October 27, 2023
I have just seen Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice, his third film based on an Agatha Christie mystery featuring her recurrent detective Hercule Poirot, this one on a late and relatively minor novel called Halloween from 1969, almost exactly 50 years after Poirot’s first appearance in a novel of 1920. I have not read the novel, but an online summary makes clear that the film has almost no resemblance to the original story beyond the fact that a character is murdered by being drowned while bobbing for apples at a Halloween party. The rest is an original creation of Branagh and his screenwriter Michael Green. What they have created is fascinating, both in its own right and in the fact that it is united, not in plot but in thematic preoccupations, to Branagh’s two prior Poirot films in a kind of loose trilogy. Beneath the entertaining surface of these films lie depths that the reviews I have read seem at most dimly aware of and do not explore.
The first major change is the relocation of the story from England to Venice. Why Venice? Real cities can also be mythical cities, and the mythical Venice is the city associated with wealth, with the theme of the identity of love and death, and also with the imagery of water. All three of these things show up, interconnected, in the film, along with a fourth motif, that of poison. A famed opera singer known for her role in Mozart’s Mithradates, about the famous ruler who made himself immune to poison, owns the decaying palazzo in which the plot unfolds. Christie was knowledgeable about poisons from her experience as a wartime nurse. The young adult daughter of the singer allegedly committed suicide by plunging from the top of the palazzo into the waters, and Hercule Poirot is invited by his friend Ariadne Oliver to a children’s Halloween party that is also a séance trying to communicate with the dead daughter, in order to prove that the medium, played by Michelle Yeoh, is a fraud. He seems to do so, yet the fact that things are a little more complicated is proved by the fact that the medium ends up dead as one of a series of murder victims. I will try to give out as few spoilers as I can while delving into the story’s deeper significance.
All three films in Branagh’s trilogy are “locked room mysteries” in the loose sense of taking place in an area that is sealed off, contained, a figurative vessel like the alchemists’ vessel or vas, inside of which transformative processes involving death and rebirth took place: a train in the Alps in The Orient Express, a tour boat in Death on the Nile, and the palazzo in A Haunting in Venice, which is isolated for the entire night by a horrific deluge that makes it impossible for anyone to leave or any rescue boat to enter. In the darkness and storm, water is seeping in everywhere through the old walls. “Fear death by water,” says Madame Sesostris, a medium conducting a séance in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem written during the nightmare years of World War I, which features a drowned Phoenician sailor and the line “Good night, sweet ladies,” an echo of the mad speech of Hamlet’s Ophelia, a young and innocent person who committed suicide by drowning. All of Eliot’s poetry is haunted, to use the appropriate word, by young, innocent girls with a mood of pathos hanging about them, and the haunting in A Haunting in Venice is supposed to be by the ghosts of children from the days when the palazzo functioned as an orphanage, who were walled off and left to die during the panic induced by a plague. The palazzo is cursed, holding the vengeful ghosts of children within its walls. The mythical Venice is also associated with plague, as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which a famous writer dies after refusing to flee the plague-ridden city, because he is possessed by the figure of a beautiful young boy. Walled up children brings to mind Count Ugolino and his children, walled up in an Italian tower to starve in Dante’s Inferno. In the film, there is a little boy who holds himself aloof from the children’s party, clutching instead to a copy of Edgar Allan Poe, who liked to wall people up or inter them alive, as in “The Cast of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” (“They have put her living into the tomb!”), and “The Premature Burial.” Poe is the prince of the irrational—and yet he was also the inventor of the detective story, in which a figure representing the power of reason defeats the forces of various irrational passions.
The passions outwitted by Poirot are typically human, all too human. Here, however, Ariadne Oliver has contrived to put Poirot’s ratiocination up against the powers of the supernatural, the greater mystery that cannot be explained. In mythology, Ariadne supplied the thread that guided Theseus through the labyrinth—another sealed room—to the monstrous Minotaur at its heart, so that he could rescue innocent youths and maidens walled up there. Ariadne Oliver, who appears in other Poirot stories, has a double motive here. She is a mystery writer whose last three novels have failed—Christie has admitted that she is a kind of Jungian shadow or alter ego—and she wants Poirot to do what he has done before, supply her with a plot by solving the mystery. But she also wants to know whether there are forces inexplicable to and more powerful than reason. Poirot’s denial that such forces exist is so vehement that we realize he is protesting too much. It is emotionally important to him that reason may stand intact against the forces of the irrational, and eventually we learn why.
This is where Haunting opens out into the larger trilogy. A recent newsletter was about secrets and shame. In Death on the Nile, we learn the secret that has determined the life of Hercule Poirot, a trauma suffered on the battlefield in World War I. We see a young Poirot come up with an ingenious battlefield strategy that seems to succeed until a booby trap explodes, killing many of his company and mutilating Poirot’s face. The huge, outlandish moustache that Poirot sports is in fact the way he has devised to cover up his physical disfigurement, which in turn covers his psychic mutilation. Poirot’s trauma, which involves his sense of guilt for dead young comrades, is walled up inside him, covered by the moustache. The dead are his ghosts, and he is their tomb. In Haunting, the father of the little boy with the Edgar Allan Poe book is psychologically broken, suffering from “battle fatigue,” what we would call PTSD, because of his experiences in the next war, World War II. He was present at the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, yet another image of a structure in which innocent people, including children, were walled up alive, and it broke him. The theme song played at the beginning and end of the film is a hit from 1943, “When the Lights Go On”:
When the lights go on again all over the world And the boys are home again all over the world And rain or snow is all that may fall from the skies above A kiss won’t mean “Goodbye” but “Hello to love”
The relationship of the song to the film is poignantly ironic. It is 1947, and the lights have gone on. It is peacetime, and life is supposed to return to normality and happiness. But in fact there are still all kinds of ghosts walled up, repressed, ignored.
This aspect of Haunting reminds me very much of a neglected gem of a film from 1998, Gods and Monsters, about the last years of the horror director James Whale, director of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Whale, openly gay, a bold thing in 1957 when the story takes place, is a difficult, dying man, played wonderfully by Ian McKellen. But through his relationship with a young, straight gardener, played with equal brilliance by Brendan Fraser, we learn that Whale’s ability to bring to life, to use the right metaphor, the world’s most famous monster derives from the fact that he too was traumatized by the trench warfare of World War I. The face of the monster is a transmutation by Whale’s imagination operating on the memory of a gas mask on the face of a dead soldier in No Man’s Land. Whale has become a bit of a monster himself, but the genuine relationship with the young gardener humanizes him. The film’s title is a glance at the full title of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. Victor Frankenstein wanted to be a human god, a Titan like Prometheus, creating life with the fire of electricity. Instead, he created a “monster,” though the monster has in fact the humanity his megalomaniacal creator lacks. Once you really plunge into the ocean of stories, the connections do not stop: we remember that in 1994, Kenneth Branagh directed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The word “plunge” brings us back to the water imagery of A Haunting in Venice. In addition to the water of the Venetian canals and the ferocious storm raging outside, water inside proves treacherous. Poirot at first cannot get water to come out of the faucets of a basin; when it suddenly does come, it nearly scalds him. Worst of all, someone almost succeeds in drowning him in the basin filled with apples for bobbing during the Halloween party. The film is inundated with water, which Jung said was perhaps the commonest archetypal image of the unconscious itself, and the plunge into water is a descent into the depths of the unconscious.
At this point, we reach the real interest of the film, and of this newsletter. We can call it liminality, the condition of being on the borderline between one mental state or another, one reality or another. The term was made famous by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who used it to describe the middle, in-between stage of the “rites of passage,” rituals of symbolic death to one identity and birth to another in traditional societies. The most common rites of passage are the “rites of initiation” by which adolescents are inducted into adulthood. Every so often, a thinker will invent a term or set of terms that seem to take on a life of their own, showing up in other people’s work, at times in contexts widely removed from their origin. Such terms seem almost infinitely suggestive, as if they were a kind of skeleton key opening many locks. Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between form and energy, is one example. “Liminal” is another. If we had to define it, we could say that it indicates “an in-between state that is both/and but also neither/nor.” All metaphors are liminal, because A is B says that something is identical with something else and yet also differentiated from it. Mythological metamorphosis is a liminal process, as Bernini shows in his famous sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Daphne turns into a laurel tree to escape the pursuing Apollo. Bernini shows Daphne caught in a moment between human (or nymph) and tree, a human form growing branches.
The idea is of a paradoxical confounding of binaries, as in twi-light, in other words both light and dark. Dylan Thomas has a central mythical poem that begins “Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house,” where “owl-light” is an archaic term for twilight and the halfway house is, in Dante’s phrase, midway in the journey of our life. An entire television series about liminal events was significantly called The Twilight Zone. More recently, the four novels of the Twilight saga (2005-2008) feature the liminal, in-between figures of vampires, half human and half demonic. I have heard endlessly of how badly written they are (Stephen King himself says so), but the fact that the four titles of the volumes designate liminal events—Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn—suggest that Stephanie Mayer has at least conducted some research on the symbolism of liminality, of ambiguous conditions in which light and darkness become equivocal.
Spatially, crossroads are liminal. If you go to the crossroads at twilight, the devil will appear and you may bargain with him for a gift, as Robert Johnson did to become the greatest blues guitarist. We think of crossroads as fourfold, or two binaries, but there is also a threefold version. Hekate is the goddess of the triple crossroads because she is one form of the Triple Goddess. As a liminal figure, she is both singular and plural, showing up as both the three witches and as their leader in Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s two plays about liminality, a play in which “fair is foul and foul is fair” and “nothing is but what is not.” The witches are sexually ambiguous, and trans, nonbinary, gender fluid and other such terms indicate the sudden revelation of liminality in the midst of what we had thought was a binary world. Because the liminal is paradoxical and eludes ordinary categories of understanding, its effect is for some people uncanny and disorienting, which is why liminal gender identifications provoke fear and hatred even more than gay and lesbian people do, even in otherwise sophisticated and liberal people like J.K. Rowling and Carlos Santana.
The liminal is the borderline, and to get to it you have to travel away from the living, familiar center of life to the strange, uncanny state surrounding all that is familiar and supposedly safe. The liminal is an extreme, and reached by going to extremes, voluntary or involuntary. There are two forms of this journey to the extreme, extraverted and introverted. The extraverted form travels outward to the wilderness, to what Northrop Frye called the “green world” in Shakespeare’s comedies. The introverted form travels inward, starting from the safe, enclosed form of the home. But the home is haunted, inhabited by otherness, uncanny: the word translated “uncanny” in Freud’s famous essay of that title is unheimlich, which literally means “un-homelike.” There is something behind the walls, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which the narrator sees a woman imprisoned behind the design of the wallpaper, wanting to get out. The narrator herself has been more or less imprisoned by her doctor husband in a former insane asylum, the irony being that by the end of the story his “cure” has driven her mad indeed, and she merges with the woman in the wallpaper. She is, then, liminal: two people who are one, yet two. Madness is an extreme state, and the hallucinations of the mad are liminal. Architectural fashion during the years of the story resulted in insane asylums that were elaborate Gothic affairs, such as Massillon State Hospital in the area I grew up in. They are like vestigial memories of the mansions and castles of Gothic romance, which were of course always haunted.
Or there is something beneath the floor. The alternative title of the independent film significantly titled The Forgotten (1973) is Don’t Look in the Basement (also the title of a song by Danny Elfman). It too is set in an insane asylum. The most famous instance of nastily inhabited architecture in recent literature is the Overlook Manor in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977; the Stanley Kubrick movie is 1980), influenced by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959). The Overlook was built atop a Native American graveyard. The house in Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) was also built atop a cemetery, but not a Native American one: that bit of lore turns out to be an example of the Mandela effect, something widely believed to be true but which is not. There is doubtless a reason: we try to bury, literally or figuratively, past and traumatic past history, but it won’t stay dead. It abides in a liminal state whose ontological status is undecidable: supernatural? psychological? Whatever the influence of Native American ghosts, the Overlook has been the scene of evil and violent events, such as mob killings, since it was built in the 1920’s, and those scenes, are re-enacted in various rooms. A dead victim who won’t stay dead but walks as a ghost is the catalyst of the plot in Shakespeare’s other liminal drama, Hamlet, where murder will out. And the Ghost, originally played by Shakespeare himself, is truly liminal: though he may not be what he claims, he is not merely Hamlet’s hallucination, for other people see him as well, at least sometimes.
Liminal stories may accentuate one pole or the other of their paradoxical double nature: the supernatural or transcendent on the one hand, the psychological on the other. In William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908), the inhabitant is initially subjected to visitations of more ordinary gross-out horror, such as hideous Swine-Things, but is eventually swept up in a vision that takes him as witness to the end of time and the crumbling of the solar system. In educated horror circles, it is, despite its creaky style, one of the most celebrated examples of what H.P. Lovecraft called “cosmic horror.” Horror imagery can be modulated into science fiction form: the original Alien film is what we could call a locked spaceship mystery. The bursting of demonic apparitions out of people’s chests is powerfully suggestive. For that is ultimately where our ghosts are buried. Blake said that all deities reside in the human breast, but so do all our demons. Under the influence of literary realism, this can produce stories where we are almost confident in reducing the uncanny events to psychological symptoms. Henry James wrote a series of "ghost stories" of this sort, and in his brilliant tour de force of an essay on them, “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” Northrop Frye says that “many of his best realized later stories are occult fantasies which could also be read as existing entirely in the central character’s mind” (116), making them extreme versions of “unreliable narrator” stories.
The most famous of these is The Turn of the Screw. There is a celebrated and interminable debate over whether the ghosts of that story, two dead servants named Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, are real or psychotic hallucinations of the governess who is the viewpoint character. If the latter is the case, the real villain of the story is the governess, whose paranoid projections frighten to death a child the governess is supposed to be caring for. That has become the most accepted view, but Frye’s essay argues, surprisingly, that such a “psychologizing” of the story is simplistic:
“The reading of the story as a straight neurosis was more or less that of Edmund Wilson, who never understood anything in literature except realism, but such a reduction is far too simple for James. The governess seems to be telling her own story as a first-person narrator, but her story is actually being read aloud by someone else who knew her, and gives the strongest guarantees of her sanity and responsibility” (120). No, Frye argues, “the governess is rather a Cassandra figure who does see what she thinks she sees, though she may be crazy, as Cassandra was. As Hamlet discovered, it is not always possible to preserve one’s mental balance when confronted with ghosts” (120). That does not mean, however, that she is innocent—the binary categories of good and evil break down in the liminal realm:
“In any case, the governess’s efforts to save the children are a violation of them as disastrous as anything the dead servants do. She is, in short, taken over by the evil she tries to fight” (120). Does James then “believe in” the supernatural? We are returned to the conundrum of belief that was the subject of last week’s newsletter. Frye notes that “James’s father was interested in Swedenborg, and Swedenborg suggests that we are constantly surrounded by evil spirits, who are there but invisible, like the stars in daytime, but are unaware of us unless we do something to attract their attention” (121). But did James believe in such spirits? The question is simply inadequate, because spirits, evil or otherwise, are liminal phenomena that are like the beast in Revelation 17:8, “that was, and is not, and yet is.”
Jung fell from grace, and was expelled from the psychoanalytic movement, in which he had been Freud’s heir-in-waiting until there was a fatal collision that ended in a shouting match by letter. The usual reason given for the argument and Jung’s expulsion was that he refused to subscribe to Freud’s theory reducing all human motives to rechanneled sexuality. But the deeper reason for Freud’s dogmatic insistence on the libido theory was as a defense. Defense against what? Jung once asked. Against the “black tide of mud” of occultism, Freud said, a subject in which Jung was interested and had done research. Hercule Poirot’s similar clinging to the idea that everything has a rational explanation, and a human one, is very similar, though more poignant: Poirot has apparently exiled himself from the company of women because of his disfigurement: he is symbolically castrated, and his brilliant mind is all that is left to him. Jung did not “believe in” the occult, in the way that, say, Yeats tried to do. But he was open to liminality to a rare degree, and, if you open to it, it will come. Events that Jung would later call “synchronistic” occurred in his presence, as with a medium. Once, when he was arguing with Freud on the subject, there was—if you believe the story—a loud crack from somewhere within a bookcase. When Freud, frightened, asked what it was, Jung said that it was an example of what he had been talking about, and that he sensed another loud crack would happen in a moment. When it did, Freud fainted, something he did rather often, like the rationalistic husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” who faints when he finds his wife raving mad and crawling on the floor.
Jungian psychology has been described as the most liminal of all psychological theories, and it emerged from Jung’s own intense liminal experiences, his “encounter with the unconscious,” a period that went on for months in which he was visited by voices and visions, which he wrote down and illustrated (he was a talented artist), the most important collection of these dialogues being collected as The Red Book. What Jung learned from this direct experience of the unconscious formed the basis of analytical psychology. It is sometimes amusing to see what biographers of Jung try to make of Jung’s “encounter.” Normative psychology can only see them as a “psychotic episode”: one called him a shaman, not necessarily as a compliment. Yet it is not a bad label, for shamans are traditionally called to their vocation by a mental breakdown leading to a similar psychic inundation, which they have to learn to master and control. Where Jung differs from a shaman is that he applied critical reason to his experiences: in other words, he is half shaman, half Hercule Poirot. However, Poirot admits at one point in Haunting that sometimes insights come to him as involuntary epiphanies rather than through sequential reasoning, which follows after the intuitive grasp. Jung’s hostile critics think of him as a combination of cultist and occultist, yet it is Jungian psychology that is capable of casting light on a bizarre phenomenon like QAnon, with its Satanic pedophiles. QAnon is a kind of demonic possession spreading among the marginalized, but liminal experiences happen to “normal” people should they dare to step outside the safe boundaries of ordinary rationality.
Joseph Campbell notes the many remarkable parallels between two of the greatest novels of the 20th century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In each book, a liminal moment happens to the central character. In Campbell’s description, Mann’s Hans Castorp “allows himself to participate in a series of séances, where, at a climax, Joachim, who has died some months before, returns, reappears on the summons of Hans himself, garbed prophetically in the uniform which it was to be Hans’s destiny to wear, of the German Army of World War I” (660). Hans is appalled: “It seemed for one moment as though his stomach would turn over. His throat contracted and a four-, a fivefold sob went through and through him. He leaned forward. ‘Forgive me!’ he whispered to the apparition, his eyes broke into tears and he could see no more. He stood up, stroke in two strides to the door and with one quick movement turned on the white light” (660). Joachim was Hans’s cousin, and his symbolic though not literal twin: one of the doctors refers to them as “Castor[p] and Pollux, the Gemini twins.
Campbell compares this scene to the climactic moment of Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus, dead drunk in a brothel, a liminal situation if there ever was one, is confronted by the ghost of his dead mother in corpse form. Stephen’s reaction is, Campbell observes, the opposite of Hans Castorp’s: “He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (641). Campbell’s summary comment is that “the abyss that Hans refused, and together with Hans his author, Joyce and his characters entered” (661). The liminal is an invitation to step over the threshold. We may accept or refuse it, declare our allegiance to the lights going on all over the world or to the darkness that calls us to what Loren Eiseley, in another of the great liminal books, calls The Night Country. But both episodes illustrate the moral that Hercule Poirot pronounces at the end of A Haunting in Venice: “We must face our ghosts.”
William Kennedy’s Ironweed takes place over the three days of October 31, Halloween; November 1, All Soul’s Day; and Nov. 2, All Saints Day. Frances Phelan, has spent 22 years running from his ghosts, especially from the ghost of his infant son whom he killed by accidentally dropping him—he, a gifted baseball player. Phelan, who is Irish Catholic, has lived out on the streets, homeless, betwixt and between, expiating his guilt in a kind of purgatory. At the end, however, he is able to return home, like Odysseus, to be accepted by a wife still waiting for him. All four of Shakespeare’s final romances have plots in which people learn to face their ghosts, take responsibility for their actions in the past, and return home. Another name for them is the bivalent “tragicomedies,” and the plot of each one leaps over a generation-wide gap in the middle: their resolution is not overnight, as in the comedies, but has to be worked out over a lifetime, as with Frances Phelan. Our entire lives are liminal, but we remember that liminality is the middle act, so to speak, of a threefold drama of death, liminal passage, and rebirth.
Strange things happen in these ordinary lives of ours. I will recount one liminal event out of my own life. In 1969, my best friend Dennis, his girlfriend, and I thought to amuse ourselves with a Ouija board. Dennis and Debra operated the board, and I played the secretary and took notes. I still have those notes. Over the course of a couple of hours, our interlocutor on the other side described an Otherworld consisting of elaborate levels of spirits, in an ominous atmosphere punctuated by moments of terror. We were all badly shaken. Dennis and Debra swore they were not manipulating the instrument: I know these people, and knew they would not lie. The situation bore more than a passing resemblance to that of the poet James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, whose material was given to Merrill and his partner David Jackson over a course of something like 20 years. The elaborate Otherworld system described in Yeats’s prose book A Vision supposedly originated through his wife’s automatic writing, though it is said she cheated to please him. I have no idea what to make of any of these things, but I know that ours did happen. No, we never attempted the Ouija board again.
In researching this newsletter, I found to my surprise that Kenneth Branagh had made a Shakespearean film I did not know about. All Is True had a very limited release in 2018. Its title is the subtitle of Henry VIII, the last play Shakespeare worked on before his retirement, yet it is not a film version of a play, but a version of Shakespeare’s life. Not, as is so common, of his youthful life before the theatre, the so-called “lost years of Shakespeare,” but of his life after the theatre, when he returned in beginning old age to Stratford and to his family. It is not a happy return: Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway has never really recovered from the death of their son Hamnet at the age of 11. All three of the women with whom Shakespeare is now surrounded are embittered, frustrated by the empty lives to which they are consigned because they are women. Anne, married to the master of the English language, is illiterate. Shakespeare’s favorite child was his son, and he is proud of the poems his son wrote—until Judith, the younger daughter, reveals that she was the one who composed them, dictating them to Hamnet, and that Hamnet was not only untalented but did not die of the plague: he committed suicide, drowning himself with copies of the poems in his pocket, after Judith told him that she was going to inform their father that he did not write them. The Earl of Southhampton, Shakespeare’s former lover, shows up, played by Ian McKellen, for a late reckoning about their love as reflected in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare had already begun a self-confrontation through the autobiographical character Prospero in The Tempest, but now he has to come to terms with a dysfunctional family resembling something out of a play by Eugene O’Neill. But he does so, and the film’s ending is bittersweet, a liminal term. On Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, the women reveal that Susanna, the oldest daughter, has taught both Anne and Judith to read and write. They celebrate his birthday, and Shakespeare will die before the day is over. Bittersweet: but he has faced his ghosts.
An entire world sprang out of Shakespeare’s mind. Frye’s remark that many of Henry James’s later stories could be read as existing entirely within the central character’s mind evokes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, all of whose various scenes spanning times and places and social classes exist within the mind of Tiresias, the blind prophet with inward sight. Tiresias is an ironic figure: the ghosts walled within his consciousness exist in a condition like that of the Bardo of Tibetan Buddhism, a realm between death and rebirth. Eliot wrote the poem while recovering from a mental breakdown. Even more ironic is the narrator of Gene Wolfe’s brilliant and disturbing fantasy Peace (1975), who is probably—nothing is for certain in this book—dead and dreaming his past life. We gradually realize that he is a totally unreliable narrator, censoring his account of his life in order to avoid facing the terrible things, including murder, that he has done in it. In Yeats’s poetic drama Purgatory, a savage old man tries to rescue his mother from purgatory by murdering his own son, expiating his guilt, since his mother died in giving birth to him. But the sacrifice is in vain: he hears hoofbeats of his drunken father riding up to impregnate the mother all over again. [Full disclosure: a long time ago, I played the part of the old man in an undergraduate production]. Hence the play’s title is ironic. Yeats was influenced by Japanese Noh drama, which takes place in the liminal Bardo realm between death and rebirth, and which would indeed be comparable to Christian purgatory. But all the characters discussed here are trapped in a stasis that is really damnation, for hell is what Nietzsche called the eternal recurrence of the same. Demonic time is stillborn: nothing is ever delivered, only repeated.
However, liminality is both ironic and redemptive at once. Literary plots are supposed to have beginning, middle, and end, but life itself is all middle. In our lives, we are always in medias res, in the middle of things. In an essay called “The Creature from the Marsh,” Loren Eiseley describes exploring a swamp:
Parts of it are neither land now sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment. | Along drowned coasts of this variety you only see, in a sort of speeded-up way, what is true of the whole world and everything upon it: the Darwinian world of passage, of missing links… (162)
The origin and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, death and rebirth, fall and resurrection: these are shapes by which the imagination imposes upon the flux of the world. Day by day, moment by moment, we feel we are floundering in the middle of things, that life is a shapeless flux, one damned thing after another. However, at its most intense, transfigured by the imagination, liminality becomes a state in which everything is metaphorically identified with everything else, a state Frye calls “interpenetration.” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the dream of a cosmic figure whose dream is all of human life and history. Interpenetration is liminality transvalued as redemptive.
This never quite happens: an absolute origin and a final fulfillment always elude us, never quite occur. Ah, but at the same time the beginning and the end always happen, are always happening in every moment, for that is the paradoxical nature of liminality. It is a riddle far more baffling than that of the Sphinx. Yet in the end, it is very simple after all. You do not have to be an Oedipus or a Poirot to unriddle it. All you have to do is face your ghosts.
References
Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology. Volume 4 of The Masks of God. Viking Press, 1968; Penguin, 1976.
Eiseley, Loren. “The Creature from the Marsh.” In The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971. 153-68.
Frye, Northrop. “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult.” In The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Edited by Robert D. Denham. University of Indiana Press, 1993. 109-29.