Following up last month’s essay on fairies, I’m delving into liminality this time. Liminal spaces are kinda the rage these days, as evidenced by this subreddit and the myriad articles being written about the concept. The kinds of liminal spaces that show up on Reddit are the real-world kind, the hallways and abandoned empty spaces of a decaying, late-Capitalist society. If I had to pick my favorite of these types of liminal spaces, I would choose that moment in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive when the diner guy tells his friend about his nightmare and then they both go back behind the diner and the nightmare becomes real (warning: this scene is scary).
As they walk around the building, heading down the metal stairs toward the empty blank space where the garbage dumpsters are, we have this feeling of liminality, the experience of being in this between place — on this threshold — that feels displaced from the ordinary world. The liminal space is not the otherworld; it is the go-between, the doorway or passage. What’s particularly eerie about this liminal space is that its seeming ordinary-ness is what makes it disturbing; we are waiting for the nightmare to emerge. That waiting, that sense of possibility, is what gives these liminal spaces power. They feel out of time and out of place; we feel that they can transport us to something beyond where we came from. If you’ve ever watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, just think of all those hallways in the hotel as Danny is navigating them on his tricycle: those are liminal spaces.
One thing I’ve noticed is that so much of my own fiction (and other fantasy in general) hinges on liminality. All three of my current WIP (works in progress) — Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, Avalon Summer, and The Gates to Illvelion — have liminal spaces and liminality at their core. This is due in large part to how influential fairy tales are to my art. As the hosts of Fear of a Black Dragon point out in their episode reviewing Gavin Norman’s Winter’s Daughter, fairy tales often take us to liminal spaces: the in-between spaces, the borders between our world and Faerie. Traditionally, these fairy tale liminal spaces are things like waterways, forests, or mounds, i.e.: transitional spaces, borders, passageways. We stand along the edge of a stream and catch glimpses of the land of the dead, or we go hunting in the forest and find our way to Annwyvn, or we sit beside a huge mound in the Irish countryside and have dreams of the sidhe. When humans pass through these spaces, they find themselves facing a rite of passage or a crucible that will alter them in some way. This is why children are often the protagonists of fairy tales: they must face the dangers of the forest and either grow up or die.
As Richard Rohr points out, “All transformation takes place here.” Limen is Latin for “threshold,” and liminal spaces are these doorways or passages to transformation. In both The Gates to Illvelion and Avalon Summer, I use the same image: a pair of wrought-iron gates standing in the midst of a forest, gates connected to nothing, leading to nowhere. This image is meant to evoke that strange feeling of liminality, of ambiguity and a sense of possibility mixed with an out-of-time and out-of-space experience. I don’t really know where this image came from or why I latched onto it, but I wanted to tell parallel stories in which these gates figured prominently. In Avalon Summer — a realistic story about a young girl spending the summer with her grandparents — she finds these gates while exploring a local woods. She believes they guard the way to a magical Arthurian Avalon. In The Gates to Illvelion, the story is set in a fantasy secondary world, and the gates guard the realm of a secretive and magical queen. In both novellas, however, the gates are a threshold to transformation: those who pass through them will transition from innocence to experience, from powerless child to mature young adult. What I hope makes it all the more eerie is that Sarah, my protagonist from Avalon Summer, is reading a book called The Gates to Illvelion (yes, the other book I’m writing), and in the book, she reads about the same gates that she has seen in the woods herself.
One of the reasons I love fantasy is because it has the ability to make these liminal spaces literal and not just figurative. The rite of passage is a literal passage: a doorway, a gate, a wood between the worlds. There is power in these physical spaces, power to transport and transform. I am a bit obsessed with transformation as a storytelling device: I love shapeshifting magic or potions that transform people into other things. The liminal space is a place in which tranformation can happen as well, and I think so much of fantasy’s power as a genre lies in the way it can imbue spaces with this transformative power. We talk about fantasy (and sci-fi) as this great “world-building” genre, but it’s not just the amount of details in the world that attracts us; I think it’s the possibility of finding liminal spaces within the world that enchants us as well.
What are your favorite liminal spaces in fiction? In real life? What are those experiences of being “betwixt and between” that have stuck in your memory, both real and imagined?
As I’ve mentioned before, there are times when I need to use my newsletter for promotion. Today is one of those times.
In keeping with my thoughts on liminality, fairy tales, and the like, I’m participating in the “Once Upon a Time: Fantasy and SciFi Giveaway” happening this month. There are dozens of free books available if you click the link below, all of them centered around fairy tales, myths, or legends in one form or another (which is why my own Merlin novel, The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, is among the bunch).
If you like that sort of thing (which I do!), then please take a look and download some free books. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of liminal spaces in the pages of these stories!
And if you know anyone who might enjoy some free books, please share this post with them!
Thank you, as always, for reading!