While some may see liminality in terms of chaos, others see the creative potential of this chaos. This brings to mind the Trickster, who in creating disruption and order, is also a culture bringer and creator. In the next excursion we will discuss the trickster at length, because Mary Poppins is tricky indeed, as we will see in the following trickster tour. On the way there, we will take a look at the liminal nature of leisure and its association with the Trickster, which V. Turner (1982b) explicates. Leisure comes from the Old French leisir, which comes
from the Latin licere, “to be permitted” and which, interestingly enough comes from the Indo-European base *leik—“to offer for sale, bargain,” referring to the liminal sphere of the market, with its implications of choice, variation, contract—a sphere that has connections, in archaic and tribal religions, with Trickster deities such as Eshu-Elegba, and Hermes. Exchange is more “liminal” than production. (p. 40)
V. Turner (1982b) draws a parallel between liminal rites of tribal people and our modern forms of leisure: “Just as when tribesmen make masks . . . invert or parody profane reality in myths and folktales,” so do the various forms of modern popular culture, “sometimes assembling them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking and usually experimental combinations. But they do this in a much more complicated way than in the liminality of tribal initiations.” Popular culture has produced a dizzying array of the different genres to choose from, “as against the relatively limited symbolic genres of ‘tribal’ society” (p. 40).
V. Turner (1982b) draws a parallel between liminal rites of tribal people and our modern forms of leisure: “Just as when tribesmen make masks . . . invert or parody profane reality in myths and folktales,” so do the various forms of modern popular culture, “sometimes assembling them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking and usually experimental combinations. But they do this in a much more complicated way than in the liminality of tribal initiations.” Popular culture has produced a dizzying array of the different genres to choose from, “as against the relatively limited symbolic genres of ‘tribal’ society” (p. 40).
V. Turner (1982b) notes that liminal phases of tribal society only invert the established order, like a mirror they invert the object and reflect it, but he argues that art and literature often break things down or apart and remold them, and sometimes even destroy them—if only in the imagination. The entertainment genres of industrial societies, V. Turner explains, “are often subversive satirizing, lampooning, burlesquing, or subtly putting down the central values of the basic, work-sphere society, or at least selected sectors of that society” (p. 41).
With liminality and the Trickster can bricolage be far behind? Bricolage, too, is a product of liminality. During periods of liminality, the factors of culture are combined and recombined in various ways because they are done so using fantasized versus experienced combinations, and in this way they are often grotesque. “In other words, in liminality people 'play' with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them. Novelty emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar elements.” (V. Turner, 1982, p. 27). This is a major function of the eternal return and is a way in which cultures renew themselves.
Hansen (2001) notes that
this recombination of elements is a quality also found in altered (i.e. destructured) states of consciousness. Odd assortments of items appear in dreams and in the productions of visionary artists. This is perhaps the essence of creativity—producing new patterns, new ways of seeing the world.” (p. 56) ∆RC[mp10]
V. Turner explicitly relates bricolage and liminality (1988) especially as it relates to play. Turner sees the analysis of culture, such as that done by the Structuralists in France, like Levi-Strauss, as the essence of liminality: “it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or “ludic” recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence (p. 28). So, according to Turner, this dissertation would be liminal in this way, too. Now that we have the lay of the liminal landscape of Mary Poppins, and its transformative possibilities, let us look a little closer at the Trickster.