ISLT 3                       
MAPPING THE THRESHOLD
24-25 de Marzo de 2003

Most accounts of the threshold focus on what it does (provide exit from or access to spaces) or where it lies (in adjacency to or between other spaces). There is a real danger of losing sight of the threshold; the slipperiness of the concept favours explanations that tend to see the spaces around it rather than the threshold itself. Thus few theories, if any, attempt to describe the essential properties of the limen or go beyond those proposed by the most influential theorists of the limen, anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner. For the former, rites of passage are defined by three phases: a breaking away from a situation or circumstance; a transitional or liminal stage; and incorporation to a new status. Van Gennep uses the terms ‘preliminal, liminal, and postliminal’ to describe the three phases. Turner goes a modest step further by describing the liminal in a rite of passage as ‘the mid-point of transition of a status-sequence between two positions’.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Van Gennep and Turner’s formulations approximate a narrative sequential arrangement comprising a beginning, a middle and an end. Genette is also instructive in this context, conceptualizing narrative as a practice which engages the sequential and the chronological, a particular ordering of events that necessarily unfolds over time. One way, therefore, of mapping the threshold might be to adopt the terms of narrative sequencing. This might in turn explain the singular aptness of the limen as an analytical tool for explicating text—in particular, narrative text.
That time figures in our conceptualization of the limen echoes an observation made by Tony Lopez at the inaugural seminar A Place That Is Not A Place, where he proposed that for the limen to be theoretically relevant it should be historically located. Current African American literary criticism, crucially influenced by Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic, illustrates Lopez’s argument. Simply put, the Black Atlantic represents a vast geographic as well as metaphoric space bordered by Africa, Europe and the Americas, including the Caribbean. It is the space forcibly displaced Africans had to traverse in order to reach the New World, there to take up their lives (if they survived the notorious Middle Passage at all) as human beings transformed into chattel slaves. Never has the ‘mid-point of a transition of a status-sequence’ produced such hellish consequences for the individual.  Following Lopez, this specific understanding of the Atlantic Ocean makes sense only if we read it against the historical circumstance of the slave trade.

Thus it would seem that another property of the threshold or limen is its temporal specificity: it is a product of, and functions in a certain way at a given historical moment. It follows that if we shift the chronological vantage point, the threshold will function and therefore mean differently. The Black Atlantic acquires a significantly different set of connotations if critiqued from the historical perspective of, say, the transatlantic passage undertaken by numerous African Americans to join Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers fighting in support of loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
Sequence, or position, together with historical moment and circumstance—we are talking of space and time—therefore appear to be significant, not to say essential elements to consider when mapping the properties of the limen. No doubt there are more, possibly related to spatial and temporal specificity. Returning to the Black Atlantic, we are able to make sense of it as a metaphoric threshold only if space and time strike some sort of relationship, if they are configured through a third element. That third element could conceivably be movement or transition, strongly suggested by all formulations of the limen, in that the very positioning of the threshold connotes an intermediate and communicating space between one space and another, or a prior and a latter space.
But the geography of the threshold is not exhausted by its adjacent spaces or prior and subsequent time periods: for (in keeping with the persistent spatial metaphor which is a hallmark of its study) the threshold itself constitutes a territory, and the peculiarities of this territory differ in crucial ways from those of normal space. Surely the fact that it is ‘a place that is not a place’ endows it with traits of a paradoxical or contradictory or ambivalent or ambiguous nature. And, just as surely, action and motion on or across the threshold evince characteristics not exhibited by ‘normal’ motion. Speakers at this third seminar were invited to concentrate on delineating the map and mechanics of the limen—as well as, to be sure, their possible significance.