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...hazardous, whether be by Caesar or a Faust, a Napoleon or an Orpheus, a swimmer from the shores of Cuba or a teenager in the wheel-casing of a 747 bound for Gatwick. Crossing borders puts at risk all that one is and all that one holds dear. The very existence of borders means difference, limitation, another way; and if a successful crossing can bring liberation, knowledge, and reward, the wish to cross is itself likely to be greeted with suspicion, fear, interrogation, and punishment. Alexander and Einstein, Darwin and Newton, might change human history, but our most potent myths are still of Icarus, of Prometheus, of the loss of Eden. The invasion of space, equally, has always aroused, understandably, the fiercest of hostility. Throwing open the doors to Charles XII, to Cromwell, to Luther or Calvin, to Mussolini or Sherman, held obvious dangers. But incursion also, at different times and in different places, presented more insidious dangers and called for more subtle forms of defence. "Each newly arrived immigrant group in America," for example, argues Hugh Dalziel Duncan,
became a butt of ridicule for older groups who had risen to power and who therefore were able to set standards of Americanization. The immigrant is always a challenge, even a threat, to established customs. He makes us realize that two (or more) evaluations of action are possible. Laughter helps to resolve this. As we ridicule the newcomer, we overcome confusion through the euphoria arising within us as we laugh. (24-25)
We can imprison or ghetto-ise our border crossers, as Britain seems increasingly to do; we might burn them, as William Tyndale was burnt in 1436 for daring to publish English translations of the Scriptures; or we can simply laugh at them until they are defused. What we cannot do is to let them alone; free access is simply not an option.
Within the arts, however, and specifically in the western world over the last hundred or so years, crossing borders has rapidly, except in the most totalitarian of regimes, lost many of its risks. The western artistic ideal, in fact, and along with it the western literary critical ideal, comes very close to a policy of free access: no frontiers, no passports, no visas; nothing is excluded; nothing is contraband. We cross (and rightly) at will, encouraging others to cross, applauding great crossings of the past, confidently anticipating even freer access in a more ideal future. In this context, a collection like the present is almost too easy. Everything literary--past, passing, or to come--can be read as crossing a border of some kind: stylistic, contentual, formal, sexual, psychological, racial--and if none of these, then always political. Contributors to this volume span works from four centuries and two continents, and all deal legitimately with the crossing of borders, celebrating the incursion and welcoming the innovation. Yet that welcome, and the reading practices that enable it, have a chequered, troublesome, and hazardous history. Artistic endeavour and the linguistic expression that would frame it into some form of cultural truth have for many centuries experienced disturbances at the borders, whether we look politically at boundaries and limits, socially at peripheries and edges, or with regard to the printed page itself, at its own margins.
II
"But she," wrote Shakespeare of Lucrece in 1594,
that never coped with stranger eyes Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies Writ in the glassy margins of such books. (The Rape of Lucrece, lines 99-102)
As an innocent participant in her exchanges with Tarquin, her unexpected guest, Lucrece has been at a loss to understand the conversation that has been proceeding within the "looks" of her would-be ravisher. As an innocent reader, she also has been unable to interpret the marginal gloss that might have conveyed the real...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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