Une Petite Mort: Death, Love and Liminality in the Fiction of Ali Smith :: Ali Smith Death Love Essays

Death, Love and Liminality in the Fiction of Ali SmithThe morbid marriage of love life and destruction is not an original topic to postmodernist writing or to sparing literature. Diverse forms of literature from Greek myth to Shakespearian tragedies have hosted stories of tragic love and romantic terminals, with varying nuances of darkness and romance. Nonetheless, this paper will attempt to establish a link surrounded by Ali Smiths 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 attribute between life and afterlife the liminal stage. As this paper will stress, Smiths wri ting deals with love and death in the context of liminality. Characters identities fluctuate and some(a)times 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 Smiths work. When asked to comment on the love and death motif in her stories, Smith admitted that the two are closely related. In her wordsOf course love and death are linked, from the French notion of orgasmic low-spirited 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 cadency of love loss? (German, p.370)In Smiths fiction, petite mort is a more complex motif than the French metaphor for sexual climax. In her stories the physical body 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 Smiths fiction. The coexistence of love and death questions the boundaries between life and death, outdos 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.