What I Wish I Had I Known Sooner: Liminality

Layman’s term

When I began teaching English I realised, much to my horror, that despite the tens of thousands of hours of English instruction I had received over my lifetime, and although I considered myself fairly ‘well-read’, I just didn’t know enough to teach it well.

The reading I began to do as a fledgling English teacher confirmed this shameful suspicion: there were (and still are) plenty of concepts within English where I am still firmly a layman, whereby neither my schooling, parents, extended family, neighbours, friends, television, newspapers, nor undergraduate university education provided me with even a crumb of understanding.

Plenty has been written about the role of knowledge in the curriculum over the past decade – that it is not sufficient for knowledge to be inherently interesting by virtue of just existing, but must be ‘powerful knowledge’, helping to reveal meaning beyond the text in hand to include other texts which may be experienced in the future. In practical terms, it means I should not just teach Romeo and Juliet, let’s say, but use that text as a vehicle for learning about broader concepts so that students may better understand other texts (Shakespeare or otherwise) they encounter in the future. It is what the cognitive scientist Professor Stephen Pinker refers to when writing ‘the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the web: They might as well not exist.’

My desperate attempt in recent years at becoming a better English teacher has seen me play ‘conceptual catch-up’. Teaching some of The Canterbury Tales to Year 8 this year, I struggled to put my finger on what it was exactly that I should teach beyond the characters and plot. What conceptual fabric could I unpick so my students might better understand English more as a discipline?

Swiftly failing to arrive at an answer, I deferred to the greater mind of David Wallace, a former President of the New Chaucer Society who, thankfully for me, authored An Oxford Short Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer (the Oxford Short Introduction books, if you’re not familiar, are brilliantly accessible routes into a variety of subjects. I intend to read as many as I can before I die).

It was here I stumbled across liminality, a concept that has subsequently helped me better understand not only The Canterbury Tales, but all the texts I teach across the curriculum. Liminality is one such Pinker-esque ‘conceptual fabric’ I wish I had explicitly known sooner.

What is it?

Liminality stems from the Latin word ‘Limen’ meaning ‘a threshold’. It was originally coined in 1909 as an anthropological term by Arnold van Gennep to describe a rite of passage, such as an initiation, in which the participant breaks from a previous practice, passes through a threshold before being re-incorporated with a new identity. A typical example seen in most cultures is such as a graduation ceremony in which an individual passes from childhood to adulthood. For the duration of the ceremony they are neither child nor adult, but at a liminal point between the two. Liminality does not just apply to individuals or brief moments, but can expand to include groups or even whole societies over long periods of time (such as a war or a revolution).

How might it apply to English?

In his Short Introduction…, David Wallace explains that there are many kinds of limen to be found in Chaucer […] new thresholds may arise at any moment of reading: suddenly the membrane thins between this world and some other.’ In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer presents physical borders that signal the onset of a supernatural encounter, a doorway to a supernatural world, often between life and death/earth and heaven. In The Miller’s Tale, for example, John the old carpenter sees his lodger Nicholas speaking protective prayers ‘on the threshhfold of the dore withoute’. Likewise, in The Pardoner’s Tale the three men encounter the old man, a person on the boundary of his own mortality, at a stile connecting one open field with another.

Once I understood this concept, I began to suddenly notice it all around. It is the very stuff of literature: the balancing act which builds tension. Hamlet, for instance, famously ponders neither whether solely ‘to be’ nor ‘not to be’, but both simultaneously. In the play he exists at a point between life and death, that liminal state established by his father’s ghost (a liminal being, no less) in the opening scene.

Macbeth has the Porter, who pretends to be the porter of hell-gate, a dwelling on the limen between life and death; salvation and damnation. The porter character appears as genius loci, the defining spirit of the place (Macbeth’s castle/Scotland/the cosmos?) straddling the play’s themes, themselves dualities: truth and deception/good and evil/nature and the supernatural/ambition and apathy etc.

In A Christmas Carol Scrooge’s redemption takes place in a realistic Victorian London, but one that is also very much inhabited by supernatural spirits.

Frankenstein’s creature is of course both dead and alive.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is indeed ‘strange’ precisely because that novel is about liminality – that ‘man is not one, but two’. Reminiscent of Chaucer’s wooden country stile, Stevenson’s novel is filled with various doorways, a motif which connotes that a transition is in occurrence  – that our understanding of human nature was changing.

In fact, the Gothic movement broadly dwells in liminality: notions such as the sublime (to be in awe of something and yet be terrified by it) or the uncanny (to find something familiar, but also strange) are liminal ideas.

Lord of the Flies depicts boys who, in order to survive their stranding on a deserted island, organise themselves into a state somewhere between childhood and adulthood.

Poetry also relies on liminal tension. Carol Ann Duffy’s Before You Were Mine (chosen at random – it has been on my mind since it was in this year’s AQA GCSE Literature exam paper), uses the ghostly image of her mother ‘clatter[ing] towards [her]’ (no doubt, now I think about it, a nod to Shakespeare’s Hamlet) to stress how the feelings for her late mother are not singularly simple, but complex: somewhere in that liminal point between adoration and disappointment.

And let’s not forget the uncomfortable bed-fellow of English: non-fiction. One reason the Victorians especially are so fascinating is that study of their writing reveals a complex worldview. The Victorians struggled to come to terms with themselves and their achievements, an uneasy blend of pride and shame. Henry Mayhew (1812 –1887), an English journalist, described this in 1850 whilst describing London in a letter:

‘It was utterly unlike London as seen every day below, in all its bricken and hard-featured reality; it was rather the phantasm – the spectral illusion, as it were, of the great metropolis – such as one might see it in a dream, with here and there stately churches and palatial hospitals, shimmering like white marble, their windows glittering in the sunshine like plates of burnished gold – while the rest of the scene was all hazy and indefinite.’

Henry Mayhew

Here are two visions of London. On the one hand, Mayhew seems to speak with pride of the idyllic ‘great metropolis’ of ‘stately churches and palatial hospitals’, but this is also blended with a description of the city as a ‘phantasm […] all hazy and indefinite’ suggesting perhaps that this picturesque view of London is indeed an unreliable fantasy. Given that Mayhew was writing at a time when Londoners were dying in their thousands of an outbreak of Cholera, partly due to the terrible living conditions inflicted upon the city’s poorest, Mayhew wisely catches himself from believing his own hyped-up view of the city.

(These are but a few examples – I could go on).

Why is it important to know?

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald Professor Sophie Gee wrote an opinion piece in defence of studying English and the humanities at university. Her argument, summed up, is that reading and writing are skills for ‘working with disorderly, contradictory points of view and colliding imaginative ideas’, that ‘texts and works of art thrive on ideas that are contradictory and true at the same time.’

Barbara Bleiman, an education consultant at the English and Media Centre (EMC), writes in a 2020 blog post titled ‘Texts That Talk to Each Other’ that ‘every text is entering a dialogue with past literature’, that ‘Reading any text is a deeply intertextual act.’ The act of reading, she appears to say, is itself a liminal act.

And is it not the case that to read literature is to find ourselves poised between two worlds of meaning – the literal and the metaphorical?

Being explicitly clear to students that English studies operates in this liminal realm and to encourage them to look for this uneasy balance of ideas has resulted in deeper, more interesting analyses of texts in my lessons. Just last week I asked my Year 8s to take their initial thesis about an extract from Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood: their accurate, but basic interpretation that ‘Dahl’s schooling was miserable’ – and to make it more sophisticated by phrasing it as a liminality. After some thought we eventually arrived at the idea that while Dahl does indeed write about the misery of his schooldays, what makes this book of greater interest is that we read it with an anticipation of childhood innocence. Dahl being caned by the headmaster stings all the more because such brutality is the polar opposite of what we think a childhood should be.

But knowledge of limen offers something more that goes beyond good essay writing. My students, when studying poetry, have more than once asked, ‘how can anyone feel contrasting emotions at the same time?’ It’s a logical question. And I sometimes feel they realise the answer immediately after asking because – when we really think about it – is this not the very nature of the relationships that we experience: competing feelings of love and despair, frustration and joy that never neatly resolve themselves?

Truly knowing one another, perhaps, is to be sat in that limen (whether we know it or not).