Interstices: Fountain as Cultural Bleed in the Welsh Owein and Tishani Doshi's Fountainville

In her introduction to New Stories from the Mabinogion, Penny Thomas writes, "Every culture has its myths . . . [which are] a way of describing our place in the world, of putting people and their search for meaning in a bigger picture."¹ Myths are, as Tishani Doshi further notes, "vague, changeable, geographically indeterminate, subsisting upon layers and layers of ever-shifting narrative."² In this paper, I examine how "place in the world" is itself an "ever-shifting narrative" situated in the geography of mythical interstitial spaces within the medieval Welsh tale Owein, or The Lady of the Fountain and Doshi's contemporary retelling of that tale from Thomas' Mabinogion series. In Doshi's version, Fountainville, as in the original, a magical fountain serves as a liminal, interstitial space, as a "middle landscape" into which wilderness and civilization bleed and hybrid identities are formed. In both texts, the impact of a dominant culture and of the wilds on those places at the margins–the rural and the magical–is questioned. The "place in the world" depicted in these tales is a place once nostalgically in balance with nature and the land and often at odds with the desires of the urban, or courtly, place at one end of the middle landscape and with the debased or inhuman wilderness on the other. This middle landscape is presented as a place of conflict and conquest where the places at the ends converge, sometimes conquering and destroying even as they bring the promise of progress. Finally, the texts themselves inhabit an interstitial space where cultures collide and form new literary identities.

"Interstitial space" is akin to what Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden, refers to as a "middle landscape."³ In this reference, Marx is referring to the landscape in Virgil's pastoral Eclogue I, which provides an "ideal pasture [that] has two vulnerable borders: one separates it from Rome [the city], the other from the encroaching marshland [the wilderness]. It is a space where [the character] Tityrus is spared the deprivations and anxieties associated with both the city and the wilderness."⁴ As Corinne Saunders writes in The Forest of Medieval Romance, "The idyllic pastoral grove becomes the familiar topos in later literature, particularly in medieval lyrics and pastorelles, at times symbolizing a lost and longed-for Golden Age, or a world of carefree play."⁵ Further, Saunders confirms the forest "as a common setting for mysterious or supernatural events, and as a landscape of exile and the hunt, standing in opposition to the highly civilized cities of Troy, Thebes or Rome."⁶ While Saunders is primarily concerned with the forest, these comments corroborate claims by Greg Garrand and Leo Marx. They argue that "there are two key contrasts from [the Hellenistic] period that run through the pastoral tradition: the spatial distinction of town (frenetic, corrupt, impersonal) and country (peaceful, abundant), and the temporal distinction of past (idyllic) and present (fallen)."⁷

This is similar, in many ways, to the interstitial space that Homi Bhabha writes of in The Location of Culture, where, in his introduction, he speaks of African American artist Renée Green and her use of architectural space to explore questions of identity. In her work, she describes the stairwell as "a liminal space, a pathway between the upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness."⁸ Bhabha explicates this scenario, saying, "This interstitial space between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy."⁹ Like Marx's "middle landscape," this space affords Green, and her art, a respite from the "deprivations and anxieties" of the more rigidly defined "blackness" and "whiteness" of floors above and below the stairwell, while it also enables a seemingly safe space for the merging of the two identities, leading to hybridity. However, Bhabha also notes that interstitial spaces are not free from conflicts. He writes, "It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the...