Liminality and the Short Story

1 “Betwixt and Between”

Boundary Crossings in American,
Canadian, and British Short Fiction
Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann
1 USES OF LIMINALITY FOR THE SHORT STORY

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Liminality as a concept of both demarcation and mediation between different processual

stages, spatial complexes, and inner states is of obvious importance in an age of global
mobility, digital networking, interethnicity, transnationality, ecological reconsiderations of
species boundaries as well as technological redefifi nitions of the human. Its usability
transcends its origins in seminal studies of cultural anthropology, such as Arnold van
Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909) or Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) and TThe
Forest of Symbols (1973). In the wake of van Gennep, Turner eventually came to defifi ne
the term ‘ lliminality’ very broadly. In his words, “[l]iminal entities are neither here nor
there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom,
convention, and ceremonial” ( Ritual Process 95)

In the last decade or so, a sizeable number of symposia, exhibitions, art works, and
publications were produced that thematize liminality in one way or another. These events
cover a surprising variety of fifi elds and range from literary, mobility, migration, and
ethnicity studies to archeological and geographical, psychological and biomedical studies
(Achilles, Borgards, and Burrichter; Aguirre, Quance, and Sutton; Andrews and Roberts;
Marcelino; Roy; Soto; Squier; Sutton; Viljoen and van der Merwe).

he conclusion from this abundance of cultural production and scholarly occupation with
liminality is also predictably liminal or ambivalent. It warns us that the term can be
stretched and twisted in almost any direction—an objection and critical comment
sometimes also expressed with regard to the theories of Turner. But the fact that the term
is used in such diverse contexts both in the arts and in scholarship also indicates that
pivotal situations are indeed not only frequent but decisive in human lives and in social,
cultural,

p.19

political, and aesthetic contexts. In order not to fall into the trap of randomness described,
this volume restricts itself to probing into the various dimensions of liminality as they
manifest themselves in short-story writing.

To a higher degree than the novel, the short story can be considered the liminal genre
ppar excellence. The short story occupies a middle ground in many respects as it develops
out of, and mediates between, essay and sketch (Garcha; Junker; StuckeyFrench), poem
and novel (Poe), narration and discourse (Brosch), and elitist and popular culture (March-
Russell). The poetics of the short story thus reveals itself as a poetics of liminality.

Some subgenres of the short story particularly further the interconnectedness with
liminality. The story of initiation, for example, depicts a liminal stage in human life, the
transitory phase between childhood and adulthood, and thereby mediates between
anthropology and narratology (Freese, The American Short Story I: Initiation; Bergmann).
The short-story cycle or short-story collection (also termed short-story sequence or
composite novel )) is linked to serialized forms of publication in magazines on the one hand
and, on the other, to the cohesion typical of the novel. Gesturing in the direction of both
short story and novel, the short-story cycle opens up liminal spaces of continuity and
disruption (Nagel).

p.20

For the convenience of the interested reader, this introduction is followed by an extensive
bibliography. The fifi rst section of the bibliography demonstrates that liminality is a well-
researched as well as widely applicable concept. The second section of the selected
bibliography lists numerous publications on the short story. It becomes apparent that both
liminality and the short story are well-researched topics. However, it is also obvious that the
concept of liminality has hitherto very rarely been applied to the short story. This study is
trying to begin to fifi ll this gap.

2 THE LIMINALITY OF THE SHORT STORY

2.1 Conceptualizations of Liminality
p.21

The aesthetic structures that produce the liminality of short fifi ction provoke specififi c
questions: Is it possible to single out narrative techniques that privilege liminality and
indeterminacy? Which strategies produce liminality in the reading experience and
reception of short fifi ction? The fifi rst six contributions in this study address such
questions. The three chapters of the fifi rst section discuss the specififi c poetics of short-
story writing in its interrelations with liminal spheres, as described by Turner, Michel
Foucault, Edward Soja, and others, and thus explore conceptualizations of liminality.

Jochen Achilles’s contribution ( chapter two, this volume )), “Modes of Liminality in
American Short Fiction: Condensations of Multiple Identities,” tries to bridge the gap
between, on the one hand, Turner’s and Foucault’s both cultural and anthropological
concepts of liminality and heterotopology and, on the other, Roman Jakobson’s, Jurij
Lotman’s, and Wolfgang Iser’s literature-oriented discussions of the poetic function as a
mediation between semantic fifi elds, between the imaginary and the real. Achilles shows
that the structural organization of short stories and the normative ambivalences they
depict are interconnected. The concept of liminality is capable of mediating between
aesthetic form and existential or political content. It also allows for an exploration of both
temporal and spatial dimensions. Liminal zones appropriate their own chronological,
systematic, or spatial extension and dramatize the contradictory interrelation between
heterogeneous systems.

Liminal processes take place over time and are also frequently tied to specififi c
environments set off from the surrounding world. Foucault’s discussion of heterotopia
highlights functions of liminality, as do related concepts such

p.22

s Giorgio Agamben’s threshold, Jacques Derrida’s limitrophy, and Soja’s Thirdspace

(Agamben; Derrida, The Animal; Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”; Soja, “Thirdspace”). Liminality
and heterotopology can thus be considered interrelated chronological and spatial
formations, respectively.

In “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” (1960), Jakobson argues that, while
metonymy is a product of syntagmatic combination and metaphor of paradigmatic
selection, the poetic function of language consists in a superimposition of metaphorical
condensation over metonymic juxtaposition. As in liminal states, ambivalence and polysemy
supersede clarity and defifi nability.

p.23

nscribing liminality in its aesthetic structures, the short story turns into a forum of crisis and
change. In American short-story writing two techniques of such inscription are particularly
prominent: fifi rstly, performative dynamics resulting from transgressions of semantic fifi
elds, and secondly, condensations of different normative codes in individual characters or
objects. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) to Joyce Carol Oates’s
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966), many American short stories
develop conflfl ictual and only temporarily sustainable liminal scenarios out of the
juxtaposition of heterotopic settings. Another group of stories from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Four
Beasts in One—the HomoCameleopard” (1833) to Judy Budnitz’s “Dog Days” (1998)
amalgamates different identities in objects or characters, which thereby turn into precarious
containers of liminal undecidedness, an alternative that Achilles’s contribution primarily
elucidates.

p.24

While communitas can congeal in permanent and petrifying social structures over time, it
initially manifests itself in a spontaneous and immediate softening or melting of the hard
contours of accepted social conventions: Liminality is both more creative and more
destructive than the structural norm. In either case it raises basic problems for social
structural man, invites him to speculation and criticism. But where it is socially positive it
presents, directly or by implication, a model of human society as homogenous, unstructured
communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species.
( Ritual to Theatre 47)
Turner envisions “an ever spiralling struggle between the forces of structure and the powers
of communitas” ( Ritual to Theatre 51), a struggle between spontaneous sympathies and
ossififi ed social conventions. Turner considers modern art and literature as decisive
antistructural forces in this battle for a more humane civilization.

p.32

liminality also characterizes contexts of writing and topics of liminality with regard to the
modes they represent, the techniques they use, and the themes they address. Narrative
modes and techniques such as Magic Realism, illness narration, syllogistic structuring,
extended metaphorization of signififi cant food, science fifi ction, and ll’écriture féminine,
spectrality, intertextuality, and initiation as well as thematic ambivalences concerning
interethnic constellations and women’s identities contribute to liminalities in the short
story.

na Bergmann’s chapter, “ ‘I Have Heard Many Stranger Stories Than This, in the Villages
Along the Hudson’: Magic Realism in Upstate New York” ( chapter eleven, this volume ),
demonstrates that short stories of the early Republic can be meaningfully discussed in terms
of Magic Realism. The early American short story marks the beginning of a regionalist
tradition that is still productive in contemporary American fifi ction. Bergmann’s essay
discusses the manifold liminalities of genre and narrative mode in which Washington Irving’s
TThe Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819/20) is embedded.

This raises questions as to the applicability and range of Magic Realism. As Bergmann
elucidates, the combination of realistic and magical elements

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allows Irving to reconcile the political dimension of “Rip Van Winkle” and its indirect
evocation of the national project of the United States with the story’s rather parochial
dimension of Rip’s existential interests in the village he calls his home. Such negotiations of
the local and the national as well as of past and present also mark Boyle’s and Kennedy’s
contemporary New York State fifi ctions. The pervasiveness of the magic realist mode in
mainstream New York writing suggests that the concept of Magic Realism applies not only
to Latin American and postcolonial situations but also to less clearly defifi nable regional
crises.

Magic Realism emerges as a form of genre indeterminacy, pointing toward ontological

uncertainties with regard to the status of both realities and fantasies. By a combination of
basically realistic plot structures with supernatural elements, without resolving the conflfl
ict, Magic Realism emerges as a genre-specififi c form of liminality.

In the introductory section of her chapter, Rohr convincingly develops the argument that
Poe’s descriptions of madness in his short stories follow patterns resembling Turner’s
defifi nitions of liminality. An introduction into Peirce’s epistemology, especially his
concept of abduction, provides a perspective on this interrelation. It highlights the
cognitive as well as the psychological aspects of Poe’s treatment of creativity and insanity,
which emerge as interdependent categories. Like Peirce’s abduction, which mediates
between syllogism and speculation, Poe’s ratiocination transcends conventional
categorizations and reveals the domesticated madness of his fifi ctions as a form of
liminality.

n her chapter, “Of Death, Dying, and Disease: The Short Story and American Heterotopian
Illness Narratives” ( chapter thirteen, this volume )), Carmen Birkle analyzes the liminal
structuring of spaces as well as relationships between medical authority fifi gures and
victims of disease, madness, and death. Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842),
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” (1892), and Ernest Hemingway’s
“Indian Camp” (1930), three famous American short stories from the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, are read as heterotopian illness narratives. All three stories discuss
medical crises by the juxtaposition of dual and heterotopic settings. Their differences
dissolve through plot structures that follow the Freudian paradigm of the return of the
repressed. The very differently accentuated rites of passage of the main characters in these
stories result in liminal stages that tend to persevere rather than lead to either

p.34

reaggregation or upheaval. All three stories implicitly suggest the persistence of liminality.

eff Birkenstein’s contribution, “How Signififi cant Food Can Make a Short Story into a Meal:
The Hyphenated Immigrant Experience in Contemporary American Short Fiction” ( chapter
fourteen, this volume ), considers what he calls signififi cant food, that is food used as a
signififi cant plot or other substantial narrative device, as a catalyst of either cultural conflfl
ict or integration in contemporary immigrant short stories.

Food evokes memories of what once was home but also suggests culinary paths into the
new country to be accepted as home. Birkenstein’s chapter probes into what he calls a
palimpsest of hunger in its widest connotations, revealing a hypertext of interethnic
liminalities.

LIMINALITY AND THE SHORT STORY

p.37

On account of its very brevity and often episodic structure, the generic liminality of the
short story privileges the depiction of transitional situations and flfl eeting moments of
crisis or decision. The liminality oof short fifi ction as an aesthetic and generic
phenomenon goes along with liminality iin short fifi ction, which emerges as moral,
cultural, and political crises resulting from the clash of different normative systems. The
aesthetic representation of such crises and clashes is, of course, not the exclusive domain
of the short story. Modern fifi ction presents numerous interethnic, gender, and social
conflfl icts that culminate in aporias of alternative moral value systems and competing
ethical norms. Many protagonists of famous novels, such as Emma Bovary, Captain Ahab,
and Huck Finn, but also the central characters of equally famous shorter fifi ctions, such as
Goodman Brown, Bartleby, Amasa Delano, Daisy Miller, Marlow, and Nick Adams, are
involved in such conflfl icts in complex ways.

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The frequent in-betweenness of the short story’s characters, plots, and settings renders it
an ideal terrain for mapping out liminality, which abounds in contemporaneous
discussions of multiple identities (Appiah and Gutmann; Clingman; Kristeva), third sex and
third gender (Halberstam, IIn a Queer Time and Place ;; Herdt), third spaces (Bhabha;
Rutherford), cultural mobility (Greenblatt et al.), postand transnationalism (Bourne; Giles;
Graham; Grewal; Habermas; Hebel; Hornung; Lenz), and postethnicity (Hollinger,
PPostethnic America )). The interplay of the liminality oof the short story and the
liminality iin the short story render possible the representation of the ethical dimension of
moral transgression, the cultural dimension of heterotopic orders and alternative
normative systems, and the self-reflfl ective dimension of the constructedness of
distinctions.

he liminality of sshort-story writing is informed by temporal and spatial ground structures

that defifi ne anthropological modes of individual and collective self-defifi nition. The
short-story chronotope can be mapped out as the interplay of Turner’s liminality and
Foucault’s heterotopology, as exemplififi ed by Achilles, or as a form of projection and
blending that initiates emergent third spaces, as shown by Brosch. In addition to the
metamorphic nature of short fifi ction and its liminal strategy of phasing, Jakobson’s, David
Lodge’s, Lotman’s, and Iser’s defifi nitions of the poetic function as mediations between
metaphor and metonymy, between semantic fifi elds, as well as between the imaginary and
the real demonstrate the ways in which basic cognitive processes of selection and
combination are transformed into aesthetic and poetic structures, as discussed by Drewery,
Zappe, and Orr. The poetics of the short story are described more specififi cally in terms of
intratextual, experiential, and interdiscursive dimensions of epistemic liminality by Basseler
and by the both empirically verififi able and interpretive examination of interstices between
fifi ction and nonfifi ction, storyness and essayness by Lohafer.

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A variety of liminal modes emerges in the discussion of liminality iin the short story.
Modes of Magical Realism furnish a link between early and contemporary American
(short) fifi ction, as shown by Bergmann. The subgenre of illness and insanity narratives
can also be considered a common denominator of short stories from different epochs, as
elucidated by Birkle and Rohr. Intercultural dimensions of African American and
immigrant short fifi ction, discussed by Carpio and Birkenstein; fantastic versions of
gender negotiations in science fifi ction, explicated by March-Russell; and spectral fifi
gures and interstitial spaces in contemporary Canadian short stories, explored by Cox, Orr,
and Mayer emerge as so many liminal modes of the short story. Liminal structuring proves
to be an essential aspect of both the complex aesthetic composition of short stories and
the equally complex cultural messages they convey. The notion of liminality may also
serve as a useful heuristic bracket for a variety of concepts, suggesting both interrelation
and conflfl ict. Liminality thus emerges as a useful inroad for the study of the short story,
which in turn reveals itself as a mirror of the undecidedness marking the human condition.