'[P]Assing Through Ourselves and Finding Ourselves in the Beyond': The Rites of Passage of Cass Cleave in John Banville's Eclipse and Shroud (Critical Essay‪)‬

Matters of demarcation tend to be of concern in current literary debate: borders, limits, and states of liminality are explored as interest is focused on, for example, the spaces between that which is alien and that which belongs, that which is human and that which is not, that which is dead and that which is alive, that which is real and that which is illusive. Certain such states of liminality, as they present themselves in two of John Banville's novels of the new millennium, will be scrutinized below. If liminality can be seen as a threshold space, a 'gap between ordered worlds [in which] almost anything may happen' (1) and in which an individual's life may be reshaped through ritual processes, then John Banville's Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002) move in liminal spaces. In these two novels, one character especially--the central female character (2)--is seen to be affected by states of liminality. If, furthermore, the space suggested by Jean Baudrillard's image of the hologram is seen as one kind of liminal space, then this philosopher's thinking--with its emphasis on a presumed human wish to create a three-dimensional copy of oneself, with the intention of 'seizing reality live' (3) (and perhaps for the purpose of realizing an immortality of sorts, immediately and 'by all possible means' (4))--is relevant to the understanding of the tragically haunted and haunting character of Cass Cleave in Eclipse and Shroud. If ritual, moreover, can be considered a psychosocial experience, Cass Cleave can be seen to undergo certain rites of passage in the novels examined here. Cass not only dwells in a borderland of psychic illness, but she also undergoes rites of reincorporation and separation which take her across borderlines before passing into 'the beyond'. Having undergone her rites of passage and undertaken her border-crossings, Cass can then, in a sense, be seen as passing through herself and in the end placing herself in a liminal space--betwixt and between--the real and the illusory.