Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place
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Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783489862 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 254 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Ian Kinane is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where he teaches popular genre fiction, postcolonial literatures, and children's literature. He is the author of Theorising Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and editor of Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade: New Paradigms for Young Readers (Liverpool University Press, 2018). Ian is currently writing a monograph in British-Jamaica cultural relations in Ian Fleming's Jamaica-set James Bond novels, and he is the editor of the peer-review, open-access International Journal of James Bond Studies.
Elizabeth Parker is a Teaching Fellow in Contemporary and Popular Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is currently working on her first monograph The Gothic Forest: Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. She is the TV editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and is the co-founder of the upcoming journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic.
Read an Excerpt
Landscapes of Liminality
Between Space and Place
By Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, Elizabeth Parker
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth ParkerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-986-2
CHAPTER 1
Close Listening
Urban Soundscapes in Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, and Berlin Alexanderplatz
Annika Eisenberg
Sound is a sensory experience and the human ear is the designated detector of sounds. The question arises, therefore, as to whether this implies that only media appealing specifically to this organ can incorporate and communicate sound. In this chapter, I argue that sound occurs very prominently in literature — and not just as an elaborate metaphor or atmospheric background description, but as sound in the way Melba Cuddy-Keane suggests: "[By] reading for sonics rather than semantics, for precepts rather than concepts, we discover new ways of making narrative sense". In following this argument, I contribute to the growing field of Literary Sound Studies as a specialised area within the widely interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies, a field which still "lack[s] a language adequate to the discussion of sound — a language that addresses sound as sound and not as something else". In a similar manner to Sylvia Mieszkowski's Resonant Alterities (2014), this chapter will "build a bridge between the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies and literary criticism". In doing so, I regard sound in literature as a liminal phenomenon, and it will be seen not only that the notion of liminality is productive as a concept for the analysis of sound in literature, but that sound itself is staged as a liminal phenomenon in texts. I first outline possible ways of looking at literature's particular means for "staging" sound — a term borrowed from Karin Bijsterveld — by conceptualising and contextualising ideas of mimesis, representation, and other approaches to the incorporation of sensory experiences in literature in order to arrive at liminality as a heuristic concept for literary sound studies. Then, I put this into practice by punctuating the urban soundscapes of three of the most seminal city novels of the early twentieth century: James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), which centres on one day in Dublin (16 June 1904) and the activities and thoughts of Leopold Bloom as a parallel to Homer's Odyssey (eighth century BC); John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925), which tells the stories of six main characters as they struggle to cope with life in New York City shortly before, during, and after World War I; and Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which is about the dim-witted and gullible ex-convict Franz Biberkopf, who vows to be respectable, but finally surrenders to the temptations of bustling Berlin. I have chosen two aspects that, to my mind, lend themselves to a fruitful investigation of urban soundscapes in literature and illustrate the analytical implications of liminality: onomatopoeia and literary dialect, which I will address in the final sections of this chapter.
SENSORY EXPERIENCES IN LITERATURE
Urban sound in literature might at first seem far from a marginal phenomenon, especially since the city and its sensory experience has become a focal point in many modern and postmodern novels. But there is considerable dissent among scholars whether literature actually contains sensory material — and thus sound. Elaine Scarry, for instance, proposes a threefold typology of how sensory experiences are incorporated and staged in different media: immediate, delayed, and mimetic sensory content. The first — immediate sensory content — tends to be experienced in music, painting, sculpture, theatre, and film, since all of these appeal to the actual senses of hearing, sight, smell, or touch. The second — delayed sensory content — gives "instructions for the production of actual sensory content". To elucidate this, Scarry uses the example of a musical score that produces actual aural content only when interpreted on a musical instrument. To Scarry, verbal arts occupy the realm of the third of these categories —"perceptual mimesis" — which means that they feature "no actual sensory content, whether immediate or delayed; there is instead only mimetic content, the figural rooms and faces and weather that we mimetically see, touch, and hear, though in no case do we actually do so".
Despite this typology being frequently put to use, I do not find Scarry's distinction between delayed and mimetic sensory content convincing. Certainly, musical scores (delayed sensory content) follow different rules and conventions than literary language (mimetic sensory content) when it comes to the transcription of sounds. But do they really require two separate and distinct categories? If one tries to find other examples analogous to musical notation and the actual musical piece, one might arrive at the relationships between a screenplay and the actual film, or a script of a theatre play and its actual performance. But what if, say, the theatre script never gets produced or is even never intended to be performed, as is the case with closet dramas? And, taken even further, what about the prolific readers of musical scores who can hear the actual musical piece by reading the notation? So rather than trying to essentialise the respective art forms and media, rather than trying to decide from the outset if something mediated by paintings, musical notation, or poetry can or cannot be actually heard, seen, tasted, smelt, or felt, I would like to argue for a more dynamic and flexible model to describe sensory content in literature (and other arts) that takes into account an intersubjective perspective and the many grey areas and marginal spaces that interart and intermedia relations create for the sensory apparatus. I propose the notion of liminality to serve as such a model. The definition of liminality that I use is taken originally from the studies of rituals by anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. "Liminality" describes a state or location that is transitional, subjective, ambivalent, unstable, and marginal and that opens up new possibilities in a binary system; liminal phenomena occupy "middle-way" positions between two states or locations by being — paradoxically — neither or both of them at the same time. This highly abstract and fluid concept is actually very helpful in bringing together sound studies and literary criticism in the field of literary sound studies.
Scarry admits that the harsh generalisation that all verbal arts have only mimetic sensory content should be qualified with regard to visual poetry and the performance of poems, since "like the musical score, its [the poem's] sequence of printed signs contains a set of instructions for the production of actual sound; the page does not itself sing, but exists forever on the verge of song". Her choice of words is already indicative of liminal characteristics, since it is both the visual/printed and the acoustic/performed qualities that make a poem, so that it occupies a state between sight and sound, a space between both modes of reception. Scarry's observation gives a compelling account for poetry as a liminal art form of visual and acoustic features, which I would like to extend to other verbal arts that I consider, too, to be equally "on the verge" of stimulating other senses. All of these observations lead away from an attempt to distil an essence of sensory content in media and towards an intersubjective mode of reception. Indeed, it is much more productive to argue for the recipient's involvement not only in hearing but also in co-creating the acoustic qualities of a work, and thus to come at this through reader-response criticism for analysis. This renders the artificial separation of notational systems — whether for music or language or something else — unnecessary. Such a shift in perspective from an art-centred to a recipient-centred approach can be found in Yael Balaban's concept of double mimesis in literature: "For a double mimesis to occur, the sensory experience must be translated into words and passed on to another person, namely the reader". The reader, in turn, engages through the author's description in the mental and maybe even the physical recreation of that experience. Balaban claims that "not only the creation of a work of art, but also its reception is a mimetic act". While Balaban focuses perhaps too much on an alleged authority of the author, her approach is much more productive for examining sensory content in literature because of its emphasis on a subjective reading experience without restricting sensory experiences to the realm of the imagination: "Though we may not react in a direct physical way, we are still subject to physical sensations stimulated by certain descriptions".
Although both Scarry and Balaban place the complex concept of mimesis at the centre of their argumentation, this difficult term may actually hinder a heuristic discussion of sensory experiences of and in literature. Even though Matthew Potolsky clarifies that "even in its earliest uses, mimesis never simply meant imitation" but "described many forms of similarity or equivalence", mimesis still carries a close association with forms of "realist" or "realistic" writing, which the modern novels selected for this chapter do not subscribe to.In this context, Daniel Hoffmann convincingly argues from a constructivist point of view that our own senses are not at all objective, and in consequence, they are actually unable to give us a mimetic impression of the real world in the first place. We frequently believe in the "ostensible objectivity of our perceptual systems", but need to be aware of the fact that our perception is much more about "construction, rather than reconstruction, of the physical world". He takes Frederick Burwick's precise observation as a starting point that "[i]f the means of perception and the media of representation are unreliable, then any attempt to define imitation in the arts will obviously be complicated by disjuncture". Instead, representation might be seen as an ambivalent, unstable, and subjective state that is not an exact imitation of an original, a completely independent creation, or the original itself — and yet it is simultaneously all three of these. In other words, novels are both the printed words on the page and the sensory impressions that they evoke; the represented cities are both actual places and fabricated creations. Victor Burgin précises this liminal state of cities represented in art and media for the visual sense: "The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart and so on". This is why liminality becomes a forceful and productive concept with regard to senses in literature and the representation of urban space and its sounds; it emphasises the blurry lines between the real and the imagined as well as the productive potential that lies in these middle grounds and marginal spaces. In the next section I turn to onomatopoeia as one of the most obvious sound-related phenomena that shows the limits of a mimetic approach and may be considered a good example of sound in literature as a liminal phenomenon.
PRODUCTION OF A WORLD
By definition, onomatopoeia should stand for language that "imitates the sounds of the world", as David Crystal puts it. As the word "imitation" already indicates, onomatopoeia is a rather controversially discussed, rhetorical phenomenon with objections usually ranging from an insistence on onomatopes as "conventional signs, not echoes of natural sounds", to an emphasis of the perception that "[o]nomatopes do not accurately imitate natural sounds", or to different definitions of the idea and term of non-arbitrary signs. Gérard Genette argues that "narration, oral or written, is a fact of language, and language signifies without imitating". Ferdinand de Saussure was already aware of the potential "threat" onomatopoeia posed to his theory of the arbitrary signifier and felt the need to downplay its significance: "[O]nomatopoeic formations are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides, their number is much smaller than is generally supposed". Earl Anderson puts these and similar claims into perspective in his monograph A Grammar of Iconism (1998) and points to the artistic value that onomatopes engender. In doing so, he argues against more conservative investigations, since — as Derek Attridge observes — onomatopoeia is still "marginalized in serious literature (it thrives in the comic book genre, of course) because it takes literature's supposed mimetic function à la lettre and in so doing exposes its limits".Indeed, this seems to be the whole point about onomatopoeia: the only way to get beyond language is actually through language. In a similar vein, one should highlight the undeniable effect onomatopoetic expressions have on the reader regardless of discussions concerning accurate imitation and extrinsic motivation of linguistic signs. In this way, I aim to reverse the unidirectional debate about the relationship between art and the world by drawing on Attridge's argument concerning Joyce's Ulysses: "Instead of letting the world break into the text, nonlexical onomatopoeia, in Joyce's hands at least, reminds us, with comic brilliance, that the text produces a world". Indeed, Ulysses is a perfect example of just how problematic and confusing a mimetic approach can be. When we read a story set in an actual place, we may assume the narrative somehow to imitate the actual real world setting. This attribution highlights the ability of literature, and of art in general, to capture and convey entire cities, worlds, even a whole universe for readers and recipients to experience and explore. But would we consider Joyce's Ulysses a mimetic text in the sense that it truthfully translates the experience of the city in a realist way? Certainly not, as Ulysses boasts experiments in narration, perspective, and style, all of which are decidedly modernist and thus stand in sharp contrast to realistic representation. Especially with regard to modernist novels, liminality seems a concept better suited to describe how a text produces a world without subscribing to the tradition of mimesis.
To be sure, onomatopoeia is not the only way to refer to sound in literature; other modes of description, metaphors and similes, may be equally evocative of an acoustic impression (maybe even more so than onomatopes for some readers). All three novels employ sometimes rather matter-of-fact descriptions, as of the sounds of a horse-drawn carriage set in motion in Ulysses's "Hades" episode: "Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer: then horses' hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. ... The wheels rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook rattling in the doorframes". Or the descriptions might be more creative and symbolically charged, resulting in adventurous metaphors and analogies such as "the roar of the streets breaks like surf about a shell of throbbing agony" in Manhattan Transfer. The same continuum can be observed for onomatopoeic expressions, which might be more conventionalised, or "lexical", as in "[t]he whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse" in Ulysses, or "the rattle of taxis" in Manhattan Transfer, or more experimental, "nonlexical", as the sound of the seagulls in the "Circe" episode in Ulysses: "kaw kave kankury kake". Listening to, for instance, the ubiquitous phenomenon of traffic in the three novels selected for this chapter as examples, it quickly becomes evident that although Manhattan Transfer probably features more instances of traffic- and transportation-related sounds than both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Ulysses combined, creative onomatopes and metaphors are far less prominent in Dos Passos's novels than in Döblin's and Joyce's. Take for example the description of Eleventh Avenue as being full of "grinding rattle of wheels and scrape of hoofs on the cobblestones. Down the railroad tracks comes the clang of a locomotive bell and the clatter of shunting freightcars". "Grinding rattle", "scrape", "clang", and "clatter" are all conventional (lexical) onomatopoetic verbs. Compare this to the unusual staging of trams and construction machines in Döblin's novel: "Ruller ruller fahren die Elektrischen" and "Rumm rumm ratscht die Ramme nieder". Or compare it to the train whistle which Molly Bloom renders as follows in the last chapter of Ulysses: "frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling".
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Landscapes of Liminality by Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, Elizabeth Parker. Copyright © 2016 Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Foreword: “A Utopia of the In-Between”, or, Limning the Liminal, Robert T. Tally Jr / Introduction: Locating Liminality: Space, Place, and the In-Between, Dara Downey, Ian Kinane, and Elizabeth Parker / Section One: Liminal Spaces and Places / 1. Close Listening: Urban Soundscapes in Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, Annika Eisenberg / 2. “Cities of the Insane”: The Asylum as Ruin in Recent American Horror Narratives, Bernice M. Murphy / 3. In Between Days: Domestic Liminality in the Work of Aideen Barry, Tracy Fahey / 4. Victorian Fireside Storytelling: Christmas, Ritual, and Liminality in Round the Fire: Six Stories, Kate Forrester / 5. “Weren’t all true nomads at their happiest in limbo?”: Hauntings in Non-Places in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black and Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Kathryn Bird / Section Two: Liminal Identities / 6. Figures in a Foreign Landscape: Aspects of Liminality in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Melanie Otto / 7. Liminal Identities of Migrant Groups: The Old Russian Believers of Romania, Cristina Clopot / 8. “Tinkers”, “Itinerants”, “Travellers”: Liminality and Irish Traveller Identity, Noelle Mann / 9. High Heels and Hard Men: The Liminal Process of Becoming a Warrior, Mark Doyle / 10. Letters of Liminality: Print Texts as Spaces of Transgressive Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit”, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou / Notes on Contributors/Index