Death, Love and Liminality in the Fiction of Ali Smith
The morbid marriage of love and death is not an original topic to postmodernist writing or to Scottish literature. Diverse forms of literature from Greek myth to Shakespearian tragedies have hosted stories of tragic love and romantic deaths, with varying nuances of darkness and romance. Nonetheless, this paper will attempt to establish a link between Ali Smith’s writing, postmodernist fiction and Scottish fantasy, while looking at the topic of love and death in conjunction with the concept of liminality. Liminality (from the Latin limen: limit) is an intermediate state, it refers to passage rituals and to existence between borders. Stories of love and death often suggest the abrupt interruption of the former because of the sudden occurrence of the latter. Sometimes, however, love and death share the same intermediate dimension between life and afterlife: the liminal stage. As this paper will stress, Smith’s writing deals with love and death in the context of liminality. Characters’ identities fluctuate and sometimes crumble altogether. Rational boundaries of time and space lose coherence. Stories develop in the uncanny limbo left after a death or some other form of disappearance. It is in this liminal dimension that love and death are sinisterly married in Smith’s work.
When asked to comment on the love and death motif in her stories, Smith admitted that the two are closely related. In her words:
Of course love and death are linked, from the French notion of orgasmic small death through the metaphysical poets all the way to something Winterson sums up in the perfect opening sentence, in Written on the Body: ‘why is the measure of love loss?’ (Germanà, p.370)
In Smith’s fiction, ‘petite mort’ is a more complex motif than the French metaphor for sexual climax. In her stories the trope of love and death does not refer only to the erotic sphere of love. In fact, because of its close relationship to liminality, the traditional topic acquires a more metaphysical twist throughout Smith’s fiction. The coexistence of love and death questions the boundaries between life and death, overcomes the threshold of the physical world to reach beyond this limit, and explores all the possibilities in between. In fact, death often seems to be a paradoxical vehicle through which life and love are manifested and asserted. The notion that death may overcome the borders between life and afterlife suggests a deeper analysis of the concept of liminality.
Kinnell, Galway. “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Portable 10th ed. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2011. 490-491. Print.
In Alistair McLeod’s collection of short stories the Lost Salt Gift of Blood; death seems to be a constant companion. Death is important and perhaps even symbolic in this collection of short stories. It is important because it has the power to affect people and relationships, invokes freedom and even predetermines ones future, through the death of animal’s people and the impending death of others.
... seeing and feeling it’s renewed sense of spring due to all the work she has done, she was not renewed, there she lies died and reader’s find the child basking in her last act of domestication. “Look, Mommy is sleeping, said the boy. She’s tired from doing all out things again. He dawdled in a stream of the last sun for that day and watched his father roll tenderly back her eyelids, lay his ear softly to her breast, test the delicate bones of her wrist. The father put down his face into her fresh-washed hair” (Meyer 43). They both choose death for the life style that they could no longer endure. They both could not look forward to another day leading the life they did not desire and felt that they could not change. The duration of their lifestyles was so pain-staking long and routine they could only seek the option death for their ultimate change of lifestyle.
... squid farm where and the waste water from poultry farm nearby for laboratory testing and isolation of Salmonella with respective bacteriophage. After we get the positive result, we continue our activity by characterization of bacteriophage. This activity is expected to take about 2 month since we need to do several repeating processes including culturing the bacteriophage, staining and observing under microscope. For the next step, we will take about 3 months for studying the biocontrol effect of bacteriophage toward Salmonella. This period is the longest among the activities that we will do because this activity involving try and error method where we may get negative result due to error during the past procedure. Lastly, we will analyze our result for about 2 months involving the data taken throughout our research so that it will compatible with our objectives.
In the free verse poem "When death comes" by Mary Oliver, the speaker contemplates what the inevitability of what death means to humans. Structurally, the poem bears no rhyme scheme as it depicts the free thought of the speaker. The voice of the speaker in this poem resonates with curiosity and the idea of life after death. Through the utilization of rhetorical devices such as repetition, alliteration, symbolism, and personification, the reader will come to understand that underlying tone that death is imminent regardless of how one 's life is spent. Within the poem, the source of tension resides in the constant internal struggle to oust the cycle of life and death. In some instances, Oliver’s curiosity and acceptance of death allows her to
People say the mind is a very complex thing. The mind gives people different interpretations of events and situations. A person state of mind can lead to a death of another person. As we all know death is all around us in movies, plays, and stories. The best stories that survive throughout time involve death in one form or another. For example, William Shakespeare is considered as one of the greatest writers in literary history known for having written a lot of stories concerning death like Macbeth or Julius Caesar. The topic of death in stories keeps people intrigued and on the edge of their seats. Edgar Allan Poe wrote two compelling stories that deal with death “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven.” In “The
In the short story, “The Story of an Hour,” author Kate Chopin presents the character of Mrs. Louis Mallard. She is an unhappy woman trapped in her discontented marriage. Unable to assert herself or extricate herself from the relationship, she endures it. The news of the presumed death of her husband comes as a great relief to her, and for a brief moment she experiences the joys of a liberated life from the repressed relationship with her husband. The relief, however, is short lived. The shock of seeing him alive is too much for her bear and she dies. The meaning of life and death take on opposite meaning for Mrs. Mallard in her marriage because she lacked the courage to stand up for herself.
Love plays an important role in most physical and emotional relationships. Love is a word that can prove difficult to define or even compare to other emotions. This is due to the diversity of meaning and the complexity of the emotion itself. Everyone has been in love at least once before and has gotten a taste of all the good and bad things that come with it. Christina Rossetti’s “Song” presents some of the good parts of love while Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed” shows us some of the bad parts of love. Larkin’s poem presents a failing relationship where communication has failed between a couple and things are getting more and more difficult. Rossetti’s poem presents a wholly different view on love; it is told from the viewpoint of someone talking to his or her lover about what said lover should do after the speaker dies. The love between them seems better, more powerful and good. The two poems also present wholly different attitudes towards “The End,” whether that is the end of life or the end of the relationship. Larkin presents the end as something dark and sad, difficult to cope with. Rossetti, on the other hand, talks about the end as just another beginning, a chance to start over in a new world. Finally, the two poems represent remembrance in different ways. Larkin’s presents memory as something extremely important while Rossetti implies that it does not matter whether we remember or not.
Although, both the writers have different intentions, they associate death with some aspects of nature. There is a common mechanics ...
The human body requires the intake of food in order to function properly. The foods that we decide to eat has an effect on the ability to use are mind, are strength, and even how prone we are to getting sick or hurt. Eating to much of the wrong foods, with little or no exercise can cause the silent but deadly epidemic of obesity in children and in teens. In the past, obesity was just known as a condition that only affected adults. In this generation the youths are becoming more prone to obesity. In 1995 an average of 18 million children all around the world was categorized as being overweight (Rabbitt, Aifric, and Imelda Coyne 731). In a Childhood Obesity Interventions article it says that 17% (12.5 million) of children in the United States is considered to be obese (Rabbitt, Aifric, and Imelda Coyne 731). This outrageous number of overweight children in the world is almost tripled in 2010, where 43 million children under 5 are considered to be overweight (Rabbitt, Aifric, and Imelda Coyne 731). Another staggering statistic is more than 60% percent of the children that are classified as overweight before they reach puberty, will be overweight as they become adults (Rabbitt, Aifric, and Imelda Coyne 731). This leads us to the most stifling fact of there being 2.8 million people in the world that die from being overweight or obese each year (Rabbitt, Aifric, and Imelda Coyne 731). These shocking statistics show how dangerous obesity really is, and should urge everyone to fight against this epidemic.
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