Monsters on the Frontier: The Denial of Liminality and the Restoration of the Lifeworld by Baptism

As I traverse "Terrain and Territory" in Anthony Steinbock's fascinating and difficult study of phenomenology, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology After Husserl (Northwestern, 1995), I allow my favorite monster from literature to intrude upon the landscape: Grendel, who famously appears in the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. Of course, Steinbock's presentation of the 'homeworld' and 'alienworld' and his adoption of these Husserlian ideas within his project of 'generative phenomenology' sets the stage for Grendel's entrance within the 'lifeworld' of the Danes.

Grendel, of Cain's kin and the 'shadow-walker,' hates the sounds of 'joy,' the celebrations within Heorot, Hrothgar's hall, where this king of the Danes gathered with his retainers in the evening. Joy, singing and even inebriation continue until the monster stopped all that with nocturnal murder. What kind of being but a monster could rage against joy? Why does joy and song enrage such a creature? Another nickname for the monster holds a clue: mearcstapa, the 'border-stepper.'



Grendel, whose name suggests both 'ground' and 'border' (consider Mod. Ger. Grenzen) or 'frontier,' crosses from the fens he holds fast to Hrothgar's mead-hall, without ever stepping into liminality.  He personifies the limit, yet never stands at the border of two world, as the 'hero on the beach' often does in Old English poetry (the hero at the border of two worlds is thematic in the Anglo-Saxon poetic record). As a shadow consigned to the lineage of Cain, Grendel can never cross over the outer limit, never become the brave one, sporting a glinting light, near the edge. He remains alien to his enemies and to himself: regenerativity (or generativity) is off limits to him: even in victory he stands alone in Heorot, sterile and the stranger. He is never at home.

As Kenneth P. Quinn has noted in his The Use of Baptismal Liturgy in three Old English Poems, the imagery of the outer limits or edges in Beowulf conjures the liminality of the baptismal font and its liturgy. Liminality, as ontological status, is something denied to Grendel through his proscription, but open to all others, presumably even to the drunken 'thanes' celebrating in Heorot. As the 'mark-stepper' Grendel is denied baptism, the play of 'homeworld' and 'alienworld' is denied its authentic relationality. For Grendel, the 'lifeworld' never reaches perfection (in the sense of completion or fulfillment), and he remains condemned to reign over the limits with no hope for liminality.

Enraged at what is possible for the revelers in the mead-hall, Grendel acts out what is impossible for him; in a mockery of a liturgy of new creation and the baptismal font, which he can never approach, he destroys what is created and celebrated in the scop's (the singer of tales) song of creation, which he cannot endure. Steinbock's delightful discussion (HB, 208-19) of 'narrative' and the role of the 'narrator' in the 'homeworld' provokes an interpretation of a dimension to Grendel's wrath: the scop, as 'narrator 'of cultural narratives, weaves not only tales of history but also of the social virtues and values. In this sense, the teller of tales re-invents the fabric of the lifeworld. The scop, then, continually weaves a world which Grendel can 'visit' but never enter.

The monster reigns over Heorot for 12 years until Beowulf turns the laughter in his heart to fear. Grendel, ripped apart from his own hand and shoulder, his very grip on Heorot, and eventually beheaded in death, rests disjointed and hewn apart whence he came, underscoring his separations in life, denied as he was a co-constituted and co-relative 'homeworld' and 'alienworld.'

The hero's eventual epic descent to the depths of Grendel's mother's lair restores the traversal of water as new life, as he secures victory over evil. The balance of 'alienworld' and 'homeworld' is also restored. Heorot is made whole again, and enjoys an integration of worlds denied its attacker. The baptism of regeneration is for some, but not for those others conscripted into the line of Cain.

A brief Note on [In]Dividuation: Levi Bryant in the Folds (Falling in Love with Deleuze All Over Again)

Levi Bryant has presented an interesting turn on Deleuze's '[in]dividuation' in his Larval Subjects piece, "Of Folds and Vortices."


Though Bryant's experience of writing locates dividuation further downstream from where I located it in the liminal zone between the Real and the Imaginary, he describes something similar:




Where writing is a verb, the unfolding of a thought that she has not yet thought, the written is the dead letter, fallen into matter and now present in the world.  She has been dividuated by her writing.  The author is always two.  She is the writing, but also the written that persists after her.  She is responsible for and before the written, yet also not it.  She is responsible for what she has written, for she inscribed those things and made them actual in the world.






So if dividuation refers to the blurring within the transformation between registers, then the transformation or translation, neither fully actualized, deferred always in the hazy oscillations of their liminality, point to the dyadic essence of the phenomenological moment: the laterality inscribed by givenness and the recipient that saturates relationality. I agree with Bryant that dyadism is in no way a dualism. Laterality, as I have described it recently, has nothing to do with dualism.


These observations might come to bear on the blurring of horizons that have earned Marion much critique. If Marion's thought of the plasticity of horizons fits into, for example, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible, it would be in a 'fold,' a Cusanian wrinkle in reality. Marion, after all, is no stranger to Deleuze. And I wonder, how great a distance there really is between Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (October, 59, Winter, 1992) and Marion's flirtation with Agamben in Negative Certainties.

The Conscience of the King: Doing Good in the Cracks

One need not carry a diagnosis of OCD to skip over the cracks in sidewalks.  I remember the hops, skips and jumps over line, cracks and other marginalia in the Brooklyn sidewalks that grew me up. It was a great game of heroic feats and high athleticism. We all did it; sometimes we’d go back over the same strip of pavement just to do it better.

 Jumping over the cracks doesn’t always work out the way we intend; it is less heroic than we at first thought. It is missed opportunity. Nothing really happens on or in the matrix of the solid sidewalk. We often meet the monolith there, and when we meet others, we tend to find them about their business, behaving more like cyborgs than Buber’s thou . It’s where the matrix breaks, on the margins, in the cracks that we meet the other; and that’s the place where we can do some good: the crack’s the thing…

 Down in the cracks we walk dry-shod, the tentative walls of the matrix on either side; there we meet the other in meaningful purpose, and with no little sense of urgency. Safe from the gray thoughts of the boardroom, from the inane humming of people taking the wide roads, from the dull thinking of expedience at all cost, we come face to face with the other on the borders of willing the good. We are encouraged to walk a little faster.

 It is an interesting moment where conscience verges on an act of the will: liminality, on the precipice of doing good: something of a leap of faith. Walking faster  with each other to a purposeful destination clearly in sight opens us up to will the good, even if we have to grab a hand and pull a little. We do some good when we recall that will without love is coercion; will acting with insight toward the good of the other is righteousness. Fascinating things can happen on the margins, on the frontiers, in the cracks. I hope to meet many people there.