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near-instantaneous reception. Yet in a world in which only a few people traveled
infrequently over relatively modest distances and only at great expense and considerable delay, the world seemed like a much bigger and more mysterious place.
Center/periphery is a natural binary for us to reconcile the spatial perceptions of the ancients because not only does ancient literature routinely employ binary pairs as contrasting symbols but we routinely use such binaries in cognition ourselves. When the subjectivity of "The Other" is extrapolated onto land features at the "periphery" we see not only other areas of human habitation but particularly non-human spheres of action, a place I have already referred to collectively as "no-man‘s land."90 Land features such as mountains or bodies of water are natural boundaries or points of reference in the
demarcation of "The Other," and the transgression of these boundaries signifies a symbolic but significant shift in this perceptual association with the "center."
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this is a sequence of distinct stages, it is unmistakably structuralist.92 The classic
example is that of the tribesman who sends his pubescent son away from society, the idea being that the boy's time spent in a dangerous wilderness transitions him from the world of women (the domestic sphere) to the world of men (the public sphere). Once the boy is reintegrated into society he is ready to fully participate as a man and with all the rights and responsibilities thereto. This example holds, but there are many other less formalized social rituals which may also be rites de passage--those associated with marriage and death, for example. Van Gennep points out that the defining feature of all of these, irrespective of purpose, is their shared tripartite structural division. In this literary topos the "no-man‘s land" is what van Gennep called the margin (the limen), and it is
symbolized as a geographical space corresponding to the areas beyond the perceptual periphery.
Van Gennep‘s ideas about liminality in the rite de passage were adapted and argued more extensively by the anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner described a hierarchy of social status, realized through an implicit system of interpersonal relations, periodically interspersed with intense feelings of oneness and equality within a
community (communitas).93 With liminality being, ―the voluntary or involuntary removal of an individual from a social-structure matrix,‖94 individuals outside of their
interchangeably with these stages, thus highlighting the importance of crossing the limen to the whole process.
92 Dundes draws an analogy between van Gennep's pattern and Propp's morphology of functions, noting that functions I-XI constitute separation, XII-XIV as transition, and XV-XIII as incorporation;
"Structuralism and Folklore," 87.
93 Turner distinguishes three types of communitas; applicable to this model is spontaneous (or existential) communitas, but he also posits modes of communitas where that spirit is organized into the social system (normative) or contrived to be a part of that social system (ideological).
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normal social apparatus feel the equality of communitas as a result of the abandonment of their earlier social positions. Communitas denotes a shared feeling among persons in a liminal state but in the complete absence of other humans, it is realized as a desire to return to social interactions through the reorganization of normative social hierarchies.
The liminoid feels this sense of communitas most acutely when at the cusp of reintegration to human society.
This point is critical to understanding the topos embedded within this type of Near Eastern wondertale; communitas is a transformative event realized in the near-death of the hero accompanying his metaphorical social death. As noted by Turner,
Those undergoing it - call them ‗liminaries‘- are betwixt and between established states of politico-jural structure. They evade ordinary
cognitive classification, too, for they are in a sense ‗dead‘ to the world-and liminality has many symbols of death.95
His position outside of the human social matrix allows the hero of the story to see and experience things diametrical to normal human experience. The transgression of the limen, whether this is metaphorical or actual, is the catalyst for this change in perceived reality.96 As Turner claims, ―Actuality, in the liminal state, gives way to possibility, and aberrant possibilities reveal once more to luminaries the value of what has hitherto been regarded as the somewhat tedious daily round.‖97 The hero exists temporarily in isolation
94 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 52.
95 Victor Turner, ―Variations on Liminality‖ 48-65 in Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols (ed. Edith Turner; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 49.
96 Among van Gennep's own conclusions, "it seems important to me that the passage from one social position to another is identified with a territorial passage , such as the entrance into a village or a house, the movement from one room to another, or the crossing of streets and squares." The Rites of Passage, 192.
97 Turner, Blazing the Trail, 50.
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where there is the potential for danger; the hero is subject to the ―protective and punitive powers of divine or preterhuman beings or powers.‖98
The possibility of fantasy is integral to the wondertale, and fantasy is rationalized through the use of metaphor because the "no man's land" would have no significance if it had no recognizable modalities. Metaphor is what bridges the divide between the
knowable and the unknowable. Again, I cite the words of Turner:
Metaphor is, at its simplest, a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown…Metaphor is, in fact, metamorphic, transformative. Metaphor is our means of effecting instantaneous fusion of two separated realms of experience into one, iconic, encapsulating image.‖99
In the case of Jonah, the implication here is that the image of a man finding refuge from a stormy sea inside the belly of a fish is not a literal sequence of events but a metaphor for his complete isolation from the world he knows. Such fantastic descriptions are the province of the wondertale, and in reading stories for these descriptions of liminality through the transgression of symbolic boundaries we read metaphors for the internal and external changes comprising a rite de passage.