Bridge vs Labyrinth

The article examines the theme of entrapment, common to the novels of Iain Banks and Susanna Clarke, and the related category of liminality. The motive of the imprisonment is one of the common plot-forming components in the works of I. Banks and S. Clarke. In the analyzed novels devoted to physical and psychological traumas, “imprisonment” manifests itself in both physical and metaphorical aspects, however, each of the authors approaches its implementation in his own way. Paying attention to the poetics of the title of Banks’s novel, we conclude that the bridge is understood as the passage of the hero through a borderline situation: the bridge as a link between fantasy and reality, between dream and reality, between the past and the future. The focus on isolation determines the consonance of the novel’s text with the political views of Iain Banks. The concept of liminality in Banks’s novel is thus closely related to the idea of rebirth. The hero of Susanna Clarke’s novel is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder due to emotional and physical abuse. The emphasis on physicality demonstrates the unreliability of a person’s presence in society. Piranesi’s abduction causes him to fall out of the social context and the impossibility of existing within traditional roles, since Piranesi is unable to leave the metaphysical state in which he remains after the trauma. For Piranesi, personal freedom becomes attainable only in liminal spaces, which indicates the presence of a borderline personality disorder. Piranesi’s characters, who are in a “threshold” state, are interpreted in view of theories of K. Jaspers, V. Turner and A. Gennep. Key words: liminality, liminal spaces, initiation, imprisonment, physicality, trauma, ‘threshold’ character, Banks, Clarke