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 metalworkerThe morbid marriage of grapple and death is non an original report to postmodernist piece of music or to Scottish literature. Diverse forms of literature from Greek myth to Shakespearian tragedies arrive at hosted stories of tragic have it off and romantic deaths, with varying nuances of darkness and romance. Nonetheless, this paper leave attempt to establish a link between Ali Smiths writing, postmodernist fiction and Scottish fantasy, while looking at the topic of do and death in conjunction with the concept of liminality. Liminality (from the Latin brink limit) is an intermediate state, it refers to passage rituals and to existence between borders. Stories of love and death frequently suggest the abrupt interruption of the former because of the sudden occurrence of the latter. Sometimes, however, love and death sh are the same intermediate dimension between emotional state and afterlife the liminal stage. As th is paper will stress, Smiths writing deals with love and death in the context of liminality. Characters identities fluctuate and somewhattimes crinkle altogether. Rational boundaries of time and space lose coherence. Stories develop in the preternatural 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 tight related. In her wordsOf course love and death are linked, from the cut notion of orgasmic small death by dint of the metaphysical poets all the dash to something Winterson sums up in the perfect opening sentence, in Written on the Body why is the measure 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 trope of love and death does not refer only to the erotic sphere of love. In fact, because of its close race 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, cut throughs the door 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.