NYRSF #291
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With each generation, the women come closer to being able to cross the threshold into the fairy realm, or even to exist in both worlds. In an echo of Daily Alice’s moment of awareness that she herself is liminal and no longer needs to cross any boundaries, Nora thinks about more recent generations than hers, seeming to move farther from the world of fairy but actually moving closer to it, who have “only ceased to search or bother themselves about it because they felt fewer and fewer distinctions between themselves and it” (257).
After Violet decides that they all must forget what they know about their Tale (123–124), both men and women suffer the burden of the women’s secrecy as the men grow more baffled and the women grow more oracular. Before as well as after that, however, the main price the women pay for their bimodal understanding is that their experience is ineffable. As an old woman, Violet talks to her son, August, about the fairies, then realizes that what she said was not true or is true only in a conditional sense (104–107). The utter inexplicability of the fairies, their status that confounds the categories on which our language depends, is clear when she decides “she ought to say what she knew.” She writes two statements that are, if not contradictory, at least paradoxical: “they mean no good to us” and “they mean us no harm either.” Then she writes a sentence in religious language—“they are made not born”—and decides it can work as well with the two terms reversed. Finally, she crushes the page of writing (106–108). The world of the fairies is one that confounds logic and perhaps language itself. To use a structuralist paradigm, if words that take their definitions from a system in which they are opposed to each other are just as valid when each is used in the other’s role—the opposites “born” and “made” become indistinguishable—then there is no difference and no meaning. At least Violet knows she is writing nonsense, or at least no sense that can be brought across the borders of the world of fairy into our world.
A few men in the novel do accomplish something like an understanding that encompasses both worlds, including Dr. Bramble and John Drinkwater, respectively Violet’s father and husband. However, they persistently work to wrangle the experience of the other world into words, and the price they pay is to lose accuracy about it. In a kind of literary tricksterism that looks forward to Crowley’s Ægypt books, the theosophical lectures by Bramble and the quotes from John Drinkwater’s ever-expanding, ever-odder book, Architecture of Country Houses, are our main sources of information about the fairies—and they are unreliable, though also the best that anyone is going to get. Even Dr. Bramble is vaguely aware of this when he states that the powers or spirits that were written about by Paracelsus—by implication, the fairies also—“are not quite material—whatever that means or meant” (42). He is unable to break away from dichotomies and understand that which is both material/immaterial and yet neither; however, he persists in speaking about it.5 Auberon Drinkwater’s Darwin-inspired theory of fairies is given even less importance (80–81), though it may be equally true and false, like anything written about the fairies.
Finally, two of the most liminal figures in the book literally move between our world and that of the fairies and exhibit a dual or multiplex nature.
Grandfather Trout is an inherently liminal figure, neither man nor fish but both, like the fish footman from Through the Looking Glass that he can almost, but not quite, remember (see Ansley 177–178). His main purpose is to carry messages—again, like the fish footman—from the fairies. His very being would be forbidden by strict dichotomies, his nature betwixt-and-between; but also, living in both worlds, he can bring information from one to the other with a minimum of garbling.
Grandfather Trout was once August Drinkwater, though by the time of Smoky and Daily Alice, little of that humanity remains. When August Drinkwater takes a hiatus from his staunch modernist practicality (101–102), represented iconically by his love for the automobile (100), to contact the fairies for permission to build a filling station, the state of mind he needs is achieved by an act of will, as is Smoky’s general attitude; but it is more fully betwixt-and-between normal modes of thought. If Smoky straddles the dichotomy of belief and skepticism, August holds the distinction temporarily at bay and thinks between them. While fishing,
He was trying, without exactly seeming to try, to see or notice something, without exactly seeing or noticing it, that would be a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages used to appear. . . . (108)
Like any fisherman, August wonders if he would do better elsewhere, and at that moment, when “his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here,” he catches a fish and talks to a kingfisher that is a messenger from the fairies (108–111). This encounter happens during sunset on a riverbank, a liminal time (between day and night) and place (between the river and the land) (111). His transformation into a fish develops out of a ruinous bargain that August makes that day. A scene in which Mrs. Underhill consults Grandfather Trout confirms that his pool is completely in the land of fairies, just as it is completely in the human world (324). However, the pool is not the threshold: that is the man-fish who is both and neither.
When everyone in the story is given the choice to step into the land of the fairies, August chooses to stay behind. We know, though we do not see it happen, that Margaret Juniper—the one woman who loved him but left him, now an old woman—will free him from his liminal state. Mrs. Underhill promises, “she will look down into this pool; she will be the one you’ve so long waited for, and she won’t be fooled by your shape; she’ll look down and speak the words that will free you.” Grandfather Trout asks if he may keep his magically mixed condition, and Mrs. Underhill seems shocked at the very idea (524). As Smoky realizes, making choices means giving up some of the potential that is permanent in the liminal state.
Perhaps the most multifariously liminal character in the novel is Lilac, Sophie’s daughter, who as a child is stolen and raised by the fairies (178–179). Evidence indicates that Lilac’s father is George Mouse, which, as Bill McClain states, makes Lilac also a bridge that joins the two branches of the family, City and country. However, that evidence, like so much in the novel, may or may not be conclusive. As prophesized by Lilac’s cousins and/or half-siblings, Lily and Tacey, Lilac “won’t stay long” but “it’s okay. She’ll come back” (175). Exactly, Lilac enacts the shamanic process: she leaves our world and then returns to bridge the two worlds. She is a human child, educated by the fairies in their world, though Mrs. Underhill is pleased that Lilac retains her human coloring and robustness (267). Lilac secretly visits her mother, Sophie, and feels human emotions which, having been “raised the way she has been,” she does not recognize and has no words for (269–271). When she is awakened, Lilac returns to the human world through the Gates of Horn (425), traditionally the threshold through which human sleepers receive true dreams. This real Lilac’s return to Edgewood makes it clear that she has been groomed as a messenger and guide, sent from fairy to Edgewood and Old Law Farm to be inserted at a critical time. There was a war in the fairyland, but it was to be resolved into peace, “and end the long sad time.” She brings this news but also a “summons,” to the Parliament that will end the war. “So you must come,” she tells those assembled at Edgewood; “You have to.” Then she visits Old Law Farm, tempting Auberon to go and giving direction to George Mouse (459–466).
The second, or false Lilac, left by the fairies in Lilac’s place, is the most frightening element in Little, Big, perhaps the one figure of pure horror. George Mouse, who destroys it with fireworks, balks at the idea of a changeling, but nonetheless knows it is wrong—he knows that it is not Lilac, of course, but also that it is something that is somehow elementally false and bad. His reaction is precisely that which Clements says accompanies encounters with interstitial creatures that challenge the boundaries of our categorizations: “I don’t know if I was crazy or not,” George says to Auberon Barnable. “All I knew was
that this thing was evil, I mean not evil evil”—because it seems vulnerable, even fragile—“But evil, I mean an awful evil thing to have in the world. All I could think of was: get rid of it.” The description of the changeling shows that it undermines dichotomies of young and old, male and female, innocent and knowing. (418–423).
One would think that two changeling Lilacs would be enough multiplication and enough liminality. However, the author turns the screw one more notch with the introduction of the third Lilac, Auberon Barnable’s imaginary childhood friend. She is not some manifestation of the real Lilac via fairy-magic; even Mrs. Underhill recognizes Auberon’s playmate as “imaginary Lilac” (267). Yet this imaginary Lilac acts independently of Auberon and shows many of the same characteristics as the human Lilac—who, however, is still in the world of fairies. It is this imaginary Lilac who meets Auberon in the park in which he practices the Art of Memory and who tells him—actually, it is phrased as a question—that it is time for him to go home to Edgewood (385, 424).
While figures like Grandfather Trout and Lilac seem more traditional to the genre than Daily Alice (Dame Kind) or Ariel Hawksquill, they are more innovative than is immediately apparent. Each repeatedly poses questions about our relationship to the supernatural, the relationship between the supernatural and imagination, and the ways in which fantasy and transformation are part of human nature. These characters’ liminal nature also precludes an easy dismissal of them as “just fantasy.” We cannot categorize them as totally alien from our experience as we can, for example, most dragons or ogre-equivalents in most fantasy novels. They more clearly exist on a continuum with the other characters and perhaps with ourselves.
Conclusion: Fantasy, Change, and Creation
John Crowley states in a 1994 interview, “One of the reasons you write fiction is because you can create your own world. You need that constant sense of possibility. If you don’t have that sense of possibility in your own life, don’t even feel a craving for that kind of possibility and change, it makes it hard to write” (4). Why someone with this opinion would be drawn to fiction with liminal concerns seems clear. First, the liminal state, with its breaking of old associations and even questioning of received categories of thought, is highly creative, perhaps containing the essence of creativity. Moreover, the process of writing a book is in some ways liminal, itself a transformative seclusion: while some worlds may be made immediately, with no pause—“Fiat lux!”—in general, lengthy processes of change and refashioning are essential to the act of creation, of magical creation within a fantastic text, or of the creation of the text itself.
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Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in Yonkers, New York with her two husbands and eight rats. A version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.
Works Cited
Ansley, William H. “Little, Big Girl: The Influence of the Alice Books and Other Works of Lewis Carroll on John Crowley’s Novel Little, Big, or, The Fairies’ Parliament.” In Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley ed. Alice Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, Cosmos Books, 2003.
Attebery, Brian. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Clements, William M. “Interstitiality in Contemporary Legends.” Contemporary Legend, 1, 81-91.
——. “The Interstitial Ogre: The Structure of Horror in Expressive Culture.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 86 (1).
Crowley, John. Little, Big. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Disch, Thomas. “Best and Biggest.” In Snake’s-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, ed. Alice Turner and Michael Andre-Driussi, Cosmos Books, 2003.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
Ellis, Larry. “Trickster: Shaman of the Liminal.” Studies in American Indian Literatures Series 2, v, 5, n. 4 (Winter 1993).
Foreman, Brendan. “John Crowley, Little, Big.”
Gateway Press, pages for books, journal, and an international conference on liminality,
Gordon, Joan. “Recombinant Post-genre Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies #91 (v. 30, part 3) November 2003.
Hamer, Naomi. “The City as a Liminal Site in Children’s Literature: Enchanted Realism with an Urban Twist.” The Mentor 2 January 2003 (v. 7, n. 1).
Hynes, James. “Genre Trouble: What stands between John Crowley and a serious literary reputation?” Boston Review, Dec 2000/Jan 2001.
Interstitial Arts Foundation, mission statement,
“John Crowley: The Writing on the Wall” (interview). Locus #398 (v. 32, n. 3) March 1994, 4.
Liminality in the Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Exchange, University of Utah, 2004 program.
McClain, Bill. “Little, Big by John Crowley.”
Palmer, Richard E. “The Liminality of Hermes and the Meaning of Hermeneutics.”
Purcell, Rosamond. Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997.
Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
——. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1967.
——. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969). New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.
van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Originally published 1909.
And special thanks to George P. Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal (Xlibris, 2001) without whom this paper would never have happened.
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Notes
1. For postmodernists such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, the challenge to dichotomies is much more a source of freedom and potential. More traditionally Western culture has sought to totally efface the challenge posed by liminality, as seen in the surgical taming of the liminal in terms of gender (hermaphrodites and other intersexed people) or body/identity boundaries (conjoined twins). For both the awe-full and the awful affect of the liminal, see Clements.
“Uncanny” is meant in Freud’s sense, but not here attributed to Freud’s explanation that it is based in recollection. Rather, the liminal state can make everyday things strange, even frightening—perhaps a combination of Freud’s use of the Term and Todorov’s in The Fantastic. “Abject” is meant as in Julia Kristeva’s work, that which we wish to push away from us but cannot actually exclude; this idea has some similarities to the anthropological concept of taboo, in that the taboo is based in, and reinforces, a status of extreme importance even as it prohibits something.
2. Taking another mythic template, Old Law Farm and the park could represent the underworld into which Auberon symbolically travels, bringing back gifts in the manner of a shaman. His guides into and out of each place are psychopomps, and the locks are the inevitable division between life and death that few may cross. This interpretation also is supported by the Winged Messenger Service in the novel and its reference to Hermes.
3. The range of sexuality in Little, Big deserves a study of its own—reaching far beyond, but definitely including, the relationship(s) among Daily Alice, Smoky, and Sophie. Bill McClain suggests that Smoky may be drawn to Sophie in part because he has taken the gift of Daily Alice’s childhood, which includes sex with Sophie. This is certainly possible,
though one cause is also, certainly, that there are, as Daily Alice says, “So few of us, . . . so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up” (168).
4. Much could be written about homeless people as liminal figures in a liminal state. They are marginalized, of course, which is linked to liminality though far from identical. Many stay, when they do stay anywhere, in vestibules, under stairs or on stair landings, on subways constantly traveling between locations, or literally in doorways. Megan Lindholm also mines this vein in Wizard of the Pigeons. See Attebery, 140.
5. Both Nora’s cards and Drinkwater’s Architecture of Country Houses present a wonderful reversal of the usual fantasy trope of a book that, once found, clearly explains all the supernatural goings on—shelves and shelves of them from H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon through the eponymous book in Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard? One of my favorite noncliché examples is the index to the town newspaper, with its hidden truths, both supernatural and not, about the town, in Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon. (An entry under “embezzlement” might lead to articles about the awarding of a contract to build something for the town, the purchase of a fancy new home by a town official, and the discovery that the new building was cheaply made despite the price.) Straub’s innovation is to make the “book” emergent and thus opaque in one way; Crowley’s is to make both books possibly unreliable, certainly baffling, all in all perhaps more trouble than they are worth.