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Mourning Time
*Aimee L. Pozorski *
/ Central Connecticut State University/
pozorskia@ccsu.edu
(c) 2007 Aimee L. Pozorski.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and
Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
2004.
1. R. Clifton Spargo begins The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and
Responsibility in Elegiac Literature with a poignant discussion of
Ruth Behar's 1996 retelling of an Isabel Allende story: a story
about a relationship between a girl dying beneath the rubble of an
avalanche and the reporter who struggles as he watches her there.
The poignancy of this scene, for Behar, depends on the tension the
reporter feels between his professional obligation to narrate her
story and his human obligation to ease her suffering.
2. Such a scene of suffering, on a first reading, refers to a "time
of mourning" crucial to Spargo's book. As his reading of Behar
illustrates, the time of mourning occurs when a witness confronts
the loss of another. More importantly, this sense of time is also
definitively "ethical." For Spargo, "there is an ethical crux to
all mourning, according to which the injustice potentially
perpetrated by the mourner against the dead as a failure of memory
stands for the injustice that may be done to the living at any
given moment" (4). When phrased in this way, "ethics" here is not
only concerned to recognize injustice, but, more crucially, to
remember the dead adequately.
3. But Spargo's book also seems invested in another kind of time,
when the grieving survivor comes to mourn time itself. Spargo's
understated second interest is about what it means to mourn the
measured time that offers comfort and stability during moments of
need; in other words, the book is equally about the kind of linear
time in which we have all come to organize our lives, but have,
despite ourselves, lost in this historical moment. Although he
does briefly write in his chapter on Hamlet about a "time of
mourning" (77), the theorization of mourning's time that runs
throughout the book in these terms is perhaps too implicit, and I
could wish for a broader or more explicit theorization of the
intersection between time and mourning. Specifically, I would call
for a theory of mourning indebted to the time of the trauma, which
Spargo sometimes invokes as analogous to mourning while seeing the
two modes of psychic unpleasure as distinct in their social and
literary implications. For Spargo, although he doesn't quite
phrase it this way, part of the value of literature lies in its
potential to represent the traumatic time of the loss of a loved
one in a way that straightforward, journalistic accounts fail to
do. Literature can move the reader-as-witness because it functions
like the unconscious mind: absolutely refusing the imposition of
linear time in those moments that come too soon to be processed in
a neat and linear fashion that cultural codes prescribe.
4. One way literature invests the reader in the mourning process is
through its reliance on what Spargo calls "elegiac address"
(25-26, 188-89, 192-94). Otherwise known as "apostrophe," the
potential for literature to address an other is typically
associated with elegies in the most traditional sense. Spargo's
reading of /the literary/, indeed, of "elegiac literature," does
not focus on traditional elegies, but on literature that invokes
prosopopeia in order to call upon the reader as ethical witness
(25). Drawing on a subtle and informed understanding of
prosopopeia, Spargo's theory of elegy explicitly refuses the trope
of the personification of the dead and instead emphasizes the
dimension of relationality created by literary
texts--specifically, literature's potential to render an alterity
in space and time that signifies as responsibility. For example,
Spargo claims that "mourning promotes a temporal confusion whereby
the question of memory is treated as though the remembered dead
stood within range of an imminent threat of violence to a living
person" (4). Spargo posits Freud's famous theorization of the
dream of the burning child as an exemplary case of this temporal
confusion. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud recounts the
story of a dead child who appears in the dream of a grieving
father, a father who falls asleep as the child's body lies
surrounded by candles under the watch of an old man. After a few
hours, Freud recalls, the father dreams that his child appears
before him, grabs his arm, and whispers "/Father, can't you see
that I am burning/?" (330; qtd. in Spargo 173).
5. On the one hand, this scene posits the father's "temporal
confusion" over whether the child is dead. Is the time of the
dream before the child has died, or after? The answer, of course
is both: In the dream, the child is both dead from burning and
alive at his father's side, as his reproachful whisper proves. As
Spargo suggests, the lesson of Freud's example is that "our
capacity to revere the living other as an unassimilable, yet
irremissible precondition for both relationship and subjectivity
depends upon the paradoxical capacity of our consciousness to be
dedicated to the permanently absent other as to the primary and
abiding signification of alterity" (176). The literary nature of
this father's dream, in other words, necessarily conflates the
living child with the dead child, allowing the father both to
express a dedication to the child's memory and to recognize that
his child's subjectivity is radically separate from his own.
Spargo's commitment to the impossibility, yet absolute necessity,
of this ethical moment leads him to Cathy Caruth's interpretive
work on this very scene. As Spargo relates, Caruth reads it as
"the story of an impossible responsibility of consciousness in its
own originating relation to others, and specifically to the deaths
of others" (176). Spargo emphasizes further the skewed timing that
this dream reveals. For him, "this apprehension of an impossible
responsibility is not merely retrospective, but prospective, since
the child's accusation reinstitutes and indeed redefines the
father's protective agency'' (176). For this grieving father, in
other words, the child's ultimate death is yet to come, calling
into question as it does the father's ability to protect the body
from burning even as it lies lifeless in the shroud.
6. But this example, too, brings out an important tenet of Spargo's
ethics: that literary works are ethical not simply in their demand
that we confront the radical otherness of the death of a loved
one, but also in their critical rejection of more dominant
cultural models for grief. As Freud's discussion of this father's
dream makes clear, the culturally prescribed mourning process in
the wake of a close relative's death--recognizing it with a
funeral service and then going about one's daily life--is
unworkable. Not only is it impossible, it is naïve: time, for the
mourner, does not work so neatly. Spargo uses mourning, often
literally, but sometimes as a figure, to reveal "a belated
protection of the dead" (6). For him, "this retrospective effort
always pertains to a question about the place the other still
holds in the world" (6). After death comes life--for the mourner,
but for the deceased as well. In this resistance to passing out of
memory Spargo senses a "resistant strain of mourning," a strain
"in which there is opposition to psychological resolution and to
the status quo of cultural memory" (6). Ultimately, "it is
precisely because our cultural modes of memory so often neglect
the other whom they would remember that unresolved mourning
becomes a dissenting act, a sign of irremissible ethical meaning"
(6). And this is why the /literary/ work itself becomes so crucial
to this study. In its very stylization, in addition to its
content, literature bodies forth a capacity to refuse resolutions
over and against more normative references to mourning.
7. In describing literary representations of melancholia as "the
elegy's most persistent sign of dissent from conventional
meanings" (11), Spargo closely and self-consciously aligns his
book with such other studies on literary representations of
mourning as Jahan Ramazani's Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy
from Hardy to Heaney (1994). Both Ramazani and Spargo privilege
poets in mourning for their potential to understand what we others
do not: that social rules for mourning do not account for the
problem of time--the lost time, the mourning time, the very time
of mourning--following the deaths of those we love. According to
Spargo, however, while Ramazani and Peter Sacks understand the
"melancholic potential in all mourning," "neither perceives
melancholia as evocative of an ethical concern for the other
elaborated by the mourner's objections to the cultural practices
presiding over grief" (11). In other words, whereas Ramazani
values the modern elegy's melancholic potential to "reopen the
wounds of loss" (xi), Spargo reads melancholia as a "persistent
sign of a dedication to the time and realm of the other" (11). And
it is this focus on "the other"--more crucially, a radically other
human being whom we possibly love, one for whom we feel a
responsibility after death, but also, and simultaneously,
impossibly, one whose alterity we are committed to preserve--that
sets Spargo apart from some other scholars on elegiac literature.
8. And there is no lack of scholarship in this field. Such recent
books as William Watkins's On Mourning (2004), Rochelle Almeida's
The Politics of Mourning (2004), Anissa Wardi's Death and the Arc
of Mourning (2003), Sam Durrant's Postcolonial Narrative and the
Work of Mourning (2003), and Alessia Ricciardi's The Ends of
Mourning (2003) are just five examples of studies published in the
last four years. However, precisely because of the way it links
the literary attributes of the elegy with the ethical
imperative--with a necessary and impossible engagement with the
other on his or her own terms--Spargo's book accomplishes
something these other books do not: it places the reader in the
uncomfortable position of having to take responsibility not only
for our own dead, but also for our reading of the figures to which
Spargo turns in the book. In other words, invested as it is in the
philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Spargo's sense of
literary and social ethics refers not simply to "doing the right
thing" in the wake of a significant death, but rather to the
impossibility of both adequately carrying forward the memory of
the deceased other and of preserving the irreconcilability of
death. In this way, Spargo's ethics is as much an ethics of
reading as it is an ethics of mourning--a move surprisingly
antithetical to the philosophy upon which he relies so heavily.
9. In order to think Levinasian ethics together with the ethical work
of the elegy, Spargo must confront (and he does) an important
Levinasian claim: that ethics does not "fit all that well with the
imaginative capacities of literature" (9). Spargo's defense,
however, is that literature has a crucial indirect potential for
conveying the untranslatable, as a way of marking particular
limits of representation. Confronting this fact is one way of
"facing the figure," as Levinas himself commanded. While it is
true that Levinas originally theorized the ethical relationship as
taking place between two human beings, later scholars, like
Spargo, have understood Levinas's ethics through encounters with
language and art. For example, Jill Robbins has suggested that we
"face the figure otherwise," extending Levinas's theory of the
"ethical relation to the other as a kind of language, as
responsibility, that is, as language-response to the other who
faces and who, 'in turn' speaks" (54). Levinas's ethics of an
other with a face, then, can also be understood as a standard for
reading--a standard that requires us to "face the figure" as we
would face an other.
10. However, Spargo's reading of the other, and particularly our
disorienting relation to the other as it exists in both time and
texts, appears as dependent upon Levinas as it is upon Freud. For
Freud, the alternative state of mourning time is "traumatic," not
simply because it is difficult to endure or even unimaginable.
Rather, it is an event that cannot be understood straightforwardly
in linear time, and therefore returns experientially in the form
of flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations. A closer reading of
Levinas might also reveal that his ideas about ethics are closely
bound up with the problem of time as Freud most famously
articulated it with the notion of belatedness, or
/Nachträglichkeit/ as first introduced in his Project for a
Scientific Psychology (1895). Granted, while Spargo is sensitive
to Freud's contributions to our theorization of mourning and is
indebted to certain Freudian categories, he explicitly attempts to
move beyond a psychic model of mourning that focuses on the
survivor's resolution, always cognizant of this model's betrayal
of the dead. But I am not confident that we can afford to forsake
psychological priority in such a way. Perhaps we, too, need a
greater reconciliation of Freud and Levinas, one that Spargo may
not deem entirely possible or even desirable. While Spargo
suggests Levinas's implicit debt to Freud, contemporary readers of
Freud might be interested in hearing more about this, especially
considering Freud's underestimated influence on Levinas.
11. For Spargo, then, while "belatedness" is a significant category,
obligation becomes more important. And even if chapter four, for
example, argues that the belatedness of literary mourning
corresponds to the belatedness of ethical mourning in everyday
life, here Spargo's turn from Freud does not quite answer what I
see as the inevitable psychic consequences of such a view of
responsibility--one that is traumatic in its own right. As such,
Spargo's account appears to take us too far afield of the
necessarily psychic dimension of ethics which I see as more
realistically explained by Freud's account of the psychic time in
which mourning occurs. For Freud, every newly discovered love
object appears as a rediscovery of a former love. Love, and indeed
death, operate on a model of traumatic repetition. Spargo's
understanding of ethics seems to recognize this impliclitly: an
ethical obligation to the other takes place in skewed temporality,
which is, perhaps, part of the point; a refusal to master the
other, while still trying to recall her. It necessarily takes
place in an alternative realm of time, an alienating sense of time
that repositions us in "the time of the other"--both inside and
out of time--both lost and perpetually losing.
12. There is a "sense of peril" in this Levinasian (and, I would add,
Freudian) ethics that is not based on what is to be gained in the
name of "doing right," but is structured around loss. For Spargo,
this sense of peril comes with the recognition that "the death of
the other demands a renewal of responsibility--on the other side
of loss, as it were, in a beyond that structurally remembers the
obligation that precedes the event of the death" (29). Ultimately
this obligation, this responsibility, as the story of the troubled
reporter in the beginning of the book reveals, is at the heart of
Spargo's model of ethics, which requires a willing listener who
hears the testimony of a witness without reducing the speaker and
his or her story to an easily assimilable experience.
13. Thinking about the elegy in this way allows Spargo effectively to
formulate the surprising proposition that the anti-elegiac
tradition provides a trajectory for responsibility that in some
way anticipates the necessarily literary strategies of elegies
about the Holocaust. At first glance, it appears that Spargo
chooses his particular subjects--literary texts that range widely
from Hamlet to Renaissance, Romantic, and Modernist poetry, to
Randall Jarrell's and Sylvia Plath's Holocaust poetry--because
each of them has something to do with an ethical listener, and
more crucially still, a persona who refuses consolation in the
name of melancholy. However, a closer look, especially at the last
two chapters on the Holocaust poetry, suggests that far more
interesting claim is driving this book: The Holocaust appears here
as the point at which the anti-consolatory gesture of the modern
elegy is pushed too far and strains beneath its own weight.
14. Spargo reads Jarrell's poetic voice as Holocaust witness, for
example, as a commentary on "the American public's own
unwillingness to have traded present pleasures for attitudes
translating into practical actions on behalf of the refugees" of
the Holocaust (210). In so doing, Jarrell struggles to transform
his personal lyrics into something more wide-ranging that can take
on a "persuasive public dimension" (222). Spargo's defense of
Sylvia Plath against charges that she appropriates the atrocity of
the Holocaust to convey her own personal pain argues--to the
contrary--that in her Holocaust imagery, Plath figures "the
difficulty our society has in commemorating victims of atrocity"
(244). Because he is a Holocaust scholar in his own right, this
seems only natural, and it sheds new light on the book's premise
that we, as readers of poetry, like the poetry itself, not only
recognize injustice but also maintain an adequate memory of the
dead without perpetuating injustice itself. Ultimately, then, this
is not just another book about mourning or loss, nor is it simply
about time. It is a book that demands that we realize how
implicated we all are in a traumatic past, and that--despite our
own inclinations to the contrary--we can't so quickly or easily
forget our responsibility to the millions who have died unjustly.
15. In keeping with this impossible model of responsibility--a
responsibility for death and injustice that we must take on, but
necessarily cannot take on--Spargo concludes his book by proposing
that "mourning is both a figure for and expression of an
impossible responsibility wherein one refuses to yield the other
to the more comfortable freedoms of identity" (274). What are we
to make of this conclusion, one not more comforting than the story
of the reporter at the beginning of the book? Do we accept the
impossibility, feeling--somehow--like more ethical beings, and
then find a way to move on with our lives? Spargo's answer, in
fact, is a resounding /No/. There is no way to fulfill this sense
of ethics, there is no way to forget injustice, there is no way to
find closure, and then move on. And this is the point: to refuse
consolation where there is none to be found. Spargo's book
rightly, albeit quietly, calls for a sense of collective ethics,
an ethics that takes responsibility for those deaths in which we
have not had a direct hand. If there is anything unsettling in
this book, it must be that. Not only do the poets read here refuse
consolation in this way, but Spargo's book does as well. The
Ethics of Mourning is about much more than a relationship between
a poet and his or her personal dead. It is also about a
significant relationship with those millions in history who have
died at the hands of injustice. Such a recognition calls us all to
be responsible not only for those we love, but for those who
died--all those who died--in the /name/ of love...and in the name
of hate too, and history, as their stories have been recounted
through the ages.
/ Department of English
Central Connecticut State University
pozorskia@ccsu.edu /
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Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy
to Heaney. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1990.