I just finished my modern British literature course thesis on female liminality (from the Latin limen, signifying “a threshold”) in the works of Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and A. S. Byatt. During the last three weeks, countless hours were spent applying the anthropological theories of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner to Carter’s revisionist fairy tales, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Possession, an extraordinary novel of romance and mystery that has ascended to the very top of my list of literary favorites.
It seems fitting, therefore, that I post a passage from Byatt’s intertextual tale “The Threshold,” written ostensibly by the heroine Christabel LaMotte, whose birthday I share, as well as so many thoughts of life and art, and of love…
There was not one way but many, all athwart each other like the cracks on a crazy jug, and he followed first one and then the other, choosing the straightest and stoniest and finding himself always under the hot-sun at another crossing just like the one he had just left. After a time he decided to go with the sun behind him always – at least this led to consistency of proceeding […]. So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction.
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“You may go no further this way,” said they, “for this is the edge of things, here, and beyond is another country. But you may choose, if you will, one of us to be your guide, and venture further. […] Choose now,” they said then, “and choose wisely, for extremes of bliss and misery stand in your choice.”
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And she drew him on, over and under the threshold of the standing stones, and his horse called out in alarm, but he stepped on unhearing. And although the stones seemed simple enough in the midst of the moor, which seemed vaguely to stretch on behind as it had before, he found it was no such thing, for beyond the lintel was a descending track, winding and winding, between banks of sweetly scented flowers he had never seen or dreamed of, blowing soft dust at him from their huge throats, and lit by a light neither of day nor of night, neither of sun nor of moon, neither bright nor shadowy, but the even perpetual unchanging light of that kingdom…
~ A. S. Byatt, from Possession (Vintage, 1990)
"Le Labyrinthe de Versailles," illustrating the entrance to the Labyrinth of Versailles and the statues of Aesop and Cupid, by Jacques Bailly (1675)
