24 Liminal Spaces and Spiritual Practice in Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison

This chapter considers the intersection of liminal spaces and ritual practices in a diverse body of texts from Naomi Mitchison, Keri Hulme and Lorna Goodison. This chapter draws upon the scholarship of ritual in relation to material religion from Jane Harrison, Kathleen Stewart and Manuel A. Vásquez to explore how these writers illustrate the ways ritual is not tied to transcendence but known in relation to familiar places and experience. Goodison, Hulme and Mitchison have different religious positionings themselves, but all engage with religious tropes and traditions in their work. The chapter engages with a variety of ritual modes, from Mitchison’s imagined reconstruction of ancient history to Hulme’s evocation of Māori traditions, to Goodison’s invocations of Jamaican syncretism. Rivers, shorelines, mountains and the built environment become places for ritualized encounters that speak to the intersection of transcendence and immanence, of alterity and recognition that forms the particular modes of spirituality in this work. These writers have somewhat liminal positions in relationship to modernist studies, although all of them have engaged with the stylistic and genre innovations associated with literary Modernism. Analysis of their work contributes to a broader and more nuanced understanding of the workings of religion in modernism.