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.
So I know we talked about this over lunch today, but I'm still really interested in the way you're framing the narrative as being about liminal identities. The roles she places herself in are very much in-between identities--an anthropologist, a photographer. They evoke that sense of being both involved and not. After all, both are tasked to observe the world and reproduce it, showing as little of their own finger prints as possible (despite this impossibility). So not only is she on a liminal journey, she is in an in-between sphere.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet I keep thinking about, with the road trip especially, that it is often in the middle of these moments that she is most firm in her own identity. Especially her identity as woman--it is not in the middle of her journey that she thinks back on her father's degendering of her, but towards the end. When she is farthest from any sense of a concrete start or stop, she becomes a fixed place. But perhaps the destabilization of her identity is what prevents her trips from ending.
I'm also curious about how you read this idea into water margins. Her brother, similarly liminal in his sense of self, does not reach the end of his journey only to discover that it is still a suspended place, but rather he never reaches it to begin with. What might that mean in the context of this reading?
Maisie, you're awesome. Just letting you know. I agree with the fluidity of actor/observer of an anthropologist and photographer, which Carson comments on a few times in her text. Making reflective notes on how her photographs are wrong or not shot well or that she /can't/ capture something. The fact that she takes on these roles (photographer, anthropologist, pilgrim (?)) is probably worth a whole discussion in and of itself--and when I write that section keep in mind that you opened up that avenue for me. The use of photographs themselves is also interesting, especially when placed anachronistically (which I always love, I don't know why), like with Queen Lupa. It has some kind of connection to ideas of objectivity vs. feeling? Objectivity vs. experience? Not quite sure yet, but I will think more on it.
DeleteThat was also something I noticed and that I am struggling to draw into this world of fluidity. She has a good line on this in "Kinds of Water", "Although we taste everything and take on every animal, although your true love exists (and maybe it does), we continue to behave more or less like the people we are, even on a pilgrimage." (157) I am still trying to find a way to bring this in and allow it to complicate my claim. We should talk more about this in person, as I think it will be easier to take apart.
A very sudden and unformed thought, but it runs off an inkling I've had about "Water Margins." While I know there is a sense of retreat in this section, of him running away from something or escaping through swimming, I think there is also a sense of being grounded. His life has become "eventless", this makes me think it has come to a point of rest. Maybe, stationed at the end of "The Anthropology of Water" and *Plainwater* as a whole, it may be a narrowing in on the liminality that exists even at the perceived end point. Just as in the other sections of the text, we see in "Water Margins" a combining of songs/poems in with thought process, in with action. But--maybe I am wrong. The introduction attached to "Water Margins" suggests your reading, so I will have to think more on it. But that is just my initial reaction!
Thank you for your comments, they were 100% helpful and have given me even more to think on.
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ReplyDelete[This is an *awesome* nucleus of some material that you’ll be using in your project. I haven’t finished Carson’s essay yet, so I’m going to limit my comments to the bits I have read, but overall I will say that as soon as you moved to discuss the parts I had not read, you completely lost me. That’s a sign that you are moving too fast and presuming too much familiarity with the text in your reader - fine for a blog (if your audience is limited) but something you’ll want to think about for the project. It looks as though you are actually talking about the whole essay here, but in your final project you will take a *lot* longer to do this.]
ReplyDeleteLiminality is a concept I *love*, and I like the way you establish liminality at the beginning. There is lots more you can do with the details, I think. For example, you say,
> 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.
I think you know all of the liminal stuff going on (you clearly bring up the window as evidence for liminality, for example) but you need to be really obvious and explicit with your reader. You ought to explicitly point out that windows are traditionally liminal spaces. And so are waterfalls. She’s also got the intervening terrace which doubles the sense of mediation between the speaker and the observed phenomenon. Then there is the dog/not dog (btw, she thinks it is *drowned* not *drowning*). That’s epistemological liminality. Tell us about it. And she worries she is “on the verge of an ancient gaffe” (why ‘ancient’ btw?). That’s a linguistic/cultural liminality. She knows some French but not enough. And St. Jean Pied de Port is liminal because it is on the border between France and Spain (I think). There’s probably more. Just be obvious. You can’t assume your reader will understand the liminality of the liminal. It’s actually a difficult concept.
What do you make of “Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle”? You say Carson “invites the reader to engage in this nebulous state of unknowing, of fluidity, of questioning with the last remark in her first section.” But what is the direct speech act function of the remark? Is the speaker saying, “my uncertainty is OK because now that I am a pilgrim it is consistent with the things that pilgrims love”? Or is she saying, “This is what I need to do to be a pilgrim”? Is loving a riddle the same as loving a “state of unknowing”? Riddles have answers, usually well defined answers. Maybe pilgrims are those who love the punchline, in which case the speaker is maybe expressing her antipathy from the pilgrim persona. You could be more precise about what this tag (and others like it) are doing.
Ian -
DeleteThank you for the thought-provoking reply!
Thanks for drawing my attention to the pacing of my writing. I know I have a tendency to assume too much from my reader and to not be thorough in my explanations. I have a tendency to either self-edit or to try to explicate incompletely/vaguely, which is why my writing, especially this kind of word-thought vomit, is often filled with random mid-sentence fragments or interjections. When writing in a more formal setting, I will definitely keep in mind being thorough and to slow down.
And wow! I definitely did not pick apart the details like that. Reading your work here has reminded me to really slow down and be methodical. So many little things require deconstructing, I am often quick to jump to big ideas and gloss over the little things or particularities.
Regarding the idea of the pilgrim loving a good riddle: I take this first section as a framing point for the search for meaning. Emphasis on the search (maybe.) Riddles do have answers (most of them, anyway), but the fun of the riddle is navigating its clues (explicit and implicit) and finding its "truth." The section immediately after this ends with the tag, “Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. On the road you can think forward, you can think back, you can make a list to remember to tell those at home.” (129) A state of searching for truth (an answer? I’ll have to think more on if there is any clear answer, but while riddles have answers they are not “facts.” I think Carson is a writer who understands the difference between “fact” and “truth”, and truth is not necessarily one-dimensional or objective) *is* different than a state of unknowing, so I may have to do some mental/language reconstruction. * Maybe my parenthetical is itself a statement against loving the punchline.
As for the comment as a framing of her understanding of being a pilgrim… I immediately think of the time she adopts the mode of the pilgrim as a way to disguise herself. The quote—“I am a pilgrim (not a novelist)”—in footnote six allows her to degrade/avoid her own analysis of a situation. By adopting the role of the pilgrim she does not have to be her, it is a play mask. She is allowed to retreat from definitiveness—at least in that particular employment of the role.
The liminal identity of the pilgrim (as a pilgrim is necessarily not a permanent role, but one that exists within a timeframe) is both a challenge to and a retreat from herself, depending on the context. She goes on this journey under the advice, “How can you see your life unless you leave it?” (122) This frames her journey as one of self-reflection and asks her to look at and into herself. She then sees herself and the role of the pilgrim (maybe?) as someone who is observing and reflecting on his or her own life and self.
Despite this long answer, I am not ready to yet say for sure what kind of definition she creates for the pilgrim and how she views herself within/interacting with that role. I have spent a good portion of two hours sitting here and thinking about your question, though, so I do have thoughts. I just don’t know where they lead yet or how to construct them into sentences.
*A quote I will have to return to before this comment becomes a blog post of its own is “Since ancient times pilgrimages have been conducted from place to place, in the belief that a question can travel into an answer as water into thirst.” (122)
I love this post! I really think that putting out something that you've actually *written*, rough though it may be, is a good exercise in catharsis at the very least--taking some of the research/writing/massive weight off of your shoulders. This reads really well, other than the few issues that you pointed out yourself. I really appreciate Ian's comments as well, because those are going to be crucial in the actual working out of your ideas and the finessing of your final paper. I think my only concern is this-- obviously the reader of your paper, whoever it may be, would benefit from reading Carson's book. Do you think that it will be so beneficial that it will be *necessary* for them to have read Carson to fully understand your paper? I say this only because I know that personally from what I've read that you've written and from what you've told me about the book (mixed with passages that you've read me) I'm absolutely dying to read it, and I think your readers may be too. Be that as it may, I suppose the only people reading our types of paper are those who are already heavily invested in our individual fields of research. Just a thought!
ReplyDeleteYay, I'm glad that you liked it! As to address your concern, I will try to make my paper as accessible as I can. I think there will be time and place when I am writing to have a more thorough description of what is actually happening in the text, but I will also try to do that more as I am constructing these blog posts. Thanks for drawing my awareness to this problem!
DeleteI have been working on my own understanding of Plainwater since reading it last week. It will surely take me some time (and more readings of it) to begin to really flesh out its meaning to me. As a starting point though, I am struck by the absence in your analysis of any mention of the narrator's father and her relationship to him, even as he faces the transition into dementia and losing himself. In my reading (and you are far more familiar with this work than I am), the journey to Compostela and the fluidity in her identity (notably, including her gender identity) derive from the fraught relationship with a father who never seems satisfied with her (and a mother who cannot fulfill the empty emotional space). Her own liminality reads to me as a result of her failure to anchor (yes, I am intentionally using a water-based image) within a family, or to have a family that harbors her. And so she searches.
ReplyDeleteThese are my early ruminations on a complex book, but I thought I would share them in case you find them useful.