24 - Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison

Summary

SPATIALITY HAS BECOME increasingly important to modernist studies (as to literary studies more broadly), but space in terms of religious practice is under-researched in the field. This chapter considers the intersection of liminal spaces and ritual practices in a diverse body of texts from Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison. Following an increasing interest in ideas of the everyday within modernist studies, this chapter explores how these writers illustrate the ways ritual is not tied to transcendence, but known in relation to familiar places and experience. Kathleen Stewart describes the practices, places and connections of daily life as refrains that allow us to live, contributing to the worlding of the everyday. Although Stewart does not class her ‘refrains’ as rituals, their repetitive, deliberate nature aligns them with ritual. Ritual allows the accumulation of affect to inhere in particular places and practices.

Goodison, Hulme and Mitchison have different religious positionings themselves, but all engage with religious tropes and traditions in their work. The chapter engages with a variety of ritual modes, from Mitchison’s imagined reconstruction of ancient history to Hulme’s evocation of Māori traditions, to Goodison’s invocations of Jamaican syncretism. Rivers, shorelines, mountains and the built environment become places for ritualised encounters that speak to the intersection of transcendence and immanence, of alterity and recognition that forms the particular modes of spirituality in this work. These writers themselves have somewhat liminal positions in relationship to modernist studies, although all of them have engaged with the stylistic and genre innovations associated with literary modernism. Their work contributes to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the workings of religion in modernism. This chapter, then, is in dialogue with other work in the field that attends to cross-cultural readings of spiritual traditions, as called for in Susan Stanford Friedman’s invitation to ‘juxtapos[e] writers from different parts of the world who emerged out of different religious cultures in the context of larger social and political conditions’.

Placed Ritual

In his book More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (2011), Manuel A. Vasquez traces the turn to materiality in the study of religion, focusing on embodiment, practice and emplacement.