Identity at the Border: Narrative Strategies in María Novaro's El jardín del Edén and John Sayles's Lone Star
Amy Kaminsky
2001
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In María Novaro's El jardín del Edén and John Sayles's Lone Star, the narrative and visual art of film functions as ritual does: to make sense of the dangerous liminal space of the border. Novaro and Sayles both locate their protagonists' identity quests in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, but they approach the problem from different directions: Sayles from the north, Novaro from the south; Sayles from the perspective of men in search of themselves through their fathers, Novaro from that of women
more »
... search of identity with the help of each other. With her focus on the stories of three women, and a camera that often interrupts the narrative in favor of the contemplative gaze, Novaro challenges both the conventional plot and the patriarchal substructure that critics have linked to Mexican cinema. When John Sayles investigates identity at the border, he charges headlong into precisely the sort of diachronic narrative that Novaro leaves behind. Yet ironically, it is by embracing narrative that Sayles confounds the boundary lines that the story of paternity is meant to maintain and that U.S. border films have traditionally policed. Literally and metaphorically, borders are liminal spaces, dangerous places of passage from one territory-or one identityto another. Anthropologist Victor Turner developed the notion of the "liminal period" as a way of describing the uneasy state of transition between life stages. Turner implies that such moments are heavy with danger because during liminal periods individuals are unbound from the rules governing either the stage they are leaving or the one they are entering, unprotected as they pass from one to another. The experience can be compared to crossing between cars on a moving train, and the resulting brief sense of danger one would feel as one slides the door open against the resistance of the wind, gauging the step that will take one across the shifting gap that must be bridged to get to the other side. The danger is not only to the person in passage, however. Turner, building on Mary Douglas's work on ritual pollution, notes that "in effect, what is unclear and contradictory (from the point of view of social definition) tends to be regarded as (ritually) unclean," so that the danger of passage is experienced by those around the liminal subjects, for "liminal personae nearly always and everywhere are regarded as polluting" (Turner 97). In using the concrete metaphor of the train, a spatially grounded metaphor of movement, to evoke this perilous moment of change, I follow Turner, whose term, "liminal," also concrete, spatial, and bound up with movement, refers to the Latin word for threshold. One does not want to trip crossing a thresh-
doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1495
fatcat:aufbpge23jbqlgtbb5beesu75e