Resurveying DeLillo's "White Space on Map": Liminality and Communitas in Underworld

Abstract

Place is always being born. A landfill or abandoned nuclear test site may appear to be at ecological end of line, but both are filled with latent possibilities for sustainability and transcendent function. Contemporary literary critics are finding ways to re-envision extant post-ecological structures not merely as sites or spaces, but as thresholds for progress and success in areas of bioregionalism, conservation, and global warming. Though Greg Garrard admits that the despair engendered by modernity seems to demand apocalyptic resolution (91), he reasons: [T]he real moral and political challenge of ecology may lie in accepting that word is not about to end, that human beings are likely to survive even if Western-style civilization does not. Only if we imagine that planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for (107). American literary history reveals much more than a one-way street to ecocide, and narrative describing movement from purity to corruption--particularly under auspices of crisis--fails to sufficiently consider forgotten places filled with ecological and critical potential. One important first step to giving overlooked places reconsideration is to complicate socially engendered critical entities margin, border, and much-theorized boundary. While having proven integral to studies of race and gender, these terms do not adequately encompass physical terrain in a millennial, transnational context. Lawrence Buell explains that one way environmental writing and criticism intervenes most powerfully within and against standard conceptions of apportionment is by challenging assumptions about border and scale (76-77). With this challenge in mind, millennial literary scholarship might offer new theoretical approaches to place that foreground spatial reapportionment by shedding conceptions of provincial boundary and by approaching place, particularly abject or forgotten space, as limen. The liminal, a conception traditionally most relevant to anthropology and psychoanalysis, has capacity to renew relationship between culture and noxious literary environments. (1) Undoubtedly, post-Word War II literature and film have depicted this capacity for renewal with increasing fascination. Such meditations can be found within millennial city Eden-Olympia in J.G. Ballard's Super-Cannes, genetically modified Paradice of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and a spate of films ranging from An Inconvenient Truth to Avatar. Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, these works interrogate border regions in liminal stage to foster new intellectual approaches to rapidly changing landscapes. Modem conceptions of liminality can be found first in Arnold van Gennep's Les Rites de Passage (1909) and later developed by anthropologist Victor Turner. For both van Gennep and Turner, initiates in rites of passage must go through three basic stages: separation, limen, and reincorporation. Turner explains: The first stage, separation, comprises symbolic behavior signifying detachment of individual or group from either earlier fixed point in social structure or from established set of cultural conditions (a state'). During intervening liminal period, state of ritual subject (the passenger or liminar,) becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of attributes of his past or coming state. In third phase passage is consummated and ritual subject... reenters social structure, often, but not always at a higher status level. Ritual degradation occurs as well as elevation. (232) Turner goes on to describe liminal as an interval, however brief, of margin or limen, when past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and future has not yet begun, instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in balance (qtd. …