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.
[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.
[10] Bell, Ritual,
101.
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