Writers on the state of being in limbo

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We’re disconnected from the way things used to be, and not yet plugged into the future.  Though Gramsci meant those words in an entirely different context, many will find it uncomfortably familiar today.

The concept of being in limbo originated in medieval Roman Catholic theology when it was conveniently used to refer to a spiritual realm located in a remote suburb of Hell. Here, the souls of children who died before they could be baptised, as well as of righteous folk before the time of Christ, awaited permission to enter Heaven.

In 2007, however, Pope Benedict authorised the publication of a document with the crisp title, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised. This epistle officially laid the dubious notion to rest. Limbo was sent to limbo, although it lives on in the sense of being marooned in a dreary waiting room between expectations and reality.

Dante, in particular, was one of the poets who made use of this nebulous space. It’s the first of the nine circles of Hell described in his Inferno, where he encounters writers such as Homer, Horace and Ovid, leaders such as Hector and Julius Caesar, and philosophers such as Aristotle, Socrates and Plato. The distinguished company, to say the least.

Other poets were less literal. For Coleridge, “Limbo Den” was a “spirit-jail” without any sweet sights, containing “the mere Horror of blank Naught-at-all.” Perhaps he’d missed a dose of his customary laudanum.

Almost a century later, in Robert Graves’s early poem titled Limbo, he contrasted a soldier’s hellish reality of “horror, mud and sleeplessness” with the lives of those who were not part of the battle, existing in a “sunny cornland where / Babies like tickling, and where tall white horses / Draw the plough leisurely in quiet courses.”

For art critic Dan Fox, a state of acute writer’s block was akin to being in limbo. “I felt I was in No-Man’s Land, the Twilight Zone, the Upside Down, the wasteland, the badlands and the boonies,” he writes in his recent Limbo, a series of personal reflections on the subject. It’s an “extraterritoriality,” as he puts it, devoid of definition yet pregnant with possibility.

The words he uses to describe this state reek of stasis and suspended animation: “Muddled and moribund, mud bound in muddy waters. Clogged, congested, confounded, choked-off, jammed, stumped, stonewalled and stymied. Flummoxed, bamboozled and blocked…Caught between a rocky trope and a hard cliché.”

It’s a condition with which Kafka must have been only too familiar. So many of his characters exist in situations where they are cut off from the past, yet prevented from glimpsing the contours of the future. In The Trial, bank official Joseph K spends a year dwelling in a fog of unspecified charges, impenetrable courtroom proceedings and inscrutable officers of the law. Meanwhile, in The Castle, the central character goes through virtually the entire novel as an outsider trying to access the upper echelons of the bureaucracy.

Much the same note is struck by the actions of Beckett’s characters waiting for an elusive Godot. As Estragon puts it: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” Elsewhere, in German writer, Marlen Haushofer’s novel, The Wall, a woman on vacation in Austria wakes up one morning to find an apparently endless, invisible wall separating her surroundings from the rest of the world. That’s social distancing taken to an awful extreme.

More recently, George Saunders’s Man Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo is set in a Tibetan Buddhist version of limbo. Such bardos are described as transitional states between death and rebirth, in which consciousness becomes aware of its circumstances before it transitions into a new life.

In Saunders’s telling, 11-year-old William Lincoln, son of the American President, joins others in a bardo after his untimely death. Disoriented, he awaits his fate, surrounded by an eccentric mélange of voices coming to terms with the acts of leaving behind and letting go.

Short stories, too, would seem to be fertile sites in which to nourish the physical and psychological conditions of being in limbo. Take women’s lives, for example. In Catherine Lacey’s Certain American States, characters wait for a change while dealing with memories, bereavements, and in-between periods. Similarly, Lily Tuck’s Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived contains tales of women displaced, disoriented and discombobulated. Many of the vignettes in Nighat Gandhi’s Waiting also concern themselves with women wedged in one world while anticipating another.

Caught between official pronouncements and scientific assertions, we await our own release from this “long dark tea-time of the soul,” in Douglas Adams’s wry phrase. When it’s over, we can finally emerge blinking into the sunlight, perhaps to break into another form of limbo – that of the back-bending Trinidadian dance style.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.