreographic Writing of Samuel Beckett,” which carries out a phenomenological reading of two of Beckett’s shorter plays, “Act Without Words I,” and “Footfalls.” In her reading of these plays, Palmstierna Einarsson examines aspects of physicality, with special focus on the concept of movement. She argues that in Beckett’s plays, the characters “are-in-the-world”
through the movement of their bodies, such as bending, turning, falling, balancing, and reaching, and that movement acts as a “crystallising process” through which meaning is imparted and brought to “givenness.” The idea of being “given” is used in the Husserlian sense of appearing in the world, thus movement acts as a sort of “choreographic writing” by which the characters in the play re-create and inscribe the play “textually” in the movements
performed. In this way the “bonds of language” are broken and movement becomes the main bearer of meaning. This focus on movement rejects the idea of text as representational and stresses instead the concept of text as presence, whereby both actor and audience experience the performance of the play in a liminal space, where the borders between fiction and reality, and expression and interpretation are dissolved.
In Chapter 6, “Caught in the Liminal: Dorothy Cross’s Udder Series and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats….,” Róisín O’Gorman examines the use of liminal space and perception in the work of contemporary Irish artist Dorothy Cross’s Udder Series, completed between 1990-1994, and contemporary Irish playwright Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…., first performed at the Abbey in 1998. O’Gorman shows how, firstly, Cross generates sculptures caught within the liminal, creating sites of perceptual multiplicities beyond simple binary realities, and, in the case of Carr, how liminality finds dramatization in her play, By the Bog of Cats…, where a borderland is created that expresses the anguish of those living on the
margins and edges of society. O’Gorman shows how the work of both Cross and Carr shifts the boundaries between seemingly stable identifications, exposing a liminal zone of multiple perceptions and possibilities, as well as the destructive consequences when these potentialities are curtailed. Cross and Carr disturb our settled perceptions, confronting us with a choice: do we acknowledge the continual shifting ground beneath our feet, or do we ritually designate a liminal border, heightening security at its edges, condemning those who refuse or do not have access to the narrow social, political, and cultural norms beyond the border?
Part IV, “Transformative Spaces in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry,” begins with an analysis of the theme of shapeshifting, which is addressed by Katarzyna Poloczek in her chapter “Identity as Becoming: Polymorphic Female Identities in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry.” Poloczek argues that by drawing on the Celtic tradition that allows for the fluidity of different polymorphic shapes, Irish women poets challenge the restrictive
framework of patriarchal society and create alternatives that are empowering and liberating.
Informed by the Deleuzian idea of “becoming-animal,” a key concept in the transformation process of shapeshifting, Poloczek examines the poem “Coda,” by Paula Meehan, where the persona transcends her bodily boundaries and becomes deer, thus inviting the repressed to emerge through the text in the form of metamorphosis. A similar metamorphic transformation takes place in Eavan Boland’s “The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish,” where the shape- shifting process of “becoming-fish” is explored, and the fish-woman transcends not only the boundaries of her female body parts, but also debilitating patriarchal concepts of female sexuality. Poloczek also examines the transgressive ritual of shapeshifting in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “The Mermaid,” where the transformatory potential of rebirth is traced, and in Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Parthenogenesis,” where a different version of the mermaid legend is explored. Her conclusion suggests that these poems all show how the shapeshifting process releases new energy where the female voice is empowered and helped to realise its full creative potential.
Negotiations with the liminal creatures of the Otherworld is the topic of Michaela Schrage-Früh’s chapter, “‘Land [. . .] to Reclaim’: Otherworldly Encounters in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Poetry,” which explores how encounters with the Otherworld allow the female speakers in the poems to question traditional female roles and received concepts of femininity. The magical realm of the Otherworld, experienced by the women when they cross the borders between the conscious and the subconscious, acts as an empowering psychic space that disturbs the tranquil surface of woman’s everyday social, familial, and domestic lives, which is further disturbed by the otherworldly creatures encountered there. Schrage- Früh argues that Ní Dhomhnaill’s informed knowledge of Irish folk tales and traditions provides her with a frame of reference to help deal with contemporary women’s psychological and emotional conflicts, and she sees the poem “Abduction,” for instance, as being about the
absence of communication and a couple’s estrangement or marital crisis. In other poems, Schrage-Früh points out, Ní Dhomhnaill highlights the liberating forces of women’s erotic desires, as in “Blodewedd,” where female sexuality is associated with jouissance, a female energy associated with the Celtic goddess. Thus the Otherworld acts as a liberating force where women’s psychic landscape can emerge and find expression.
In Chapter 9, “The (Translato)logic of Spectrality: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and her English Doubles,” Maryna Romanets examines the extratextual parameters of translation from a postcolonial point of view, addressing such issues as linguistic asymmetry, and how an abstract linguistic model of translation can be viable in an ideological context. Focussing on translations of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry by John Montague and Paul Muldoon, Romanets’s chapter inquires into both inner textual processes and into a complex functioning of translation in the target linguistic and cultural systems. She is primarily interested in the cross-gender dynamic of translations that involves transpositions of literary and rhetorico- ideological conventions into another linguistic medium. Examining Montague’s interpretation of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem “Oiléan,” Romanets acknowledges that Montague’s
“Island,” with its interpretative orientations, is extremely appealing and, in some critical studies of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry, becomes privileged over the original. According to Romanets, Muldoon, in his translations of Ní Dhomhnaill’s poetry in the bilingual edition, The Astrakhan Cloak, imposes his cultural grid on her imaginative landscape. Thus,
Romanets poses the question, if under the sign of disintegration and indeterminacy of meaning, in the Derridian sense, the translator becomes “a vampire or a cannibal” and thrives at the expense of the source author.
