Mapping mystic spaces in the self and its stories: Reading (through) the gaps in Ernest Buckler's 'The Mountain and the Valley', Alice Munro's 'Lives of Girls and Women', Peter Ackroyd's 'The House of Doctor Dee', Adele Wiseman's 'Crackpot', and A. S. By

In their novels, Ernest Buckler, Alice Munro, Peter Ackroyd, Adele Wiseman and A. S. Byatt have each explored moments when their characters experience expanded states of consciousness. Narratives such as these, as well as those of various mystical literatures, posit the idea that the barriers of the known self can be broken through, often repeatedly. Each of the novels to be studied here portrays a gap- or flaw-ridden self in the act of perpetuating and/or penetrating various forms of narrative and identity constructs. Each also features an encounter with what is other when these narrative and identity boundaries are breached. Reading about "mystical" occurrences of this nature challenges readers with the possibility that perceptions may be registered beyond the paradigms of the subject/object split. In this project, narrative fiction will be read in terms of its capacity to trigger a questioning of, and an expansion from within, systems of knowledge and identity, explicitly in terms of character and plot structure, and implicitly as a model for the reading self. The ability to observe and to respond to productive "gaps" or "flaws" in the stories of the self is a skill not only practiced by contemplatives and mystics, and by the characters in these novels, but by readers of imaginative fiction as well.