Thresholds and Boundaries

Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1530)

Lynn F. Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351608732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early 'early modern' period -- has been much less fully investigated. Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550) addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures), and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts). Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God—and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning. The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

Part I

Introduction

1 Liminality, thresholds and boundaries

The term “liminality” is not used in everyday conversation. But the term “threshold” – and its conception as the sill of a doorway, the entrance to a building or the point of entering or beginning – is a quite common and not particularly obscure word.¹ You can buy “door thresholds” at Home Depot and the tradition of carrying the bride “over the threshold” is still often observed by newly married couples.² So too, the word “boundary” and its meaning as a border or limit is a very familiar one. We watch sports such as tennis, basketball and soccer in which various rules govern balls that go “out of bounds” – that is, outside the designated borders or limits established by the lines on the playing surface. Land surveyors offer their services to home owners in specifying the exact locations of the boundaries of their land. The term “liminality” derives from the Latin limen, which means threshold; and since the door or portal that forms a threshold also marks a boundary – especially when it is closed – the notion of a limen also incorporates the idea of borders and limits.³ So while “liminality” is a technical term – with a large body of scholarly literature exploring its meaning and implications in quite sophisticated, theoretical ways – the term’s links to the notions of the threshold and the boundary mean that liminality is rooted in very basic human experiences.

Liminality and anthropology

Arnold van Gennep, an anthropologist, is credited with having invented the term “liminality” in his 1909 book, Les Rites de passage. In this book, van Gennep focused on identifying and characterizing rituals that “enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined” – social transitions that included, for example, birth, social puberty, marriage, parenthood, advancement to a higher class and death.⁴ Van Gennep argued that these rites of social transition, which he called “rites of passage,” all had a similar tripartite structure: (1) preliminal rites, or rites of separation from the previous world, (2) liminal (or threshold rites), which take place during the transitional stage and (3) postliminal rites, or ceremonies of incorporation, in which the person is reintegrated into society in his or her new status.⁵ A liminal stage is necessary, van Gennep argued, because the gap between two states of being, or two different social positions, is so great that one cannot pass from one to another without an intermediate stage;⁶ indeed, on van Gennep’s view, it is the process of “passing through several states and traversing several boundaries” that allows the individual undergoing a rite of passage to be changed.⁷ Van Gennep noted that in many societies the passage from one social position to another is identified with a territorial passage and is often ritually expressed by passage through a door or portal.⁸ Hence he used the term “liminal” for the transitional period and the transitional rites. Van Gennep saw the door (or threshold) as a key boundary between the foreign and the domestic, and between the profane and the sacred. For van Gennep, liminal rites formed a critical element within rites of passage because “to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.”⁹

Van Gennep’s analysis of rites of passage and, in particular, the liminal phase of rites of passage had little scholarly impact until these ideas were probed and developed in the work of another anthropologist, Victor Turner.¹⁰ Turner’s paper, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” which he first published in 1964, and then incorporated into his 1967 book, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, directly addressed and developed van Gennep’s ideas. Turner saw the liminal period as one in which the person undergoing a rite of passage is in a condition of ambiguity or paradox – that is, he or she is at the same time “no longer classified” and “not yet classified” – and hence all the customary social categories are in a state of confusion.¹¹ To some degree Turner viewed this state of social ambiguity as containing elements of danger, pollution and ritual uncleanness, as Mary Douglas argued.¹² But he was especially concerned with the more positive elements of the liminal condition, particularly the status leveling and comradeship that he observed among the Ndembu people of northwestern Zambia who were undergoing rites of passage.¹³ Turner would come to call this kind of comradeship “communitas.”

Turner’s later works, especially The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) and Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974), continued to analyze the state and role of liminality, with particular emphasis on how the unstructured status of the “liminar” (the person experiencing a liminal stage in the process of transition) results in the equality of communitas. Turner ended up seeing liminality as a state or condition that was not limited to rites of passage, as van Gennep had defined it, but one that could arise at any time – both within and outside of ritual practices – whenever people were in a condition that could be characterized as “betwixt and between.”¹⁴ Hence the term “liminality” came to apply both to a transitional stage of ritual and to an ambiguous state of a person either within or outside of such a ritual.¹⁵ Though he continued to recognize how orderly societies could view the antistructured nature of liminality as a danger to existing social structures – and was aware of how liminality could result in anarchy and violence¹⁶ – Turner tended to focus on how liminality could suggest new possibilities and embody sacred conditions, and on how liminality’s character of antistructure allowed societies to grow.¹⁷ In other writings Turner argued that liminality provided a realm for the ludic and the grotesque, and that pilgrimage was a major mode of liminality for the laity in nontribal cultures¹⁸ – though Turner felt that the voluntary nature of liminal activities in the West might be better termed “liminoid” or “quasi-liminal” to distinguish it from van Gennep’s use of the term “liminal” in relation to established, nonvoluntary rites of passage.¹⁹ Turner’s later works significantly expanded the notion of liminality to apply not just to processes of individual change but to processes of cultural change as well.²⁰ Indeed Turner saw the concept of liminality as a pebble, which he had tossed speculatively into a pool of anthropological data and which had then spread rings throughout his work and thought, thereby spreading the concept over wider and wider ranges of application.²¹

Needless to say, Turner’s work on liminality, produced largely in the 1960s and 70s, has not escaped scholarly criticism. Most frequently, scholars have questioned Turner’s claims that the liminal phase of rituals constitutes a break from established social structures; instead many believe that rituals in fact constitute continued expressions of social hierarchies.²² Another major objection, raised by Caroline Bynum, is that Turner’s model of liminality and ritual change applies more to men than to women, since women’s religious experiences rarely involve the significant changes in status or the role reversals that Turner associates with liminality.²³ Nevertheless Turner’s development and articulation of van Gennep’s idea of liminality as a state of being “betwixt and between” and as a phase within ritual and extraritual transitions has been enormously influential not just within anthropology, but within a variety of other fields, especially sociology and, more recently, history.²⁴ In addition, the concept of liminality has been extremely valuable within analyses of different forms of artistic expression.

Liminality in literature and art

Some of Turner’s ideas dovetail with modes of interpreting literature developed (independently) by Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous literary critic.²⁵ Bakhtin’s study of literary chronotypes (i.e., temporal and spatial categories within a text) included sustained emphasis on the threshold chronotype, which Bakhtin agues is always metaphorical and symbolic, marking moments of crisis and transition, such as falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies and decisions.²⁶ Bakhtin emphasized how threshold spaces (which, using Turner’s terminology, could also be called liminal spaces) – such as staircases, front halls and corridors – were the site of major turning points for the soul of the characters in Dostoevsky’s writings.²⁷ Moreover, like Turner, Bakhtin was interested not just in the crisis aspect of the threshold but also in its connection to the ludic: Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais brought his attention to the theme of carnival and its embodiment of a utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance – what Turner would call communitas.²⁸ In these ways Bakhtin recognized in literature the same kinds of meanings associated with the threshold – both the rupture of the human condition and the equality that arises out of this – that Turner recognized in ritual and other social activities.

Indeed, once one becomes attentive to the role of the threshold – and the concepts of liminality associated with it – one can find thresholds, boundaries and liminality playing important roles in generating meaning in all sorts of art forms. So, for example, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Count Vronsky makes his first outright declaration of love to Anna as she stands at a doorway – a locale that marks this moment as the beginning of the path to ruin that inexorably guides Anna’s life once she begins her adulterous love affair.²⁹ So too, in the film T...