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I
Liminality refers primarily to the concept of the threshold, the area between two spaces. And that threshold is predominantly associated with provisionality, instability, intermediate forms; what lies between the known and unknown, or "other."1 Noel Carroll writes (by way of Mary Douglas) that "things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture's conceptual scheme, are impure...cognitively threatening."2 And the argument that danger lies in such a liminal area, where the distinctions by which we organise our lives and cultural systems are bought into question, is unsurprising.
However, we should remember that, in the words of Michael Taussig, "a threshold...allows for illumination as well as extinction."3 Promise then, as well as threat, lies in the notion of the border area, and the possibility of crossover and transgression associated with it. Thus Bill Brown refers to "the mesmerising power of genuine liminality, where the structures of normalcy and everyday security break down."4
In this essay I refer to the three novels by Thomas Harris that feature Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon (1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999). For reasons of space, I mainly focus on the two most recent texts. Harris's novels engage with all kinds of threshold areas, thus providing a particularly useful site for an exploration of liminality. Here I briefly describe a number of such engagements -though the spatial limits of this essay mean that other areas necessarily go untreated.5 I focus my argument, however, around Harris's use of the Gothic genre, and follow William Veeder in seeing the genre itself as a type of liminal space where both foreclosed cultural norms and (at a psychological level) repressed desires can be explored and interrogated to powerful effect.6 The boundary crossings that Harris represents in his texts, then, are tied in symbiotic connection to the Gothic forms he uses.
II
Harris, though, also engages the thresholds between genres in his texts, and it is at that point that I commence. Harris's novels would normally be categorized as crime fiction. Thus, for instance, The Silence of the Lambs comes to be structured round Clarice Starling's successful quest to discover the identity and whereabouts of serial killer Jame Gumb ("Buffalo Bill") before he murders Catherine Baker Martin,...