MYTHIC AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: Ritual and Liminality

Pilgrimage is a rite of passage. A rite of passage is an anthropological term for a ritual that passes the participant from one state of life into another. The most familiar rites of passage include ceremonies celebrating birth, coming of age, weddings, and death.[1] A ritualized setting condenses this transition of social identity into a single setting. A participant in a rite of passage goes through three stages: pre-ritual, liminality (or in the midst of the ritual), and post-ritual. In a chapter of her book Rituals: Perspectives and Dimensions, Catherine Bell explains how the elements of a rite of passage allow for the participant’s transformation, “[rites of passage] orchestrate a physical removal from the rest of the world, physical changes of appearance […] and basic conceptual changes in one’s sense of self.”[2]

Bell borrows this model of pre-ritual, betweenness, and post-ritual from folklorist and mythologist Arnold van Gennep, who created a similar paradigm for the process of initiation. Van Gennep’s steps for initiation are separation, liminality, and reincorporation.[3] This model has been borrowed not only for rites of passage, but also for travel narratives—particularly, for pilgrimage. Bell writes,

Setting out from home and a familiar world, the pilgrim endures the trials and tribulations of the journey, passes through strange lands to which he or she does not belong, and finally arrives at a place considered holier than others, a sacred center where wisdom or grace or gifts are dispensed. Securing a token of that dispensation, the pilgrim returns home bearing the transformed identity of one who has made the journey, touched the sacred objects, and received heavenly boons for effort.[4]

The act of pilgrimage, therefore, requires the pilgrim to enter into a state of transformation. During pilgrimage, a pilgrim communes with God, being changed from a previous self in the process. This fits pilgrimage into the framework of an initiation or rite of passage—moving the pilgrim from the pre-ritual self to the post-ritual self.

Anne Carson uses this discussion of the steps of ritual in framing the larger narrative of “The Anthropology of Water”, the section of Plainwater that contains the essay “Kinds of Water”, “Just for the Thrill”, and “Water Margins.” By titling the work “The Anthropology of Water”, Carson places herself within an anthropological discourse. She draws herself further into the camp of the anthropologist, the mythographer, and the folklorist through the introduction to this text, “Diving: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Water.” Here, Carson begins her work via a summarization of a discussion she has with an anthropologist and the introduction to anthropological vocabulary or, the delicacy of word choice. Carson focuses on the distinction between the words “encounter” and “discover” and how choosing the former is “the difference…between believing what you want to believe and believing what can be proved.”[5] This comment plays with anthropology’s concern for the unbiased through the ethics of word choice and mental framing. Anthropology requires an objective recounting of what is there, rather than fitting what is there into what one expects to find. Through the narrator’s response, “ ‘I don’t want to believe anything,’ I said. (But I was lying.) ‘and I have nothing to prove.’ (Lying again.) ‘I just want to travel into the world and stop, noticing what is under the sky.’ (This, in fact, is true.)”[6], Carson’s intentional plays on the expectation of the anthropologist and her narrator’s inability to perform the objective role. This inability to fulfill the role of the anthropologist (a maybe impossible role of only word play rather than reality) is what leads Carson’s narrator into the role of the mythographer, in which reality becomes displaced or mythologized through story.

“Diving” ends with the story of Danaos, an Ancient Greek hero who had 50 daughters. The daughters were connected to their father psychically, as when “Danaos stirred in his seep they would awaken, each in her narrow bed.”[7] When Danaos married off his daughters he “carried out the wedding ceremony” and then forty-nine of his daughters murdered their husbands in their beds.[8] That left one daughter, who Carson writes “remains to be discovered”, intentionally playing back on the ethics of word choice discussed earlier.[9]

The Danaos myth is the ur-myth for Carson’s stories throughout “The Anthropology of Water,” setting up a situation of sustained liminality (the between state of ritual) that is the state of her various narrators. An “ur-myth” is the most basic or first telling of a particular myth or mythic theme in a particular mythos. This myth tells of forty-nine daughters who refused to allow men to break their liminal state—as the wedding night completes the wedding ritual/rite of passage—and killed their husbands due to their devotion to their father. The daughters therefore remained connected primarily to their fathers. However, the fiftieth daughter who does not murder her husband, Hypermnestra, does not break her state of liminality either. Lyceneus, her chosen husband, honors her liminality by agreeing to allow her to remain a virgin and, therefore, not finalize their wedding ritual.

Liminality, or the middle period of a ritual, is the mode of each narrator in Carson’s “The Anthropology of Water.” During the liminal state, the participant experiences a dissociation from their previous identity and therefore enters into a period of identity-confusion. A state of non-identity and intentional disengaging with a previous identity, opens up the room for transformation. The ritual process usually guides the individual from this state of lack of identity into their emergence into their new identity. By choosing to start her three pieces with “Kinds of Water,” her pilgrimage narrative, Carson puts the state of ritual and liminality at the forefront of her longer works. This thread that begins in “Diving” then does not fade away, but remains clearly woven into the first story and, therefore, in the mind of the reader as they move onto “Just for the Thrill” and, eventually, “Water Margins.”

The lack of ritual and rites of passage may not follow into “Just for the Thrill”, a distinctly American road trip narrative, due to the general lack of rites of passage in American culture. Bell comments on this in her text, stating that “lack of clear life-passage rites in American culture has contributed to the loss of community and a growing sense of social alienation.”[10] While Carson’s narrator is transitioning into a state of womanhood throughout “Just for the Thrill”, there is no formal ritualized setting for her to move from androgynous youth to woman. However, given the ritual of the pilgrimage in “Kinds of Water” and the similar states of questioning, alienation, and transformation, one can conclude that the narrator in “Just for the Thrill” is on an analogous ritual path.

While neck-deep in the state of liminality, Carson’s narrators often attempt to take on an observer’s role to their own experiences. This dual nature of the objectivity of anthropology and the liminality of the myth of Hypermnestra in “Diving” frames the push-pull of Carson’s narrators who she describes simultaneously in the roles of the observer and the actor. She frames the pilgrimage in “Kinds of Water” simultaneously through diary entries and describing the sharing of photographs. The narrator takes on the role of the photographer, a role necessarily of observation. The dual role of the narrator as both actor and observer comes through these dual forms of discussing the journey—both first-hand descriptions that are written in a stream-of-consciousness style and the sharing (and taking) of photographs.

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[1] Catherine Bell. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997: 94.

[2] Bell, Ritual, 95.

[3] Bell, Ritual, 95.

[4] Bell, Ritual, 104.

[5] Anne Carson. Plainwater. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1995: 117.

[6] Carson, Plainwater, 117.

[7] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[8] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[9] Carson, Plainwater, 118.

[10] Bell, Ritual, 101.

Retreat (quiet, quiet, quiet)

On Saturday afternoon, I left Canterbury Court and drove down to my childhood home in Lemont, a southwest suburb of Chicago.

I did not realize how much I had missed silence until I was tucked into my bed and could hear nothing other than the sound of my own breath. My house has never been loud--it's a comment that other friends with siblings often make when they come to visit. Now that everyone but my parents have moved on with their lives, the quiet is so pervasive it feels like life on the edge of movement. The only thing that occasionally separates out time is the clicking of my dog's nails down the hardwood hallway, though most of the time he is curled away in some warm corner (as fourteen year old dogs do.)

Going outside, the sound is wind and leaves and the occasionally chirp and flutter of a bird taking off. The geese honk, too, but they're content to perch on the edge of the pond and pick at themselves most of the time. When I took out my dog, I saw a squirrel launch itself onto a tree and disappear into the branches, shaking the robins out of comfort and into the sky.

Some may call the city a concrete jungle, but I am not used to the suffocation of vines needing cut through. I am used to openness, to stretching sky and trees creating canopies that let in light through leaf gaps and the brush of the wind.

While I spent most of my time reconvening with home and my parents, I did not completely forget about my project. One thing that coming home always brings up is the non-linearity of time. The past presses up against the present and says hello each time. The sense of drowning it both what is, what has been, it comes to me here. Anne Carson brings this sense of memory, of time all collapsing in on itself, through a few devices in her text: the anachronisms, the jump from a place in the present time to a place in the past, a sense of the dream, a recollecting.

We have not moved since I was born, so this house has collected many moments. Like houses do, it has its own life and one that breathes again when I come back to it. Sometime this year, my parents will be selling the house and moving. It is a strange feeling, but I am embracing it. But I will miss the quiet, the place to withdraw, and how immediate the sense of the past is--how close it can come, how much it can feel just as alive as the present.

And yes, my dad did decide to grow a grapefruit tree in our living room.

The places between knowing and emotion

Tonight, a couple of friends and I watched the film The Last Unicorn, which is a childhood favorite of mine. I encountered in the watching and discussing of this film something that I am beginning to notice in my own re-reading of Anne Carson: the difference between allowing a piece of media to be an experience and analyzing that media.

When I am in the mode of experience, I am passive. I let in color, sound, light, and feel. The act is a bit like immersing oneself in water. You may retain a sense of self and an identity, but the focus is on the way that the media interacts with you on a level both superficial and deep. There is no conscious networking between these two aspects of oneself, they simply do--like waves rippling out to meet each other and stir further movement. It is not analytic, it is not focused on deconstructing the layers between the top and the bottom.

In analysis, the focus is on peeling each layer back to reveal something new and to unravel the inner lines and connections. To deconstruct the piece, one must take a step outside of the realm of feeling and movement. At least, that has always been how I perceived it--at a distance. By grappling with a topic and with issues that have evoked emotion within me, I am beginning to see where the distance lessens and can be both beautiful and distracting.

It is hard sometimes to slow down and not assume that the feeling is obvious and the meaning that hums down from skin to depths does not occur similarly for everyone. It is not a removal of oneself from the process, but an expansion and deepening of those stirring movements into vibrations that maybe make sense. The work only becomes more imbued with feeling and meaning the more I untangle those threads within it. I hope by the end of this project I can map those moments out for someone and show them that this work is meaningful.

"Caught in a motion that I don't want to stop"

Over the last week, I have dove back into Anne Carson's Plainwater, particularly, her first full "essay" in the section "The Anthropology of Water", titled "Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela." A dense and nuanced read, I am attempting here to piece out some particular moments in the text that I see hinting at the notion of an identity in flux as allowed by a liminal space.

[Post-writing note: I do not necessarily see this as a coherent whole. It needs a lot of tweaking and a lot more threading in of major concepts and a lot more background reading. This is just a very, very rough description and analysis of some ideas within "Kinds of Water" all very loosely tied together with the idea of liminality--which I will probably be supplementing with a reading of the "Dark Night of the Soul" as both a concept and a piece of work.]

To start, liminality is an anthropological concept that emerges in conversations of rites of passage. Carson describes herself pre-pilgrimage as though on the verge of a rite of passage herself: "I was a young, strong, stingy person of no particular gender" [1]. This description hints at someone at a threshold of transformation--or even in the beginnings of transformation. Often rites of passage include defining of gender--or full immersion into a particular gender, think 'manhood' rituals--and the movement into adult. This opens the space for the pilgrimage to exist within the moments between a start and a conclusion.

Although Carson uses the rite of passage framework, she plays with its boundaries. Instead of envisioning the neat and progressive narrative of self-growth as pre-pilgrimage, pilgrimage, post-pilgrimage, Carson presents her narrator as fully immersed in the state of betweenness--or, more accurately, liminality. The word liminality, as defined by Wikipedia [2], means, "the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete."

The entirety of Carson's narrative lives in this space and the narrator reveals this from the start. The first piece of "Kinds of Water" starts with the narrator staring out her window down to a river and waterfall where she sees something in the water, but cannot quite make out what it is. She believes it to be a dog and worries it is drowning, but at the same time she hesitates to name the moment as she watches people walk by and do not make any sign of noticing. She reveals distrust of her ability to to make meaning here: "I have come through countries, centuries of difficult sleep and hard riding and still I do not know the sense of things when I see it, when I stand with the pieces in my hands." [3] Whereas others move without notice, seem to be engaged in their tasks, she watches from the window and asks, "What is it others know?" [4] Carson invites the reader to engage in this nebulous state of unknowing, of fluidity, of questioning with the last remark in her first section: "Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle." [5]

This sense of looseness of identity and, therefore, lack of knowledge and meaning-making appears also in the narrator's reflections on her traveling companion, "My Cid." The narrator takes on the role of the observer [6], watching My Cid and seeing in him the knowledge that she lacks. "Ahead of me walks a man who knows the things I want to know about God, about lovers' conversations," Carson writes, after a reflection on her own lack: "There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what appetite is." [7] The narrator desires to understand, but yet as she watches My Cid and attempts to understand by following him, she is only left with the "white dust puffing up to cover each step, left, right, left" [8]. She cannot learn what she wants to know from him, following him only leads to further obfuscation, further blending and confusion. All becomes lost in the white dust.

The confusion of meaning-making or knowing is not the only confusion in Carson's text. The liminal space also creates a fluid identity. Carson repeats throughout "Kinds of Water" the notion of animals riding on top of each other or animals entangled in each other. A sense of the confusion of self and other complicates the narrator's attempt to be an objective anthropologist. While the narrator watches My Cid walk before her, she realizes, "How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal. I know the animal. Does that mean I hand myself over?" [9] The act of being entangled requires the self to become part of another--it requires a fundamental giving in. Further in this section, titled "To Compostela, 23rd of July", the narrator describes a photograph of My Cid and his mother and a memory tied to it. During this description, the fragment "Half smile" appears. [10] This fragment appears frequently in the text [11] and is always attached to the narrator in response to My Cid. Here, while the employment could be similar as an interjection by the narrator, it appears more attached to the line that precedes it: "'Must get a hat,' [My Cid's mother] would say every time, bending her head." [12] In sharing My Cid's memory, the narrator has become an element within it and has become conflated with the image of his mother.

This entangling of identity and meaning, the multiplicity of meaning allowed in any single action, is also revealed in the narrator's meditation on the act of offering. Carson writes, "Flowers are banal between lovers but this is not that. Mine are much less an offering to My Cid than an entangling of him in an offering to the saint, which is in turn an entangling of the saint in an offering to God, as the pin snares the flower stalks and the hat gives occasion to the whole." [13] One action holds a multiplicity. Here, Carson unravels the implication(s) of action. She makes a similar remark on the relationship between the pilgrim and the road, where "[the road] asks only one thing. Which happens to be the one thing you long to give. You step forward...Nothing is left in you but desire for that perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino." [14] The act traveling is not just a movement forward, but an expression of love and abandon. It is an offering of oneself to the road, a relationship and entangling of one with it--the perfect slotting of [desire of the] beloved and [action of the] lover. While often the narrator remarks being confused about the language and meaning of things, here she can piece out clearly the multiplicity of meaning. The act of walking unfolds to reveal its oneness with the act of love.

Carson ultimately does not end this narrative of pilgrimage with the narrator in a state of post-pilgrimage. The coming to Santiago does not mark solely an admiration of the church, but in fact includes the explosion of the church with fireworks. The next day, the narrator and her fellow pilgrims stand "knee-deep in gold rubble." [15] Beyond the literal destruction of the perceived end point and destruction as a transformation (playing perhaps into themes of the "dark night of the soul" that is mentioned throughout the text), the narrator does not end in Santiago. She and My Cid move onward, "as no mountain ends at the top, so no pilgrim stops in Santiago...the road goes on. It goes west: Finisterre." [16]

Finisterre is described by My Cid, "there is nothing there except the end of the world." [17] When the narrator and My Cid get to Finnisterre, they walk into a fog that never seems to end and eventually decide to turn back. When they start heading back, the narrator has a moment when she realizes "we are utterly lost. Let me revise that. I am lost....No one is here but me. And there is no road." [18] Now stripped of the action (walking) and the relationships that are most familiar (My Cid and the road), that lead her onward to the perceived end of her journey, the narrator has fully immersed into the endless liminality. The next and last section of the text brings the narrator to the shore. Here she parallels the drowning dog from the beginning of the entire pilgrimage: "I have fallen at the edge of the water, knocking back and forth slightly in the force of the waves." [19] Above her, figures gather and speak over her, "What is it they are saying? Perhaps--no. Words never went on in me." [20] The hesitation and reaching for meaning-making, for understanding the words of others and their machinations, has ceased. The narrator abandons her reaching for construction, she feels fully, "Fear shakes me. As it sometimes will just when we are about to be handed over." [21]

By framing the pilgrimage within a liminality through the events of drowning, Carson plays out the truly suffocating, confusing, and uncertain limits of identity and meaning.

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[1] Anne Carson, Plainwater. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1995): 123.
[2] I apologize for the use of Wikipedia. There is an article on rites of passage that I am going to cite when I end up discussing liminality in the paper, I just do not have access to it at the moment.
[3] Anne Carson, Plainwater, 124-125.
[4] Carson, Plainwater, 125.
[5] Carson, Plainwater, 125.
[6] "I am a pilgrim (not a novelist)" here Carson makes a claim about her ability to construct meaning. She is here not as a meaning-maker, not a narrative-constructor, but a pilgrim, someone in motion. Carson, Plainwater, 152.
[7] Carson, Plainwater, 143.
[8] Carson, Plainwater, 143.
[9] Carson, Plainwater, 175.
[10] Carson, Plainwater, 175.
[11] Carson, Plainwater, 185. Maybe not as prevalent as I imagined, but I will have to read through again more carefully.
[12] Carson, Plainwater, 176.
[13] Carson, Plainwater, 149.
[14] Carson, Plainwater, 154.
[15] Carson, Plainwater, 181.
[16] Carson, Plainwater, 183.
[17] Carson, Plainwater, 185.
[18] Carson, Plainwater, 186.
[19] Carson, Plainwater, 189.
[20] Carson, Plainwater, 189,
[21] Carson, Plainwater, 189.

Title of this blog comes from "Burning" by The Whitest Boy Alive.