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• Title: Images of Liminality in Book VI of the Aeneid (Critical Essay)
• Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Release Date : January 01, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 83 KB

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The concept of liminality in humanities scholarship was brought to the fore by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep (1873-1957) followed by anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983). Their focus has been on the association of "liminality" with a series of rites known as rites de passage: "rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age" (Turner, The Ritual 94). The set of rites are divided into the three phases of "separation," "transition," and "reincorporation," but given the importance of liminality, the notions have been re-labeled around that concept as "preliminal, liminal, and postliminal" (Turner, On the Edge 159). The individual, who has been separated from the masses to undergo these rites, is later reincorporated into the communitas, so to speak, reborn. One of the sources of fascination with liminality is that only a few elect have the capacity to withstand its high demands. Even in the case of the selected few, the individual undergoing the rites de passage has to manifest signs of readiness and maturity. Aeneas, for instance, has to overcome his fears and surmount many an obstacle before he becomes worthy of the rites of passage concretized in his journey to the Realm of the Dead. Only when he is officially "tried of Illiacis fate" (exercitat(us) Illiacis fatis) (The Aeneid V 725) does the spirit of his dead father, Anchises, summon him officially to the Underworld to witness the fate of the dead and the unfolding of the future of his race before his own earthly eyes. However, as I demonstrate in the article at hand, within the context of Book VI of The Aeneid, which abounds in images of marginality, the notion of liminality is not confined to heroic individuation and can also be linked to morphological and ontological beginnings and openings in the form of the presencing of new forms of being and marginal characters that fail to fall into any distinct category. Not only monstrous beings, but also heroes, in being endowed with capacities that exceed human limits, manifest signs of liminality. One might argue that liminality is embedded primarily in anthropology and has little to do with literature, however, the concept does embrace anthropocentric discourse as the epic genre, to which The Aeneid is believed to belong, by definition, has man, as heroic as he may be, at its centre. It is to be noted that Aeneas despite all his godlike qualities possesses enough foibles to render him a member of the human race. The concept of liminality is, in fact, present in a variety of forms in The Aeneid, an epic invested in geographical transitions of the Trojan people and the transformative odysseys of their hero, also the legendary founder of Rome, Aeneas. For one thing, Aeneas is a liminal figure in being connected with the world of the mortals and that of the gods, a characteristic which allows him to embark upon a katabasis, a journey to the Underworld. The term limen, meaning threshold in Latin, permeates various parts of the poem, although it does not herald an altogether new experience in all cases of its usage. Book VI of The Aeneid, in which Aeneas is initiated into the mysteries of the Underworld and the future of his race, abounds in diverse images of liminality. Given the hero's state of in-between-ness, as a half-divine mortal who embarks on a journey to the Land of the Dead, while he himself is alive, there remains little wonder as to why liminality is so conspicuously present in this section of the poem. Book VI of The Aeneid is not only significant in terms of delineating a Virgilian view of the mysteries of the universe in general, and the Afterlife in particular, but also in giving the heroic founder of Rome the quantum leap required to move towards the fated city of Latium, the site of the reborn Empire. Book VI of The Aeneid, which marks a watershed in the course of the epic's twelve books, signals both the rebirth of Aeneas as a hero ready to take on the hardy Latian

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