"Internal difference/Where the Meanings, are": a theory of productive mourning

Rebecca Curran

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of English University of New South Wales Sydney, Australia

2007 Abstract

This thesis is a response to the abstract phenomenon of bereavement as well as to the death of an actual beloved. It situates mourning as ethically and politically significant, reading it as an instance of crisis for the bereaved subject as well as for the culture in which she is located. Via theorists as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Dominick LaCapra and Donald Winnicott, the thesis considers the enabling potential that is implicated in this crisis. It suggests that mourning has the capacity to manifest productively as a form of localised intervention or "revolt" that simultaneously invigorates the inner life of the subject and subverts certain ideological aspects of contemporary, Western culture. In particular, the thesis suggests that the significance of productive mourning lies in its capacity to attenuate, via an anti-elegiac approach to narrative, the normative discourse of "identity", a crucial element of the discursive network that sustains a socio-political system mired in the "truth" of liberal individualism. Productive mourning facilitates an interrogation of the self-other/subject-object dialectic embedded in Western culture. This interrogation might be conceived as a deconstruction of the subject in its privileged status relative to alterity, the deconstruction of, in other words, "identity" and its processes. The thesis is informed by the author's experience of bereavement and mourning following suicide. Utilising a fictocritical approach, it performs a commentary in addition to an argument, evincing a unique approach to delineating the personal, cultural and ethical significance of loss. Originality Statement

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

______Rebecca Curran Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank the following people:

Dr Anne Brewster, my supervisor, for never questioning my capacity to produce a good thesis. I thank Anne for her patience and her belief and trust in my ideas and methods.

Dr Brigitta Olubas, for reading and commenting on drafts.

Professor Laurel Richardson, whose writing workshop at UNSW in 2006 helped to push me over the line.

My family—Rob Curran, Jan Curran, Melissa Curran, Christopher Cyrill and Emily, Lizzie and Noah Curran-Cyrill—for the various and invaluable contributions each has made to sustaining my life and work. In particular, I thank my parents for instilling in me a deep love of reading, supporting my education, and never dictating to me the path I should take in life; and Emily, Lizzie and Noah for bringing me such love, joy and perspective.

Diana Sands and Dr Sue Messner, who made—and continue to make—so many things possible.

All my friends, especially Dr Anthea Taylor, who experienced a similar postgraduate journey and provided extraordinary and constant encouragement, intellectual companionship and emotional support. Germs, we did it ‘our way’.

M. (1973-1995), whose precise legacy I will always struggle to express, and M.'s family, for opening their hearts to me.

My colleagues who have shown interest and support. Special thanks to my current manager, Julianna Demetrius, who inspires, encourages and supports me and greatly contributes to the enjoyment of my paid work.

Many other people too numerous to name have contributed significantly to my life and work during the past decade, and I thank them also.

I gratefully acknowledge receipt during 1998-2001 of an Australian Postgraduate Award. Without the financial assistance this provided, I would not have embarked on postgraduate study. Table of Contents

I A bad summer: a collage 2 II Preface 8 III Introduction 12 IV Part 1: The modern approach to bereavement and its products 38 V Yonder revisited 76 VI Part 2: Mourning against monumentalism 94 VII Twenty-nine anecdotes 126 VIII Part 3: "Where such unmaking reigns": narrative in productive mourning 161 IX Five women 194 X Part 4: "The reverse of love's intention": mourning after suicide 210 XI Anniversary 241 XII Truth 245 XIII Conclusion 263 XIV Postscript 279 XIV Works consulted 281

Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo- events which rush by in spectacular dramatisations have not been lived by those informed of them...what is really lived has no relation to the official irreversible time of society and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of the consumable by-product of this time.

– Guy Debord1

One must respond even when one does not have the heart or is at a loss, lacking the words; one must speak, even reckon, so as to combat all the forces that work to efface or conceal not just the names on the tombstones but the apostrophe of mourning.

– Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas2

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us – We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are –

– Emily Dickinson3

1 Guy Debord, quoted by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. p6. 2 Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, "To Reckon With the Dead: Jacques Derrida's Politics of Mourning", Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning. P. Brault and M. Naas (eds.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. p30. 3 Emily Dickinson, Poem 258, Thomas H. Johnson (ed.). Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems. [1970] London: Faber & Faber, 1975.

1 A bad summer: a collage

It was a bad summer, and we all knew it. We liked to phrase it that way, as if what was happening was an aberration—a single season of pain and doubt—instead of all out informing people that our lives were falling apart, plain and simple.1 It may have been our age, or our inclination, but somehow we'd gotten stuck in the middle of sorrow.2

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known from the first. It was simple to touch you against the hacked background, the grain of what we had been. It was even simple to take each other's lives in our hands, as bodies.3 No one's fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen; we're not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes.4 Some friendships are the beautiful, fossilised remains of love affairs that did not evolve in the usual ways.5 Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story; women at least should know the difference between love and death.6

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live.7 How can I go on this mission without you—you, who might have told me everything you feel is true?

Sometimes the moon and I discern a woman I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat and choking her like hair. When away from you I try to create you in words, am I simply using you, like a river or a war?8 You held out your hand, I took your fingerprints. You asked for love, I gave you only descriptions. Please die, I said, so I can write about it.9 The waste of my love goes on this way, trying to save you from

2 yourself.10 A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?11

On what moral right do I dare attempt to stop the human species from committing suicide anyway? None. Especially since suicide is, we all know, the only really refreshing, new idea with any curiosity about it left at all.12 (She's been used before, in Marat, Sade, but she doesn't even know she's a cliche).13

This word died of bad water.14 Your body is not a word, it does not lie or speak truth either. It is only here or not here.15 You have transmuted yourself to me. I am a vestige, I am numb. Now you accuse me of murder.16 I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.17 (This form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.)18 We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in a darkness which I remember as drenched in light.19 You are the sun in reverse, all energy flows into you and is abolished.20 This one love. Repetitions from other lives. The deaths that must be lived. Denials.21

None of your candles the darkness will not breathe upon. How could I be caught dead being alive?22 They gave me a drug that slowed down the healing of wounds.23 Primordial pain as it stalks toward me, flashing its bleak torch in my eyes, blotting out her particular being, the details of her love.24 I suddenly see the world as no longer viable.25 The scream of an illegitimate voice. It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself: how do I exist?

3 This was the silence I wanted to break in you. I had questions but you would not answer. I had answers but you could not use them.26 Most of our love took the form of mute loyalty.27

This did not happen last year or forty years ago but last week. This has been happening, this happens.28 The country is too much itself to refract exact years.29 The place & pace of a particular story can be returned to never.30 Nothing gets finished, not dying, not mourning; the dead repeat themselves.31

§

We are older now, we have met before. These are my hands before your eyes.32 I understand life and death now, the choices. I didn't know your choice, or how by then you had no choice.33 By heart I have learned grief over and over again; 34 I want to call this life.35 When you have buried us, told your story, ours does not end.36 (When sisters separate they haunt each other.37 I will not be divided from her or myself by myths of separation).38 Courage to feel this, to tell of this, to be alive.39 I believe I am choosing something new, not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel.40

The woman who cherished her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. I love the scar tissue she handed on to me, but I want to go on from here with you, fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.41 This is what I am: the refusal to be a victim. We have lived with violence for so long. Am I to go on saying for myself, for her, this is my body, take and destroy it?42 No way I can walk back with you to the country of these mutilations.43 The story of our lives becomes our lives.44

4 There is no virtue in survival, only luck.45 My heart is moved by all I cannot save.46 This is useless to you and perhaps to others.47 So much has been destroyed.48 The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears. There is no poem you can write about it.49 Don't ask for the true story; why do you need it? The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue.50 A compass is useless; also trying to take directions from the movements of the sun, which are erratic. Words here are as pointless as calling in a vacant wilderness.51 In this country you can say what you like because no one will listen to you anyway, it's safe enough. In this country you can try to write the poem that can never be written, the poem that invents nothing and excuses nothing because you invent and excuse yourself each day. Elsewhere, this poem is not invention. Elsewhere this poem takes courage. Elsewhere, this poem must be written because the poets are already dead.52 The loony bins are full of those who never wrote a poem. Most suicides are not poets: a good statistic.53 The lost continents continue.54

How to close such a message? I miss you. We are all as well as can be expected. Hope you are fine and having a wonderful time. Don't send a picture postcard when you can. Stay hidden. Come back to us. We'll join you. Don't accept rides from strange men. Remember that all men are strange as hell. Think of us sometimes my sister. Forget us, my friend. Watch for me when you look in the mirror; I see you all the time.55

1 Alice Hoffman, Local Girls. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. p41. 2 Hoffman, op.cit. p55. 3 Adrienne Rich, "Origins and the History of Consciousness". The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. 4 Adrienne Rich, "Twenty One Love Poems". The Dream of a Common Language. 5 Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust. London: Vintage, 1998. p147. 6 Rich, "Twenty One Love Poems". 7 ibid. 8 ibid.

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9 Margaret Atwood, "Their Attitudes Differ". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. London: Virago, 1998. 10 Adrienne Rich, "For the Dead". Diving into the Wreck. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973. 11 Atwood, "Their Attitudes Differ". 12 Robin Morgan, "Credo". Monster. New York: Random House, 1972. 13 Robin Morgan, "Nightfoals". Monster. 14 Margaret Atwood, "Two Headed Poems". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 15 Atwood, "Their Attitudes Differ". 16 Margaret Atwood, "Speeches for Dr Frankenstein". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 17 Margaret Atwood, "Backdrop Addresses Cowboy". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 18 Margaret Atwood, "Asparagus". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 19 Rich, "Origins and the History of Consciousness". 20 Margaret Atwood, "They Are Hostile Nations". Eating Fire: Selected Poems 21 Adrienne Rich, "Not Somewhere Else but Here". The Dream of a Common Language. 22 Robin Morgan, "Revolucinations". Monster. 23 Adrienne Rich, " A Valediction Forbidding Mourning". The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971. 24 Adrienne Rich, "Splittings". The Dream of a Common Language. 25 Adrienne Rich, "The Phenomenology of Anger". Diving Into the Wreck. 26 Adrienne Rich, "Cartographies of Silence". The Dream of a Common Language. 27 Adrienne Rich, "A Woman Dead in her Forties". The Dream of a Common Language. 28 Margaret Atwood, "Notes Toward a Poem that Can Never be Written". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 29 Marge Piercy, "Proximity Fuses". Available Light. New York: Random House, 1988. 30 J.S Harry, "They Will Think of This Place as Waiting". Selected Poems. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1995. 31 Margaret Atwood, "Two Dreams 2". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 32 Rich, "Splittings". 33 Rich, "A Woman Dead in Her Forties". 34 bell hooks, "Deep On-going This Loss". A Woman's Mourning Song. New York: Harlem River Press, 1993. 35 Rich, "Origins and the History of Consciousness". 36 Adrienne Rich, "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev". The Dream of a Common Language. 37 Adrienne Rich, "Transit". A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981. 38 Rich, "Splittings". 39 Rich, "Not Somewhere Else But Here". 40 Rich, "Splittings". 41 Rich, "Twenty-One Love Poems". 42 Adrienne Rich, "Natural Resources". The Dream of a Common Language. 43 Margaret Atwood, "Head Against White". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 44 Rich, "Twenty-One Love Poems". 45 Marge Piercy, "Joy Road and Livernois". Available Light. 46 Rich, "Natural Resources". 47 Rich, "Cartographies of Silence". 48 Rich, "Natural Resources".

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49 Atwood, "Notes Toward a Poem That Can Never be Written". 50 Margaret Atwood, "True Stories". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 51 Margaret Atwood, "Journey to the Interior". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 52 Atwood, "Notes Toward a Poem That Can Never be Written". 53 Margaret Atwood, "The Words Continue Their Journey". Eating Fire: Selected Poems. 54 J.S. Harry, "Tell Me What You See Vanishing". Selected Poems. 55 Robin Morgan, "Letter to a Sister Underground". Monster.

7 Preface ______

When I first embarked on this thesis a number of years ago, I wanted to write about something I called "traumatic female subjectivity". I was particularly interested in the event of suicide, and the idea that suicide performs the (il)logical conclusion of the embodiment of traumatic female subjectivity. In short, I was preoccupied with the notion of female melancholia and its radical interminability. In hindsight I understand this preoccupation as an effect of the historical facts of my late adolescence and early adulthood. I was clinically depressed for a good portion of this period, and two months prior to my twenty-first birthday, my closest friend, M., took her life. I wanted to write about female melancholia and suicide, I think, for one blindingly obvious reason: to produce a memorial to M. I wished passionately to "bear witness" to her suffering and to her fate. Subtending my memorial intent was also a profound need to evince a theoretical explanation of that fate. In the absence of an actual suicide note, I set myself the task of answering the crucial question: "why?"

A little over a year after M.'s suicide, I enrolled in the Honours year of my degree. As part of that program I attended twice-weekly seminars on critical theory and psychoanalysis. In the classroom, my seduction by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan commenced. I was thrilled by the concept of lack, by its transcendental status as the ontological condition of subjectivity. I liked the feeling of it on my tongue, that it was similar to black, but exacted less verbal effort. Yet something critical—and critically affecting—occurred in that classroom. In a sentence, my losses—their history and specificity—were transmuted into one irremediable absence. Suddenly, it was not my fault I was depressed, nor was it M.'s for taking her life. Rather, I concluded with Lacan's assistance, we were merely performing our unviable femininity. I decided that

8 I would write a treatise explaining this, and at the conclusion of my Honours year, enrolled in a PhD.

One year later, two things occurred in close proximity. On a clear winter day, I slipped at the base of a Blue Mountains cliff and cracked my skull on the slippery rock below. There was a moment—either just before or just after the impact—when a wave of relief surged over me. A shameful disappointment rose within me when I realised I was still alive. Some months following this incident I ended up in casualty, struggling to breathe one late summer night. This was caused by a severe allergic reaction, and soon abated, but not before death seemed distinctly possible—at least to me—and fear seemed to paralyse me as much as the allergen that had, according to the doctor, caused the constriction of my throat. Perhaps I am inventing a certain symmetry when I say that it was while recovering from this experience that I became repulsed by the task I had set for myself. In bed one day I remembered a line by a poet: Live or die, but don't poison everything.1 When I got better I decided to sever my nascent love affair with Lacan and write about mourning instead. I did so because, somehow, my confusion about whether I wanted to live or die caused me to reflect on my own experience of bereavement and the cultural hostility towards it, a hostility that announces that "…there is no room for the pathos of working through specific, historical losses".2

It became apparent to me that I wanted to protest against the radical devaluation of the other implicit in this announcement, against the flattening and systematising discourse responsible for such an impoverished scenario. If, like the sky, absence and lack cover everything, I wanted to recover mourning as way of wresting the specificity of the lost other from that totality. In this way, I continued to be motivated by the desire to construct a memorial to M. This motivation gradually began to shift as my mourning progressed and my thinking became more sophisticated and nuanced. Consequently, I came to view mourning in terms not of simply lovingly re-membering the other, but

9 lovingly dis-membering the self as well. It was at this stage that (writing about) mourning began to be less a means to an end and more "an ongoing, interpretative challenge".3 I had reached a significant turning point when I decided that I would not dedicate my thesis to M.

The work that follows is a product of my recognition that "the ethical quest for justice often depends on the ability to turn certain constellations of emotional revolt…to productive ends".4 These are ends that are not "merely stylistic".5 They aspire to something more than the embodiment of a postmodern symptom, that is to say, to "cynical indifference" before the spectre of lack.6 What most disturbs me about this spectre is the absence of hope it denotes. I invoke the term "hope" as the cultural theorist Mary Zournazi has, that is, as a quality that opens a space within which "new social and individual imaginaries" are made possible.7 Hope militates against the "type of depression and narcissism" that Zournazi describes, "where territories are defended and the stakes raised are already known".8 The work that excites me is work that, in the words of Zournazi, "[keeps] asking what risks need to be taken for a hopeful world, what habits of thought need to be changed in our cultures, and what responsibilities and ethical and political acts will make the world a hopeful place".9 Above all, I intend my thesis to be a contribution to this work. "The fact that a situation is ubiquitous", Alice Miller has written, "does not absolve us from examining it".10 Miller argues to the contrary; it is the banal "truths" that constitute our singular and collective fate that must be examined most urgently. And so, with hope, to mourning.

1 Anne Sexton, "Live". The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. 2 Alessia Riccardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. p20. 3 Riccardi, op.cit. p4. 4 Riccardi, op.cit. p65. 5 Riccardi states that "[t]he issues at stake in the definition of a critical postmodernity are ethical and political rather than merely stylistic". op.cit. p13.

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6 Riccardi, op.cit. p98. 7 Mary Zournazi (ed.), Hope: new philosophies for change. Annandale: Pluto Press, 2002. p12. 8 ibid. 9 Zournazi, op.cit. p19. 10 Alice Miller, quoted by Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. p1.

11 Introduction

______

The desire [is] to create something that is not a complete argument...but where there are endings and beginnings all over the work. A working work.1

…the most serious work we can do with our response to an event, to a set of feelings and memories, is to engage in play, in serious play, with them.2

Like Guy Debord, whom I have quoted in the epigraph to this thesis, I am interested in the extraordinary significance of those events that define ordinary, subjective existence. One such event is bereavement by the death of a beloved. This thesis is a response to the phenomenon of bereavement as well as to the death of an actual beloved. Comprising both an argument and a commentary, it seeks to perform a meditation on the personal, cultural and ethical significance of loss. I suggest that loss induces a crisis for both the bereaved subject and the culture in which she is located, and that this crisis proffers the opportunity for a productive experience of mourning. What I refer to throughout as "productive mourning" manifests as a form of localised or intimate "revolt"3 that simultaneously invigorates the inner life of the subject and subverts certain ideological aspects of contemporary, Western culture.

The particular ideological aspect that interests me is the fictive independence that the symbolic4 of Western culture claims to offer the subject in the guise of "identity". Put simply, the significance of productive mourning lies in its capacity to attenuate, via an anti-elegiac approach to narrative, the

12 normative discourse of identity. This discourse is a crucial element of the symbolic network that sustains a socio-political system mired in the "truth" of liberal individualism. Productive mourning facilitates an interrogation of the self-other/subject-object dialectic embedded in Western culture. This interrogation might be conceived as a deconstruction of the subject in its privileged status relative to alterity; the deconstruction, in other words, of "identity" and its processes. To this end, the thesis suggests that productive mourning can be an impetus for engaging differently cast questions about the subject's implication in the symbolic of Western culture. While there is nothing new about the idea that "libidinal object loss may fuel and influence sublimation that yields remarkable creativity and unique productions",5 it is elaborating the significance of mourning as a unique production in and of itself with which I am concerned.

Situating "mourning"

I use the word mourning rather than grief to describe the experience of subjectivity that is called into play as a result of the death of a beloved. At face value this choice may seem odd given that, at present, the latter term has greater cultural currency than the former. Therapists, for instance, advertise themselves as specialising in grief, not mourning, as do the titles of self-help books. Broadly speaking, to mourn and to grieve connote much the same thing in the modern English vernacular. The terms tend to be used interchangeably, although "grieving" has become more popular than "mourning" to describe the process of psychosomatic "adjustment" that is provoked by bereavement. However, as Lyn Lofland explains, "while the terms grief and mourning are frequently used as synonyms, scholars have found it essential to differentiate between them. Grief refers to what is felt, mourning to what is done".6 This distinction informs my own semiotic choice. Yet, while I characterise mourning in the terms suggested—that is, as an actively constituted practice— mine is not an anthropological or sociological approach. I do not use the word

13 mourning to denote an empirically observed set of culturally specific customs or rituals enacted around bereavement. Rather, I invoke it in the psychoanalytic tradition to indicate a particular libidinal experience of (bereaved) subjectivity, albeit one that is circumscribed by the subject's location in a particular socio-historic context. By "libidinal experience" I am referring to a collection of intra-psychic responses on the part of the subject, in this case, to the (perceived) dispossession of the beloved. These responses cannot be reduced to mere emotions or feeling states, rather, they constitute a performative labour.

I have sought to recuperate mourning in the terms I have suggested mainly because grief is a signifier with increasingly overt consumerist connotations. As such, it has become incapable of accounting for the complex libidinal experience brought to bear by bereavement. In the past two or three decades, grief—like depression and stress—has become a marketable commodity, one subject to all manner of expert intervention. Paradoxically, at the same time it has been made to "mean" so thoroughly, grief has been arguably denuded of significance. Within a great grab bag of psychobabble, it has no specificity. Along with depression and stress, grief is a concept that is over-articulated and under-qualified in 21st century Western culture, signifying little more than a set of generalised symptoms. Book shelves, television programs and magazine columns teem with populist "experts" whose self-appointed role is to catalogue these symptoms and to orient the layperson along the right course towards expunging them. Helpful tips abound. Grief can be mitigated, the experts tell us, by (variously) eating healthily, getting plenty of exercise, not being afraid to cry, practicing forgiveness, keeping a journal, taking up a new hobby and—a perennial favourite—letting go. "By these scanty prompts", writes Anneli Rufus, "[we] are prepped in the basics of grief: Grieving for Dummies".7 It is deemed the "expert’s" prerogative to point out the individually and moralistically couched benefits of the

14 bereaved subject’s experience: while it will be painful, this is a journey that will make you stronger, wiser and more appreciative of each and every moment… etc.

In this way, I suggest, grief is represented primarily in passive, instrumental terms and the inherent dynamism and theatricality of mourning is denied.8 Bereavement is figured as an event to be countenanced rather than actively experienced, and this reflects a version of subjectivity that is almost wholly impotent against the machinations of the symbolic. Put bluntly, the concept of grief, so configured, is a vastly inadequate way of approaching the question of loss and its significance. Following my own bereavement, I was never convinced, for instance, that (it was enough that) I should merely "recover" from my grief and resume a normal existence, however morally or otherwise enriched. At a conceptual level, the chief frustration is two-fold: the passive, instrumental figuring of grief strips the bereaved subject of any real agentive capacity and, at the same time, denudes bereavement itself of specificity, ignoring its far-ranging psychic, social and ethical implications.

In her important book, The Ends of Mourning, philosopher Alessia Riccardi does not regard this culturally preferred treatment of grief as coincidental. Rather, she views it as characteristic of a "consumerism of loss" that elides the significance of the object or the other.9 According to Riccardi, this consumerism dominates high and late capitalism.10 It stresses the importance of homeostatic subjectivity over the relation with the other, that is, of identity rather than identification.11 In other words, the significance of the other (object) is elided in favour of reinforcing and amplifying the self (subject).12 In contrast, bereavement intuitively turns the subject's attention to the other, that is, to the lost object. Capitalism, however, which depends on the notion of the atomistically conceived individual, requires this attention to be re-routed towards the self. I concur with Riccardi's argument, and, like her, I am interested in the ethical consequences of the consumerism of loss. Julia Kristeva, who has made the point that "we are surrounded by distressed

15 persons, but they are given no representation", suggests one such consequence.13 This statement can be read in multiple ways.

One interpretation, and the interpretation that I would like to stress, is that the current symbolic does not specify suffering in ways that enable individuals to recognise themselves and their most profound, affecting experiences. In claiming that "[t]here is a dearth of methods and theories about how suffering can be useful", psychotherapist and writer Polly Young- Eisendrath suggests another related consequence.14 Certainly, the specious profit-out-of-loss model that I have already alluded to is ubiquitous. What is not found in quotidian terms is rather a nuanced approach to suffering that is invested in what Anthony Elliot has called "the critical reappropriation of meaning in social life".15 In contemporary Western culture, we are arguably in the midst of a collective hunger for alternative ways of considering the experience of social and psychic life. More precisely, what we seem to desire are ways of understanding suffering that neither claim to be capable of transcending it, nor retreat into interminable, postmodern melancholy. In the words of psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, what we require are "secular maintenance myths" that enable us to withstand the anxiety and alienation of contemporary life, but at the same time, resist the conflation of normalising limits with normalisation.16

I argue that the first of the consequences I have identified above—the failure to give representation to distress—is primarily symptomatic of capitalism, while the second—the absence of useful theories about suffering— is primarily symptomatic of postmodernism. In contemporary Western culture, the ideologies of capitalism and postmodernism co-exist in curious tension. On the one hand, capitalism configures the self in terms that imply choice and empowerment but which actually privilege an oppressive, normative identity. This identity is incapable of supporting difference and therefore, specificity. In drawing constant and critical attention to the effects of

16 normativity, postmodernity has also arguably suppressed the possibility of specificity by rendering the subject in "distinctly fragile and feeble form",17 as incapable of aspiring to anything more than cynical detachment. In this version of events, as cultural historian Dominick LaCapra has noted, "any mode of reconstruction or renewal [is seen] as objectionably totalising, recuperative, optimistic or naive".18 In response to this strange and somewhat paralysing state of affairs, there has been a renewed interest in recent times in exploring what Joan Kirkby has called a "a politics of the inner life".19 Advocates of this politics are interested in re-investigating the productive, intimate capacities of subjectivity in ways that neither over nor under-state their significance. The objective of elucidating a politics of the inner life is to evince ways of being or living that resist simple capitulation to ideology, whatever its basis. My attention to mourning can be understood in these terms. Julia Kristeva has argued that we must "invent and diversify listening posts in order to compensate for the general deficiency of symbolic markers" 20 attesting to the possibility of this approach. From a meta-discursive perspective, this thesis is an attempt to do so.

Influences and frameworks

Having very broadly established the nature of my undertaking in this thesis, I want to comment on the intellectual and political influences that inform it. At the outset, I emphasise my debt to feminism. My work is determined by feminist philosophies in several aspects. To begin with, it acquiesces with the now ubiquitous tenet of the women's liberation movement, "the personal is political". A contemporary, theoretical revision of this aphorism might be that the subject and the symbolic are inextricably linked, and that the political is also inescapably personal. In this thesis I am concerned, among other things, with elaborating an intimate experience of subjectivity—mourning—that says something about the ideological underpinning and effects of the symbolic of Western culture. By doing so, I am making a choice to dwell in material demeaned by a phallogocentric,

17 epistemological tradition as private, affectual and abject.21 It is primarily through the work of feminists that such material has been validated as a suitable discursive subject. This is illustrative of the fact that, while the specific political ideologies that define feminism at any historical moment are polymorphous, transient and contestable, feminism has always entailed the interrogation of epistemological structures. One of the most significant legacies of feminism is, I suggest, its enduring emphasis on questioning patriarchal and phallogocentric "ways of knowing". In this thesis, I am seeking both to practice a different "way of knowing" and to suggest that mourning itself can engender an alternative epistemological landscape.

My feminist interest in the interrogation of epistemological structures precedes and has been further cultivated by my instruction in early structuralism (Freud); poststructuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Levinas); and psychoanalysis (Kristeva, Irigaray). Given its profound influence, knowledge of Freud's oeuvre is critical to an understanding of later developments in twentieth century Continental philosophy, particularly those enunciated by the feminist psychoanalytic philosophers Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, both of whom I engage with in this thesis. For me, as for the feminist psychoanalytic philosopher Jane Flax, the fundamental appeal of psychoanalysis is that, "[f]or all its shortcomings [it] presents the best and most promising theories of how a self that is simultaneously embodied, social, ‘fictional’ and real comes to be, changes and persists over time."22 Critically, in entertaining these theories, psychoanalysis dramatises (albeit ambivalently) the encounter with the other.23 Moreover, as Adam Phillips has argued, psychoanalysis renders "both the private-social and the anti-social available for comment".24 Unfortunately, this aspect of Freud's legacy has been inadequately appreciated, particularly by those feminists who, quite appropriately, have been concerned to point out the patriarchal bias underpinning his work. Indeed it is only through my work on mourning that I

18 have come to appreciate, despite its many problems and failings, this revolutionary aspect of Freud's achievement.

In its radical examination of difference, post-structuralism is closely associated with psychoanalysis. Its praxis of deconstruction—a term and approach indebted to Jacques Derrida—is a powerful methodological tool for anyone seeking to investigate aspects of the nexus between subjectivity and "the social and historical context within which subjectivity develops".25 Performing a radical critique of metaphysical presuppositions, poststructuralism is particularly important for having opened up for scrutiny the subject-object relation, and its dependence on the law of identity. The other respect in which poststructuralism has generated enormous influence is its concern to demonstrate the radical inseparability of the signifier and the signified, or, put differently, "the poetic-cum-rhetorical dimension of the text…from the 'content', message or meaning".26 The import of poststructuralism for my own work is doubly manifest, influencing my approach to project (conceptualising and writing) and subject (mourning the other).

Because of the way I draw on the combined influences of feminism, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism to consider questions about the subject's implication in the symbolic order, my work is a contribution to the academic field that has come to be known as cultural studies, which is itself indebted to both feminism and philosophy as well as a variety of other disciplines like sociology, anthropology and history. The emergence of cultural studies is an historical effect of cumulative interventions that have forced the academy to take greater account of issues concerning subjectivity, language and culture as well as of differently embodied perspectives. It is primarily concerned with the enculturation of human existence in all its aspects, and, as Hal Foster has put it, with seeking "to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations".27

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That this is a thesis located within cultural studies is underscored by the range of writings and approaches I draw on. I mobilise "high" theory and standard critical texts as well as "popular" contributions to the theme of mourning. Thus, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud share the page with Germaine Greer and Stephanie Dowrick. The reasons for this eclectic approach are quite straightforward. In the first place, the approach belies a certain utilitarian pragmatism. I survey a range of contributions to the topic of mourning because they assist me to convey the observations I wish to make. That Greer and Kristeva are writers and cultural commentators who operate in vastly different discursive contexts is plain; yet something as profound to the experience of humanity as mourning cannot be contained within one or another discursive context. This brings me to my second line of reasoning. Unlike some objects of academic study, mourning is a profoundly embodied, enculturated state produced by, and productive of, a range of discourses. Not to attend to the full range of these would be to limit opportunities for analysis and insight. Thus, while writers like Kristeva and Derrida have much to offer in a conceptual and critical sense about mourning, "popular" and self help texts function to interpellate subjects who are experiencing mourning in ways that theoretical manouevres of the sort practiced by these authors generally do not. It is important to attend to such texts in order to understand how subjects are collectively conditioned to understand and interpret what is happening to them. Conversely, in order to elucidate the normalising function of self help texts, inter alia, it is useful to turn to theoretical articulations which are able to provide conceptual pegs on which to "hang" one's analysis.

While it is useful to situate my trajectory in this way, it is perhaps more so at this point to specifically locate the main writers and texts that subtend my thesis. Julia Kristeva's elaboration of the concept of "revolt" and its contemporary, cultural relevance is critically important for my theory of productive mourning. In the more recent incarnation of Kristeva's work in

20 which this concept is elucidated, what particularly attracts me is the simultaneously ethical, political and theoretical approach that grounds it. Most overtly, it is Kristeva’s commitment to theorising the contemporary subject and the ethico-political significance of the subject’s psychic interiority (or inner life) that influences my work on mourning.28 Kristeva argues that "there can be no socio-political transformation without a transformation of subjects".29 That she considers subjective transformation viable is in itself important to acknowledge. As Alessia Riccardi has astutely observed, Kristeva thus performs an active resistance against the nihilistic sentiment that could be said to characterise the general philosophical crisis of our time.30 Unlike Jacques Lacan, for instance, she avoids "lamenting what is lost, absent or impossible".31

Although I disagree with some of the conclusions Kristeva arrives at in her oeuvre generally, these are on the whole irrelevant to my own project, and consequently I do not engage with them here. The texts that primarily concern me are The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The power and limits of psychoanalysis32 and Revolt, She Said,33 in addition to her much earlier and seminal work, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.34 These are the texts in which two of the key concepts I rely upon to elucidate my theory of productive mourning— abjection and revolt—are developed with most salience. Jacques Derrida is another writer whose work is of important and clear relevance to my own. Derrida's work is always concerned, to some extent, to demonstrate the incapacity of the symbolic of Western culture to "respect the Being and meaning of the other".35 In Memoires for Paul de Man,36 Derrida’s response to the death of his close friend and colleague, the specific consequences of this incapacity for the experience of mourning are considered. The text essentially forms a catalogue of questions and meditations on the ethical dimension of mourning, and these questions and meditations shape my own thoughts in overt and subtle ways. Both Derrida and Kristeva are, in turn, ambivalent heirs of Sigmund Freud. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Freud on

21 modern thinking about loss and grief—which I discuss in detail in Part 1— and, as such, his influence on my work is profound.

In terms of my thoughts about the contemporary cultural hostility toward mourning, I am indebted to both Alessia Riccardi, the philosopher whom I have already mentioned, and to the cultural historian Dominick LaCapra. Riccardi's The Ends of Mourning was published after I had formulated my own thesis but before I had completed writing it and I was heartened to find affirmation within its pages for my own view that contemporary Western culture has all but eschewed the question of loss. Riccardi's deconstruction of the reasons for this hermeneutic failure is invaluable, assisting me to understand the effect of the historical imperative and to better appreciate the discursive point at which (a) critical intervention is required. Dominick LaCapra's work37 is important to Riccardi's, and to my own, because he elucidates what is problematic—ethically as well as politically—about the failure to attend to loss. LaCapra also offers a useful way of figuring the performative response ("acting-out") encouraged by a consumerism of loss and on the other hand, the performative response ("working-through") that might be seen to resist it. The work of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has been very influential, enabling me to begin imagining how I might set about articulating mourning in terms of an enabling experience of subjectivity, as "a way of nuancing the theatricality that is integral to the making of our identities".38 I owe a particular debt to Phillips' 1999 book, Darwin’s Worms,39 which performs an ingenious meditation on the topic of how the experience of loss is an integral part of human existence that also prompts creative, gainful resourcefulness.

There are other important theorists whom I critically engage in this thesis. I am indebted to the work of the poststructuralist historian Michel Foucault on the dispersal of power via the production of normative discourses that delimit the possibility of subjectivity for assisting me to explain why

22 mourning is a culturally threatening event.40 My understanding of the relationship between ethics and alterity is informed by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas41 and the feminist psychoanalytic philosopher Luce Irigaray.42 (I owe a particular debt here to Penelope Deutscher’s late 1990's essay, "Irigaray Anxiety: Luce Irigaray and her ethics for improper selves"43 for reinvigorating my interest in Irigaray and the applicability of her work to my thinking about mourning.) I make use of Rudolf Bernet's 2000 essay, "The Traumatized Subject", to develop my ideas about the role of trauma in the life of the subject.44 The important work in the mid-twentieth century of child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott45 has contributed to my thinking about the facilitation of experiences of productive mourning. To this end Hélène Cixous’ eloquent meditation on "the gift of loss" is also important.46 In her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Cixous, who defies categorisation, offers a way of thinking about how and why mourning—as a form of exile—is recoverable in productive terms. Philosopher Jane Flax, and in particular her classic though still contemporary study published a decade and a half ago, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, also requires mention.47 Flax’s influence on my work derives largely from the way in which she has helped to clarify a number of theoretical complexities that subtend my approach. Specifically, her commentary on object-relations theory has assisted my thinking around a subjective capacity that is not defined by "primary narcissism".48 Flax’s pragmatism, which is expressed as a form of scepticism about "truth claims…understood…in abstract correspondence to the Real",49 has also served as a reminder of the challenges associated with theorising and writing about intrapsychic events that occur within specific political, social and embodied contexts.

Heterotopic textuality: fictocriticism and an alternative conception of “the thesis”

Within this work, there is no seamless movement through "thesis- antithesis-synthesis". I find the traditional tripartite model of "the thesis" anti-

23 intuitive and inadequate. While one of the things I am interested in doing is advancing an argument, I regard the value of my work (and for that matter, any work) as residing within the various relations that emerge out of the processes (or parts) that constitute it, rather than in their coherent resolution. A simple way of putting this is to say that while this thesis can be read as a body of work, it is a body that is aware of its limitations as well as the network of parts that constitute it. The subtle shift from the traditional model of the thesis that this position represents is one that acknowledges the fallacy of internal consistency, a notion more at home with liberal humanism than with post-structuralist thinking. This acknowledgment hopefully encourages both writer and reader to dispense with what Hélène Cixous has called "the speculating self, the speculating, clever 'I'",50 an entity that inhibits creative engagement with ideas in favour of demonstrating one’s mastery over them. In the epigraph to this Introduction, I have quoted Rachel Blau du Plessis’ definition of a "working work" as a text comprised of co-existent "endings and beginnings". This formulation evokes for me the Lefebvrean51 notion of "heterotopia". A heterotopia is a site of displacement/misplacement where what is exigent "is not understanding, but meeting, encounter".52 A heterotopic text, then, is not combative in the way it progresses a theory or a critique. It is not invested in defending the propriety of what it has to say at all costs, but rather with engaging the process of "saying" it. The most overt marker of heterotopic textuality in this work is my practice of "fictocriticism". A decade ago, Noel King noted that:

the fictocritical and the paraliterary are in the process of being defined and refined, with the result that an unavoidable degree of provisionality attaches to any attempts at elaborating what the terms eventually might be made to mean.53

I suggest that the term fictocriticism remains similarly provisional and contestable, despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that following a flurry of

24 debate in the 1990's, there has been a relative paucity of critical material engaging it.54 Bearing this in mind, the definition employed by Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettelbeck in The space between: Australian women writing fictocriticism, is one I find useful. Kerr writes that:

[f]ictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridised writing that moves between the poles of fiction ('invention'/'speculation') and criticism ('deduction'/'explication'), of subjectivity ('interiority') and objectivity ('exteriority')…[as] writing that brings the 'creative' and the 'critical' together — not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing a spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them 'say' something else.55

Another way of putting this is to say that fictocriticism embodies and exploits what Roland Barthes calls "the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical".56 In a separate context, Kerr puts it differently again: [i]n the context of qualitative research in the humanities and social science disciplines the fictocritical effect is that which disrupts disciplinarity, whether because it refuses to theorise, works with partial and situated knowledges, or because it is personal and demotic in tone (in short, the intrusion of 'imagination' and 'creativity').57

Notably, my own excursion into fictocritical territory commenced during the period I first decided to write about mourning. From the outset, as I explained in the Preface, this decision was imbued with personal significance. Clearly, my desire to "say something" about mourning was overtly linked with my own particular, subjective history. From the beginning, the question of how to

25 manage this relationship posed a dilemma. At first I attempted to resolve it by practicing a temporary, provisional mode of writing through which I imagined I might exorcise my subjective history. This I approached as a cathartic exercise that, once completed, would enable me to get on with the business of "doing" a thesis. 58 Even my undergraduate adventures in feminism and postmodernism had done little to interfere with my asssumption that there were certain institutional imperatives I must comply with. Evacuating the critical text of one's subjective history and personal investments was chief among these.

I was aware of the existence of a handful of infamous "hybrid" texts by feminist writers that relied mostly on the insertion of autobiographical content to enunciate "a politics of self location"59 intended to subvert the generic conventions of traditional academic writing.60 However, I regarded the legitimacy of such texts as being contingent on the authority attached to their (tenured) academic authors. I did not seriously consider that it was open to me to admit my subjective history to any thesis I might write. At this time I had never heard of "fictocriticism". When I was so enlightened, my initial response was to interpret the existence of the term and of texts that self-reflexively announced themselves as fictocritical as constituting a kind of permission—a permission to "hang on" a while longer to that which I could not, in truth, "let go"—my subjectivity and its particular history. For fictocriticism, as I understood it, was critically interested in engaging with "what is inevitably left out and or misrepresented" by the representational practices associated with traditional academic writing.61 I was excited by the revelation that there a way of writing available to me that could enable me to explore the intersection between the various epistemological fields—theoretical, subjective, biographical— influencing my thinking about mourning. This knowledge freed me to imagine how I might go about importing materials from these fields into "the text" in order to problematise the very project of representation I was undertaking.

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As this statement suggests, what marks fictocritical texts as I read them is their deliberate focus on "the creation rather than the explication of meaning".62 As Helen Flavell explains, "in ficto-critical texts the form is not just the vehicle for the story; the form is part of the message".63 Refuting the constraints associated with the traditional requirements of scholarly denotation, fictocriticism experiments with textual strategies to foreground the labile and contestable status of the subject and the representational practices she employs. In this way, fictocriticism is a writing practice that "imposes self- vigilance on the process of subject positioning both in language and discourse and at a specific historical moment or a particular cultural space",64 thus enacting a self-reflexive awareness of "the nature of textuality and of authorship".65 Bringing "other voices" into the text in ways that do not conform with the conventional requirement of authoritative citation is one way this is foregrounded. Much fictocritical work is overtly feminist, and perhaps feminists, many of whom are profoundly interested in exploring the resonances of other voices, are attracted to fictocritical writing precisely because it enables this interplay in a way that other textual forms have traditionally prohibited. This would correspond with Anne Brewster’s point that fictocriticism "describes not so much a style or an aesthetics as a practice which has been produced by specific historical conditions",66 and with Anna Gibbs' statement that fictocriticism "says something which can't be said any other way".67 Gibbs, in fact, goes so far as to say that fictocriticism has its roots specifically in feminism, an analysis with which Flavell concurs.68

Flavell goes further to locate fictocriticism as a specifically "minoritarian" form69 that "vigorously looks for alternative links between self and other, and instead of inhibiting difference through the codes of normalised interpretation…engages in a process that is both experimental and ethical".70 This emphasis on the experimental and the ethical "rather than the epistemological dimension" of the text71 is perhaps the quality that most

27 attracts me to the practice of writing fictocritically. As Nettelbeck explains, "the effect of the fictocritical…text is twofold: it creates the critical text as something other than a hermeneutical exercise…and it suggests that the critical text can be used to do something other than explication".72 What is particularly notable about this effect is the way it is produced according to an implicit acknowledgment of its productive limitations; fictocritical texts are self- reflexively constituted as partial and situated interventions. "Consequently", writes Brewster, "fictocritical writing does not deliver us from anxiety over the production of meaning".73 This is an important point. Fictocriticism:

as an alternative model of knowledge production which foregrounds issues of relativity, hybridisation, contradiction and uncertainty by defamiliarising the conventions of genre, enacts the process of thought, of learning, of writing and reading, and the 'digestion' (or non-digestion) of knowledge.74

The fictocritical writing that appears in this thesis does so intermittently as discrete departures or "sorties" within the body of the text, interrupting the more conventionally reproduced exegesis. These tangents represent points of extremity, and are concentrated manifestations of the heterotopic textual encounter. Flavell has suggested that in order to achieve something other than a superficial stylistic effect, fictocritical texts must do more than work to "temporarily undermine one's mastery of the subject of critical attention".75 The placement of the fictocritical writing in this thesis as "sorties" risks a reading which views them as a series of temporary departures from the text that do little to subvert "the masterful tradition of dominant critical writing".76 Yet, the tangents they constitute are also incursive. They undermine the apprehension of "the thesis" as a repository of truth-claims, revealing it to be rather a collection of variegated attempts to "resolve, transpose, reweight, dilute, arrange, substitute" etc. materials that are of significance to the author.77 In this way, they evoke "those knowledges that…can only be practiced rather than

28 enunciated",78 thereby drawing attention to the elisions upon which the conventional critical text depends. This is not to say that what is elided is simply the "autobiographical" or "personal" dimension. While the fictocritical "sorties" that appear in this thesis turn mainly upon an actual event and experience in my own life—the death of a beloved—they cannot be discursively contained as such. bell hooks puts it well when she says that:

[r]ethinking ways to constructively use confession and memory shifts the focus away from mere naming of one’s experience. It enables [us] to talk about identity in relation to culture, history, politics, whatever and to challenge the notion of identity as static and unchanging.79

The approach I take in placing fictocritical writing alongside more conventional critical discourse can be viewed as a contribution to the on-going effort within a range of cultural interventions to:

1) avoid propagating ancient yet still operative myths about author-ity and its relationship to the production of "knowledge",80 and

2) insist on the importance of acknowledging and "writing out" the link between the generation of effects and concepts,81 something which is frequently obfuscated within a symbolic culture that "[focuses] only on the finite product, the text produced".82

Significantly, the point at which my fictocritical and conventional critical writing visably merge within the thesis is also the point at which I experienced my subjectivity at its most exposed and vulnerable. In my discussion about suicide, I considerably risk my authority by "bringing to the foreground the

29 power differential between subjects and objects of study and criticism".83 As Flavell notes, "the practice and term [of fictocriticism] remains marginalised as a legitimate mode of academic writing";84 it is at this point of the thesis that I flirt most dangerously with my "scholarly" credibility. My fictocritical writing engages, at times quite literally, with a plethora of writers—the majority of whom are women. Many, such as Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood, are poets. Others, including Joan Didion and Siri Hustvedt, are novelists-cum-essayists. Some, such as Nicole Brossard and Hélène Cixous, adopt writing practices that could themselves be described as fictocritical. The influence of these writers is as significant as that I attributed earlier to Kristeva et al. It is, however, vastly more difficult to locate or define, and this task I assign willingly to my reader.

Outline of the thesis

What I offer in this thesis is a way to think about a specific condition of existence (the inevitability of loss) and its attendant possibility for the subject (a productive experience of mourning). In Part 1 I will illustrate the ways in which bereavement, grief and mourning have most frequently been apprehended by Western culture over the past century. This discussion will assist to highlight the debts and departures that constitute my own approach to the question of mourning. I will traverse the contributions of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and John Bowlby and the various permutations (process and task models, continuing bonds theory, meaning reconstruction theory) that have dominated in their wake. In Part 2, I will consider the effect of the normative discourse of "identity" that preoccupies Western culture. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, I will consider how this discourse suppresses alterity, and, via Julia Kristeva, how the threatening event of mourning re-calls it as a result of the "narcissistic crisis" it enacts. I will pursue the idea that the enabling or productive capacity of mourning derives from the effect of this crisis.

30 Remaining with Kristeva and engaging a number of concepts (Winnicott’s "transitional space"; LaCapra’s "acting-out" and "working- through"; and Tietjens-Meyers’ "dissident speech"), I will develop this idea further to suggest that productive mourning can be regarded as an intimate site of "revolt". In Part 3 I will propose a way of critically apprehending this intervention by discussing the treatment of narrative in productive mourning. I will consider Jacques Derrida's work on contemplation and Luce Irigaray's on felicity, as well as some cultural texts that represent experiences of mourning. I will argue that the productivity of mourning—its status as a form of localised revolt—is expressed largely through the anti-elegiac approach to narrative employed by the bereaved subject. In Part 4 I will consider some aspects of bereavement by suicide, an event I suggest is culturally over- determined. I will argue that suicide bereavement crystallises the question of mourning's potential productivity. In turn, I will consider the extent to which my own bereavement by suicide may inform my thinking about mourning. The Conclusion brings the thesis to a close, and considers some of its implications, limitations and challenges.

1 Rachel Blau du Plessis, "Otherhow", Mary Margaret Sloan (ed.), Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women. New Jersey: Talisman House, 1998. p584. 2 Thomas Ogden, "A Picture of Mourning". Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2000, 10 (3). pp.371-375. p.371. 3 I have appropriated the term "revolt" from the work of Julia Kristeva, which I will elaborate in Part 2. 4 By "symbolic" I am referring to the organising structure of culture that is composed of the dense network of signifiers and signifieds that constitute within that culture an experience of meaningful subjectivity. 5Henri Parens, "We All Mourn: C'est la Condition Humane", Salman Akhtar (ed.), Three Faces of Mourning: Melancholia, Manic Defense and Moving On. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2001. p124. 6 Lyn Lofland, "The Social Shaping of Emotion: The Case of Grief". Symbolic Interaction, Fall 1985, 8 (2). pp.171-190. p173.

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7 Anneli Rufus, The Farewell Chronicles: How we really respond to death. New York: Marlowe and Company, 2005. p.xvii. 8 In her book, The Cue for Passion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), Gail Holst- Warhaft argues similarly. Mourning is theatrical because it is a passionate, exaggerated state of subjectivity. Holst-Warhoft argues that "the emotional state of the bereaved is regarded as potentially dangerous [because] the temporary chaos of death and mourning can spill over into the society at large and threaten its stability."(p6). 9 Riccardi, op.cit. p1. 10 David McCooey has also described "…the minimalist response to death as a function of capitalist economics". ("Dead ends: notes on self, death and representation". Meanjin, 1998, 57 (1). pp.60-75. p62.) 11 For a discussion on the difference between identity and identification, see Stuart Hall, "Who needs identity", S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996. 12 Riccardi, op.cit. p25. 13 Julia Kristeva in Bernard Sichere, "An Interview with Julia Kristeva". Partisan Review, 1994, 61 (1). pp. 120-131. p129. 14 Polly Young-Eisendrath, The Resilient Spirit: transforming suffering into insight, compassion and renewal. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999. p187. 15 Anthony Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva. London: Blackwell, 1992. p2. 16 Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms. London: Faber & Faber, 1999. p58. 17 Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London: Routledge, 2004. p21. 18 Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss". Critical Inquiry, Summer 1999, 25 (4). pp.696- 720. p706. 19 From her essay of the same name in John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (eds.), After the Revolution: on Kristeva. Woolloomooloo: Artspace, 1999. 20 Julia Kristeva in Sichiere, op.cit. p129. 21 In her book, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (London: Routledge, 1995), Lorraine Code explains that "one of the principal tasks of mainstream epistemology has been to devise ways of separating 'pure' knowledge claims from sullied, tainted ones, with the presumption that only the pure ones merit the label 'knowledge'." (p70). 22Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: psychoanalysis, feminism and postmodernism. Berkley: University of California Press, 1990. p16. 23 Anthony Elliot and Stephen Frosh make the point that "psychoanalysis has always revolved around an ambivalent encounter with otherness". ("Introduction", Anthony Elliot and Stephen Frosh (eds.), Psychoanalysis in Contexts: Paths Between Theory and Modern Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1995. p3). 24 Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. pxiii. 25 Kelly Oliver, "Revolt and Forgiveness". Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, affect, collectivity: The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. p91. 26 John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. p108. 27 Hal Foster, quoted by Amanda Nettelbeck and Heather Kerr (eds.), The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Nedlands: University of Western Australian Press, 1998. p7. 28 Noelle McAfee has gone so far as to say that Kristeva is "one of the few philosophers of our day to provide a language for thinking about how the personal becomes political". "Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt and the Space of Appearance". (Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, affect, collectivity: The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. p113.) 29 Interview with Julia Kristeva. Tel Quel, Autumn 1974. p1. 30 For discussion on this point, see Flax, op.cit. 31 Kelly Oliver, "The Crisis of Meaning", John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (eds.), op.cit. p81.

32

32 Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. 33 Trans. Brian O'Keeffe. Los Angeles & New York: Semiotexte, 2002. 34 Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 35 Quoted by Flax, op.cit. p196. 36 [1996] Revised Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 37 LaCapra, op.cit.; Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. 38 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p83. 39 op.cit. 40 Especially as distilled in "The order of discourse", Robert Young (ed.). Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader. London: Routledge and Paul, 1981. 41 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority [1961]. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Boston: The Hague, 1979. 42 Especially To Be Two (Trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc. London: The Athlone Press, 2000) and I Love to You: a sketch for felicity within history (Trans. Alison Martin. New York: Routledge, 1996). 43 Penelope Deutscher, "Irigaray Anxiety: Luce Irigaray and her ethics for improper selves". Radical Philosophy, Nov/Dec 1996, 80. pp.6-16. 44 Rudolf Bernet, "The Traumatized Subject". Trans. Paul Crowe. Research in Phenomenology, September 2000, 30 (1). pp.160-179. 45 D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. 46 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 47 op.cit. 48 Flax, op.cit. p18. 49 Flax, op.cit. p203. 50 Cixous, op.cit. p156. 51 After the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, author of The Production of Space (Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Lefebvre describes heterotopias only as "contrasting places". In "Other Space" (Trans. J. Miskowiec. Diacritics, 1986, 16 (1). pp.22-27), Michel Foucault elaborates on Lefebvre's concept, identifying six principles of "heterotopology". The third, that the heterotopia can accommodate the juxtaposition of sites that are otherwise incompatible, most closely evokes the sense in which I refer to heterotopous textuality. I acknowledge Geraldine Shipton for introducing me to the concept of heterotopia via her essay "Self-reflection and the mirror", Chris Mace (ed.), Heart and Soul: The therapeutic face of philosophy. London: Routledge, 1999. 52 John Wheway, "The Dialogical heart of intersubjectivity", Mace (ed.), op.cit. p108. 53 Noel King, "My Life Without Steve: postmodernism, fictocriticism and the paraliterary". Southern Review, September 1994, 27 (3). pp.261-275. 54 The title of Scott Brooke's 2002 essay "Does anybody know what happened to fictocriticism?: toward a fractal genealogy of Australian fictocriticism" (Cultural Studies Review, November 2002, 8 (2). pp.104-118) refers to this paucity. Helen Flavell's PhD thesis, Writing Between: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism (Murdoch University, 2004), constitutes the most comprehensive Australian critique of fictocriticism to date. In it, Flavell shows how the origins of the term have been obscured, perhaps deliberately, in the Australian context. She attributes its first use to a Canadian art critic, Jeanne Randolph (see p194). 55 Kerr and Nettelbeck, op.cit. pp.3-4. 56 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida [1980]. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000. p8. 57 Heather Kerr, Letter to the editor. TEXT, April 2000, 4 (1). www.gu.edu.au/school/art/TEXT. Accessed 10 April 2003. 58 Greg Dening critiques the "doing" approach to writing a thesis in "Writing: praxis and performance", Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath (eds.), Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration. Monash Publications in History, Department of History, Australian National University, 2000.

33

Flavell, op.cit. p257. 60 Of these, the piece I recall as having the most significant impact on me was the essay "Me and My Shadow" (New Literary History, 1987, 19. pp.168-78) by the American feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins. 61 Flavell, op.cit. p10. 62 Kerr and Nettelbeck, op.cit. p2. 63 Flavell, op.cit. p288. 64 Susan David Bernstein, quoted by Flavell, op.cit. p270. Bernstein is defining the mode of writing she terms "reflexive confessing". Flavell notes that this notion is suggestive of the practice of fictocriticism. 65 Kerr and Nettelbeck, op.cit. p1. 66 Anne Brewster, "Fictocriticism: Undisciplined Writing", Jan Hutchinson and Graham Williams (eds.), First Conference of the Association of the University Writing Programs Proceedings. Sydney: University of Technology, 1996. p29. 67 Anna Gibbs, "Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism". TEXT, October 1997, 12. www.griffith.edu.au/school/art/text/oct97/gibbs.htm. Accessed 10 April 2003. 68 Gibbs, op.cit. 69 Helen Flavell, "The Investigation: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism", Antithesis, 1999, 10. pp.104-116. p106. 70 Flavell, Writing Between: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism. p.291. 71 Nettelbeck and Kerr, op.cit. p9. 72 Nettelbeck and Kerr, op.cit. p4. 73 Brewster, op.cit. p30. 74 Anne Brewster, "Fictocriticism: Pedagogy and Practice", Phil Buttress, Caroline Guerin and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.), Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Adelaide: ASAL, 1996. p90. 75 Flavell, Writing Between: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism. p252. 76 ibid. 77 Rachel Blau du Plessis, "For the Etruscans". [1981]. Elaine Showalter (ed.), Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. p280. 78 Scott Brooke, invoking Michel de Certeau, op.cit. p106. 79 Quoted by Tal, op.cit. p194. 80 I place this word in quotation marks to indicate its problematic status. 81 See Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. p19; p21. 82 Julia Kristeva, quoted by Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989. p51. 83 Flavell, Writing Between: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism. p11. 84 Flavell, Writing Between: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism. p5.

34 Part 1: The modern approach to bereavement and its products

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In this Part I will describe the major ways in which bereavement and its attendant products—grief and mourning—have been apprehended (or "narrativised")1 in modern times. These frames are both ideologically and textually drawn. Since it is not the purpose of this thesis to chart the development of contemporary thought about loss, grief and mourning, per se, my objective in this part is merely to signpost some of the more salient contributions to that tradition in order to help situate my own work. I propose to perform this task under two broad headings: psychoanalysis and psychology. These headings are contrived and there is significant overlap between the material I will consider under each. I have adopted them for reasons of organisational pragmatism as well as because I want to try to give a flavour of the broad influences that have impacted on the modern "framing" of bereavement and its products. In recognition of their disproportionate influence, I will devote considerably greater attention to certain contributions, namely those by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and John Bowlby.

Psychoanalysis

A psychodynamic theory of mourning: Sigmund Freud

All contemporary approaches to loss, grief and mourning, including my own, are indebted one way or another to Sigmund Freud's psychodynamic account of the subject. In American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style,2 the historian Peter Stearns contextualises the origins of this account. Stearns argues that by the end of the Victorian era, theology had become increasingly displaced by scientific positivism. In short, the industrial

38 revolution ushered in a new, rationalist approach to matter that resulted, among other things, in the denaturalisation of the subject. In this context, Freud sought to develop a global economic or quantitative model of the psyche. His original theory of mourning, or Trauerarbeit ("grief work"), was clearly advanced in the service of this project, as Stearns argues. Over time, however, Freud was to modify his model of the psyche, arriving at the conclusion that, as John Lechte puts it, "the psyche is…a meaning structure before it is a physical entity".3 The strictly quantitative model that dominated Freud's early account of the subject thus gave way to more qualitative aspects, namely, symbolisation and interpretation. However, Freud proposed the concept of Trauerarbeit well before this modification took place and, to a large extent, this fact has tended to limit subsequent readings and derivations of his work. "Mourning and Melancholia"4 is Freud's most famous and commonly cited text on mourning, but in order to fully appreciate its claims it is necessary to also consider his earlier essay, "On Narcissism: An Introduction".5 Although it does not explicitly address the topic of mourning, the rationale for Freud's theory of object loss and decathexis can begin to be traced in this essay, as Tammy Clewell has skilfully demonstrated.6

In it, Freud establishes the concept of "primary narcissism" as a normal stage in ego development. Freud theorises that, prior to individuation, the self is wholly narcissistic. Narcissism, for Freud, refers to a libidinal state in which the ego in its entirety is adopted as the self's primary love-object. The self becomes a subject, so to speak, only when it modifies its narcissism, that is, when it invests its libido in others. Via this process, the self internalises its external attachments, and object relations come into play. The process of internalisation installs what Freud calls an "ego ideal", which becomes the new compensatory target for self-love. The ego ideal is an intrapsychic formation that results from the merging of narcissism and identification. It "constructs a self image conditioned by an outside world of others and objects",7 thus reflecting an accommodation of the symbolic. In accordance with this model,

39 beloveds—that is, those others in whom we invest significant libido—clearly function at the intrapsychic level as partial objects of the self, as "on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego, but on the other hand...partly strangers, even enemies."8 This paradox generates ambivalence.9

In "Mourning and Melancholia", Freud suggests this ambivalence is so profound that it instigates unconscious death wishes towards the beloved. In turn, ambivalence gives rise to intense guilt in mourning, as the grieving subject fantasises that it is responsible for the beloved's demise.10 Freud suggests, but does not explicitly spell out, that it is the ambivalence/guilt dyad that is responsible for provoking the "complete collapse" involved in mourning.11 This collapse is further complicated by the subject's belief that it has lost not only its good "external" object, but its good "internal" (part)object as well. Because of this belief, a literal part of the self is experienced as having died when the beloved is no longer carnate; the bereaved subject considers the lacuna that is produced impossible to "fill". As the self struggles to understand itself newly constituted by this lack, it becomes momentarily paralysed, in a sort of psychic limbo, unable to act as before, but as yet, unsure how to act differently.12 This is a dangerous and risky subject position and, accordingly, the subject in mourning directs her attention and energy inward. Trauerarbeit is the result of this preoccupation.

In order to explain in greater detail how Trauerarbeit proceeds, Freud adopts a structure that juxtaposes mourning and melancholia, suggesting that the two states present in a sort of logical relation to one another, whereby the latter can be seen to result from the incomplete resolution of the former.13 Freud is at pains here to distinguish between the pathological character of melancholia and the "normal" experience of mourning.14 In mourning, the subject withdraws its libido from the lost object and eventually invests it in a new object. This process of withdrawal extrudes an "exclusive devotion...which leaves nothing over for other purposes or interests".15 Freud

40 represents it in the sort of linear and progressive terms that postmodern theories have done so much to discredit.16 "Successful" grief work is understood, in this context, as involving the triumph of "reality", that is, the acceptance of the absolute and uncontestable fact that the beloved (or lost object) is dead, buried, and thus no longer in any sort of existence. Freud describes the journey towards this acceptance in terms that evoke the image of ticking off items on a checklist: "[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it."17 Conveniently, once this is accomplished (the checklist completed), "the ego becomes free and uninhibited again" and can attach itself to a new object,18 the subject having realised that it is economically imprudent to continue to invest libido in the lost object.

In melancholia, on the other hand, the subject reacts to the loss of the other by internalising and identifying with the other rather than withdrawing its libido from it. Because of the ambivalence with which the subject regards the other (object), the subject's identification with the other in this way induces a "disturbance of self-regard".19 Freud claims that this disturbance is what fundamentally differentiates melancholia from mourning. Melancholia is pathological for Freud because it is characterised by the survivor's refusal to accept the "the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists".20 The melancholic subject exhibits "a failure to manage" her libidinal drives.21 Although he concedes in "Mourning and Melancholia" that the "economic means" by which the work of mourning "carries out its task" is difficult to explain logically,22 Freud determines that it is successful only if and when the "narcissistic satisfactions" of the bereaved subject triumph over the lost object, that is to say, when the bereaved subject comes to value her own status over and above her desire to maintain a connection to the beloved.23

41 As he articulates it in "Mourning and Melancholia", Freud's theory of mourning, with its emphasis on libidinal decathexis, is productive to the extent that it privileges mourning as psychic labour that is all-consuming of the bereaved subject's energies. Moreover, whatever one thinks of Freud's account of melancholia, it enacts, at the very least, a recognition that bereavement can be a psychically risky business. Freud's notion of reality testing also provides an explanation, convincing or otherwise, for the ambivalence and stress that bereavement may induce in some subjects. These qualities might be understood as logical effects of the intolerability for the grieving subject of the conflict between her investment in occupying a particular libidinal position (that is, object related) and the requirement of its divestiture. Yet the limitations of Freud's account of mourning in "Mourning and Melancholia" are considerable. It is clear that it is driven by the relentless positivism that characterised the historical context in which Freud worked, and this leads to certain imaginative constrictions on his part. Most notably, the other exists for Freud only as an ego-prop for the subject. As Tammy Clewell points out, "Mourning and Melancholia" implies that "[w]e love others less for their uniqueness and separateness and more for their ability to contract our own abundance, that is, to embody and reflect back that part of ourselves we have invested in them." This ethically spurious construction suggests that "the people we love are imminently replaceable".24 Bereavement, in "Mourning and Melancholia", exists merely as a temporary disruption of the mourner's narcissism. As Clewell puts it, "Freudian mourning involves less a lament for the passing of a unique other, and more a process geared toward restoring a certain economy of the subject".25 In this way, Freud's account can be placed "within a longstanding epistemological and cultural tradition in which the subject acquires legitimacy at the expense of the other's separateness and well-being".26

However, as Clewell has also demonstrated, Freud revised his mourning theory significantly in his later work, The Ego and the Id.27 In her

42 article, "Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss", Clewell shows how Freud first questioned his early theory of mourning in the wartime essay, "On Transience".28 In this essay, Freud concedes "…why it is that [the] detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it."29 In The Ego and the Id, which appeared a few years later, Freud radically alters his account of melancholia. In "Mourning and Melancholia", he described melancholia as a pathological condition resulting from a situation in which the subject installs the lost object in the ego. In The Ego and Id, however, he views melancholia as the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects (the "id" being the reservoir of affective energy that precedes individuation).30 In other words, Freud revises melancholia as being fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. According to this construction, as Clewell puts it, "[i]t is only by internalizing the lost other through the work of bereaved identification…that one becomes a subject in the first place".31 As a result:

[w]orking through [mourning] no longer entails abandoning the object and reinvesting the free libido in a new one; it no longer entails accepting consolation in the form of an external substitute for loss…Rather, working though depends on taking the lost other into the structure of one's own identity, a form of preserving the lost object in and as the self.32

In other words, Freud revises melancholia such that it is not only constitutive of subjectivity, but also integral to mourning. Yet, elsewhere in The Ego and the Id, Freud unexpectedly undermines this assertion by introducing the notion of rivalrous identification in his account of the Oedipus complex. In acting out this complex, Freud suggests that, rather than withdraw the lost object (the mother) into the ego, the subject intensifies its identification with its rival (the father). Clewell argues that this notion of rivalrous identification has

43 significant implications for understanding the development of Freud's mourning theory, since it "imports into mourning the violent and hostile characteristics previously associated with melancholia".33 It does this by foregrounding the intense feelings of love and hatred for the rival, which are displaced onto the self. Still later, however, Freud undermines the notion of rivalrous identification by addressing the issue of infantile bisexuality, which calls into question the ability to "obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications".34 Freud's focus on ambivalence is important, for when he revises the Oedipus complex to view ambivalence as no longer deriving from the outside, that is, from rivalrous identification, he posits it as "an effect of the very separation between self and other, as the product of bereaved internalization".35

Consequently, Clewell suggests, Freud "raises the possibility of thinking about mourning as an affirmative and loving internalization of the lost other", as "an elegiac formation".36 It must be said, in fact, that the elucidation of this possibility is rarely attributed to Freud. What endures in terms of Freud's influence upon how we understand mourning is his emphasis on libidinal decathexis and the triumph of the "reality principle". The modification that takes place in The Ego and the Id has not exerted equivalent cultural influence. It represents a more nuanced account of both subjectivity and mourning, but in the end, reinscribes the claims of the other as subordinate to the all-important work of re-establishing the self. This ethically problematic economy will prove to be a recurring theme in contemporary accounts of loss and grief.

An object-relations theory of mourning: Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein's most important contribution to modern thought about loss and grief is distilled in two articles: "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" and "Mourning and its Relation to Manic- Depressive States".37 Klein's work represents both a development and an

44 extension of several of Freud's major psychoanalytic axioms. She challenges Freud on at least two important points: in her emphasis on the dyadic relationship between the child and its mother (significantly under-accounted for by Freud) and her related insistence on the complexity of pre-Oedipal psychic functioning, a complexity that renders somewhat rudimentary Freud's account of primary narcissism. The significance of Klein's contribution is that she emphasises the realm of the interpersonal in addition to the intrapersonal, which leads her to develop a series of insights into object investment and loss that are particularly significant in terms of the subsequent development of theories about subject formation generally, and loss and grief specifically.

For Klein, mourning is a phenomenon rooted in the earliest experience of infantile development. It is therefore critical to look at what she has to say about this experience. Where Freud describes several "stages" in the formation of subjectivity (namely those aligned with the development of the various erotogenic drives: oral, anal and genital), Klein identifies "positions", preferring this term for its capacity to suggest an on-going, labile and irreducible mode of psychosomatic engagement. The positions Klein identifies are the "paranoid-schizoid" position and the "depressive" position. The paranoid-schizoid position refers to those conflicts and dramas that exist prior to the individualisation of the subject. In infancy, this is marked by the inability to distinguish clearly whole objects, particularly the mother, as opposed to part objects, primarily the mother’s breast. The paranoid-schizoid position is characterised by a relational mode that Klein terms "splitting". Splitting refers to the infant's tendency to relate to its part objects as either wholly good or wholly bad. The infant also splits herself, perceiving the "good" self that loves the "good" mother as a different entity to the "bad" self who hates the "bad" mother. What is experienced as an extremely precarious existence at this stage must be protected by such separation. Ambivalence is intolerable at this time, as is the concept that objects exist in any dimension other than that circumscribed by the infant's needs; the infant cannot, at this time, perceive the

45 mother as a subject in her own right. This is the period of primary narcissism, more intricately rendered, that Freud hypothesised. The boundary between self and other is tenuous under the influence of the paranoid-schizoid position. The infant will identify via a process of introjection (taking part/s of the object into herself) with both excessively idealised and excessively denigrated aspects of the loved object. Projection is also a common feature; the infant characteristically tries to disown the "bad" parts of herself by phantasising that they in fact belong to the other (object). In any case, the paranoid-schizoid position is marked by an extreme defensiveness. As Julia Segal puts it, "the anxieties of the paranoid-schizoid position are life and death anxieties".38

Klein’s depressive position follows on the heels of the paranoid-schizoid position, and is characterised by integration as opposed to splitting. Klein regards the resolution of the conflicts and dramas that characterise the depressive position as critical to normal individuation; she suggests that an unsuccessful resolution (that is, remaining "stuck" in the paranoid-schizoid position) lies at the core of psychotic illness.39 During the depressive position, the infant begins to relate to objects as whole rather than partial as it acquires a sense of its own separateness. The infant begins to understand that the object it perceives as "good" and the object it perceives as "bad" are, in fact, one and the same object. At the same time, the infant learns to "hold" its internal good and bad objects rather than splitting and projecting them onto the other. As it comes to the realisation that it does not have omnipotence over its external object(s), it becomes critically important for the infant to securely establish "good", internal object(s). It is this secure relation that allows the infant to withstand "the disaster by which it feels itself threatened when the depressive position is at its height".40 The depressive position is one of alternating loss and reparation; what the infant "loses" externally, it must re-establish internally. A concrete example may help to clarify this point. Anyone who has observed an infant in any sort of proximity will be familiar with the phenomenon commonly referred to as "separation anxiety". Faced with

46 separation from its mother, the infant clings, cries and generally exerts extreme resistance. According to the Kleinian perspective, this is not just because the infant fears its mother's absence, but also because it internalises this absence as the presence of a bad/attacking/persecuting object. The infant overcomes this anxiety only when it:

1. realises that the "bad" mother who leaves it is also the "good" mother who cares for and meets all its existential needs, that is, is able to moderate its ambivalence 2. understands that its hatred of the mother's "badness" is not responsible for the mother's disappearance, that is, is able to moderate its guilt and persecutory phantasies 3. has adequately established a "good", internal object-relation with the mother to sustain it throughout her (externally manifesting) absence, that is, is able to moderate its fear of persecution (being overwhelmed by the "bad" object/s) by holding onto a mental representation of its "good" object.

The establishment of the "good", internal object also frees the infant to form other external object-relations, which in turn increases its feelings of security (since it no longer feels absolutely dependent on its mother). At the same time, it arouses in the infant an awareness of loss and grief. This is now tolerable, however, since the infant has become able to view its object/s in a more realistic light, that is, along a continuum of "goodness" and "badness", presence and absence. Klein is at pains to foreground the arduous nature of the task that is required of the subject in the depressive position. In fact, she argues it can be adequately but never completely resolved. Mourning, in Klein's approximation, always involves recalling the experience of the (infantile) depressive position: negotiating one's ambivalence, guilt and fear; moving through separation anxiety; and re-establishing the inner psychic world. If the process of psychic reparation does not take place, the ego is at

47 risk of pathological identification with the lost (dead) object; Klein describes how "in both in children and adults suffering from depression [she has] discovered the dread of harbouring dying or dead objects...inside one."41 However, like Freud in The Ego and the Id, Klein views melancholia as a fundamental stage of individuation or subject formation, and as assuming a pathological cast only when the self remains "stuck" within it.

Also in common with Freud, Klein views mourning, and the psychic labour it demands, as a "slow process of testing reality".42 She describes how the mourner is overwhelmed by:

unconscious phantasies of having lost his internal 'good' objects as well [as the lost loved one]. He then feels that his internal 'bad' objects predominate and his inner world is in danger of disruption. We know that the loss of a loved person leads to an impulse in the mourner to reinstate the lost loved object in the ego...however, he not only takes into himself (reincorporates) the person whom he has just lost, but also reinstates his internalised good objects...[t]hese too are felt to have gone under, to be destroyed, whenever the loss of a loved person is experienced.43

For Klein, the pain of mourning is the pain incurred by the necessity of divesting oneself of the loved, lost object in order to renew one's links with the "external" world (ie. the realisation that one cannot, in fact, have one’s "cake" and eat it too).44 This divestiture involves a highly anguishing process of "rebuilding" the inner world according to the new "reality" comprising this world. The process involves an extreme withdrawal into the self through which "early psychotic anxieties are reactivated". In Klein's own words, "the mourner is in fact ill".45 In its capacity to instate recognition and legitimation of the risk to subjectivity encompassed by mourning, this formulation is potentially productive. Another of the more useful aspects of Klein's work is

48 her emphasis on ambivalence as an on-going relational mode (we have seen how Freud also stressed the significance of ambivalence in The Ego and the Id). As Julia Segal has pointed out, Klein is particularly interested in examining "the relationship between aggressive and loving impulses and phantasies".46 In understanding the often contradictory and shifting impulses that characterise mourning, this relationship needs to be acknowledged and accounted for.

On the other hand, while Klein does account for melancholia as being fundamental to subject formation, she does not spend nearly enough time attending to the significance of the reactivation of early psychotic anxieties within the bereaved subject. However, this is at least partly counter-balanced by Klein’s view that "resolution" does not preclude the subject from "[holding] onto something from the past, rather than striving to simply let it go".47 The elemental beginnings of the "continuous bonds" model of grief, which I will discuss later, can be located in this emphasis. Despite its limitations, Klein's framework offers several useful insights. Of these, the most significant must be her emphasis on object-relations as the major defining influence upon the experience of subjectivity. As I have already noted, the focus on ambivalence in this context is critical, as is Klein's insistence on the importance of internal, as well as external, modes of psychic identification. Perhaps what is most appealing about Klein’s formulation is the agentive capacity it suggests; Klein’s subject is one actively engaged in her own development. In this regard, Klein's thesis argues for an economy of suffering that encompasses a dynamic and creative dimension of subjectivity. Unlike Freud's, Klein's influence on contemporary renderings of mourning has been more or less restricted to the clinical psychoanalytic field. The inclusion of her account here is important primarily because she configures mourning in terms of a return to the conflicted self prior to its normalisation as a subject. She thereby renders mourning an uncanny experience. In Part 2, I will show how the uncanny is linked to revolt. Among other influences, Kristeva's elaboration of revolt is indebted, I suggest, to Klein.

49

It must be said that the contributions of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein do not represent the totality of contributions to the psychodynamic/analytic understanding of loss and grief.48 They are unarguably, however, the most significant in terms of enduring impact and early insight respectively. As Alessia Riccardi points out, Freud is the first to present mourning "as a privileged moment of psychological work",49 while George Hagman has noted that the apprehension of Freud's model of mourning "as a painful process of identification, decathexis and re-cathexis in reaction to the loss of a loved one"50 is among one of the most influential of modern constructs. The notion that the subject is a kind of "'modernist machine' perpetually working to replace its objects" has persevered under the weight of this model.51 Subsequent psychoanalytic contributions have adhered to it, to a greater or lesser extent. One of the more significant in this regard consists of Hélène Deutsch's 1937 essay "Absence of Grief",52 in which the author argues that (an apparent) failure to mourn is indicative of pathology. The trace of this argument can be contemporaneously located in both clinical and popular texts on grief, particularly those influenced by ego-psychology, although its influence has diminished somewhat in the past decade or so.

The later contribution of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok53 is also notable, not for radically departing from the Freudian hermeneutic that underpins "Mourning and Melancholia", but rather for invoking a new metaphor for construing what is at stake within it. Abraham and Torok describe mourning in terms of "incorporation", a process whereby the bereaved subject undertakes the task of bringing inside him/herself and assimilating the lost object (or more accurately, an "imago", that is, a representation, of the lost object). In other words, "successful" mourning depends, for Abraham and Torok, "on trading the other for symbolic compensation, that is, on reducing the other's uniqueness to the subject's means of representation".54 By this account, language emerges as

50 compensation for the loss of the (m)other. Where the assimilation of the lost other remains incomplete, the acceptance of linguistic compensation refused, Abraham and Torok specify "encryption" (something akin to Freud's original melancholia). In the case of encryption, the imago occupies a borderline; it is neither inside nor outside, neither wholly self nor wholly other. In this abject way, the subject attempts to keep the dead other (the lost object) "alive". Anna Gibbs has described Torok and Abraham's figure of encryption as:

something which preserves the status quo, which defends against topographical change in the subject; rather than attacking the individual, it aims to transform the world, rendering it in conformity with a 'secretly maintained topography' in which death is disavowed. 55

Among others, Jacques Derrida has critiqued the model of incorporation as inadequate to the task of understanding mourning; I will say more about this in Part 3. Overall, the point to be made here is that "[t]he major trend in psychoanalytic theories of loss after Freud has been to study the process of identification in great detail but to direct less attention to the fate of the object representations after a death".56 This is really the major limitation of psychoanalysis in terms of its elucidation of the significance of mourning. Not surprisingly, this limitation is a by-product of the broader cultural context in which it has developed as a hermeneutic tool; I will discuss this context in Part 2.

Psychology

In the second half of the twentieth century, various permutations of "grief theory" flourished on the basis of Freud's concept of Trauerarbeit. The majority of these permutations were and remain situated within the discipline of psychology.57 Broadly speaking, psychology's approach to bereavement

51 and its products can be organised into two major categories: conceptual and clinical. The former is interested in developing and explicating theoretical frameworks or "master concepts"58 within which the phenomena of loss and grief can be analytically and clinically apprehended. The latter is concerned with defining and measuring the observable products of those phenomena, for example, affect and symptomatology. This distinction is of course a simplification, but it is adequate for my purposes here. In this section, I will focus predominantly on conceptual psychological approaches to loss, grief and mourning, only occasionally noting as I go their relationship to clinical approaches. This reflects my own interest in mourning, which in the context of this work is overwhelmingly conceptual rather than clinical (although this does not mean that I am uninterested in therapeutic approaches to bereavement, something I will address in the Conclusion). The conceptual category can be further divided into two strands. One of these strands addresses itself to the cause of grief, that is, explicating why bereavement causes suffering, and whether and how particular kinds of bereavement impact differently on the subject. The other strand concerns itself with mapping the progress of grief as a more or less abstract phenomenon, describing and evaluating the stages through which the bereaved subject can be expected to pass, and investigating the significance of "pathological" cases in which the subject apparently fails to do so.59

Attachment theory

The single most influential contribution to the first strand of conceptual psychological approaches to loss and grief derives from John Bowlby's theory of "attachment".60 Bowlby's work, which he carried out over several decades commencing in the 1940's, was based on his experiences as a psychiatrist observing the effects of separation and loss in early childhood. Attachment theory is strongly influenced by Klein's insights into early object-relations, and attempts to pose the answer to Freud's question concerning why it is that

52 mourning is so painful. Broadly speaking, Bowlby postulates that loss (and the grief it produces) cannot be understood in isolation from attachment. Attachment occurs when an individual develops a relationship with an-other that "provides a secure base from which an individual can explore his or her environment"61. Bowlby views attachment as the penultimate task of infancy and as the crucial cipher of experience through which the psychological conflict of grief later comes into being. Thus, for Bowlby, there can be no grief for an object without prior attachment to it. Grief is "the pining and searching for the lost object of attachment".62 Its painfulness arises from the conflict between this pining and searching and the reality of the loss that has been incurred. For Bowlby, attachment needs are present from birth, that is, they are intrinsic. This view leads Bowlby to view bereavement not only in psychological terms, but rather "a state of biological disequilibrium brought about by a sudden change in the environment".63 Mourning is understood "in terms of the activation of attachment behaviours which are unsuccessful in maintaining the affectational bond".64 Over time, these behaviours are tested against the reality of the loss of the object.

Attachment theory is indebted to Freud in that it stresses the importance of the bereaved subject's eventual acceptance of the reality principle. For Bowlby, mourning is successfully completed only when the individual ceases to attempt to restore the loss, and "instead begins a redefinition of self and situation".65 This redefinition involves the cognitive act of "reshaping internal representational models so as to align them with the changes that have occurred in the bereaved's life situation".66 Clearly, Bowlby views mourning in terms of adjustment, that is, as an adaptive function. Attachment theory provides an intuitive and readily identifiable explanation for the suffering that characterises mourning.67 Significantly, Bowlby, like Klein, recognises that "a continuing sense of the presence of the dead person is not pathological but is often compatible with a normal mourning process".68 As a result and unlike Freud, he did not think it necessary for the bereaved

53 subject to integrate the loss itself into the actual structure of the self.69 However, as Rose Cleary points out, Bowlby largely fails to articulate this "continuing sense of the presence of the dead" in terms of a theory of interpersonal relatedness.70 According to Cleary, he therefore ignores the critical question of the self's relation with the "imaginal other".71 As I have already suggested in relation to psychoanalysis, this is a criticism that can also be made of psychology's approach to loss and grief generally.

If mourning is the painful work of coming to terms with a lost attachment, then the nature of that attachment surely has a significant impact on the quality of the grieving experience. Psychology has postulated that ambivalent or "insecure" attachments, for instance, are likely to lead to difficulties. Further, psychology has tended to privilege some attachments over others. In relation to bereavement, the loss of blood attachments—those between parent and child especially—are regarded, usually implicitly, as leading to greatest grief and suffering, followed closely by sexual/romantic attachments sanctioned by marriage.72 While this chauvinism has begun to be addressed by some researchers and theorists, it continues to exert influence on cultural attitudes to loss and grief, leading, among other things, to what Kenneth Doka has termed "disenfranchised grief". Doka invokes the term to connote grief incurred by losses that are unrecognised or minimised by others, or situations in which the bereaved person is not acknowledged as such.73 In my reading of self help texts on bereavement, for instance, I have noticed that the tendency to privilege certain types of attachment is prevalent. The bereavement and grief of parents, adult children and spouses is often addressed, while that of others such as siblings, friends and colleagues frequently remains unacknowledged, let alone represented. This tendency has the effect of conveying a particular status on certain subjects, while marginalising others. Essentially, disenfranchisement is a by-product of the normativity that conditions the relation of subjects to the symbolic. I will discuss this relation in Part 2, and I will return to the concept of

54 "disenfranchised grief" when I consider the experience of mourning after suicide bereavement in Part 4.

Process/task models of mourning

Earlier, I said that the second strand of conceptual psychology is concerned to map the "progress" of grief as a more or less abstract phenomenon, describing and evaluating the stages through which the bereaved subject can be expected to pass. This strand represents an effort to explicate Freud's original economic notion of grief work and has led to the development of process and task models of mourning. These models describe, typically in discrete and progressive terms, certain emotional and/or psychological states that are supposed to be characteristic of mourning. Above all else, they promote the notion that grieving is a process of adaptation.74 One of the most well known process models was proposed in the late 1960's by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a psychiatrist whose work was based on her experiences with dying people and their loved ones. In her highly influential book, On Death and Dying,75 Kubler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial; anger; bargaining; depression; and acceptance. The "five stages" have exerted ubiquitous influence on contemporary grief theory. Significantly, they have informed much of the popular, self help literature on grief and therefore have entered broad cultural consciousness.76 Kubler-Ross apparently did not intend for the stages to be prescriptively interpreted; yet, in a remarkably short space of time, they were effectively adopted as a normative template for bereavement.77 Psychologist Robert Neimeyer describes this template as "suspiciously simplistic" and as having been "largely repudiated by contemporary theorists and researchers",78 however the degree to which its influence has been effectively diluted is questionable. The reductive extrapolation of Kubler-Ross' insights is unfortunate because her emphasis on

55 the dynamic, psychic processes that are initiated in response to loss is valuable and runs counter to the instrumentalist version of grief that has become culturally predominant.

Some process models, like those proposed by psychologists Therese Rando79 and William Worden,80 build on the descriptive approach employed by Kubler-Ross, isolating particular tasks that the bereaved subject must undertake if she is to successfully complete her grief work, or "resolve" her loss. These so called "task models" are diagrammatic; they attempt "to explain the process of how adjustment to bereavement occurs, rather than just describe its progress."81 Worden, for example, identifies four tasks of mourning:

1. accepting the reality of the loss 2. working through the pain of grief 3. adjusting to an environment in which the deceased is missing; and 4. emotionally relocating the deceased and moving on with life. while Rando’s "Six R’s Process" consists of:

1. recognising the loss 2. reacting to the separation 3. recollecting and re-experiencing the deceased and the relationship 4. relinquishing the old attachments to the deceased and the old assumptive world 5. readjusting to move adaptively into the new world without forgetting the old; and 6. reinvesting.

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Essentially, task-model theory postulates that "[a]lthough bereavement may be a choiceless event…the bereaved can choose their own timing and pacing in undertaking [its] tasks."82 While less deterministic than the template approach in that they at least allow (or claim to allow) for a degree of non- linearity, task models still seek to regulate the experience of mourning in economic terms and, in this way, they do not represent a significant departure in the development of grief theory. Like process models, task models of mourning have regrettably been taken up, for the most part, in ways that "[shape] stories around grief as a deviation from normalcy that requires corrective action".83 Psychologist Tony Walter attributes the salience of this view to the effect of "a secular and individualistic late 20th century culture" in which "a modernist and medical concern to return the individual as rapidly as possible to efficient and autonomous functioning" predominates.84

Indeed, from Freud onwards, a concern with ameliorating "morbidity"85 is expressed through much of the twentieth century via the production and maintenance of a psychiatric model of grief emphasising "the control of disruptive symptomatology"86 and a return to normal, pre-bereavement functioning. Such symptomatology is generally accepted by clinical psychology as being perceptible and measurable psychosomatic phenomena. Typically, they are believed to include anxiety, depression and insomnia, to name a salient few. Often, there is an emphasis by clinical psychology on differential symptomatology. In other words, the presence or absence of particular phenomena and their observed intensity are measured against factors such as the age and gender of the bereaved subject, nature of the bereavement, relationship of the bereaved subject to the deceased, and so on. It is unusual for symptomatology to be addressed in terms of its potential productivity (except in relation to enabling the subject to "move through" the tasks of grief work).87 This reflects the predominant modern view that

57 discomfort or pain are wasteful by-products that can and should be eliminated from the experience of subjectivity.

Alternative conceptions of grief work

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the idea that grief progresses in a way that can be generalised along the descriptive and diagrammatic lines of process and task models began to be increasingly challenged. In this respect, psychologists Wortman and Silver offered one of the most influential and, within the field of bereavement studies, infamous critiques. In an article entitled, "The Myths of Coping with Loss",88 the authors challenged a number of the key tenets of grief theory to date, arguing for an absence of empirical support for the claims embodied by those tenets. Wortman and Silver identified five "myths of loss", these being:

1. the inevitability of distress or depression 2. that failure to experience distress is indicative of pathology 3. the importance of "working through" the loss 4. the expectation of recovery; and 5. ultimate resolution.

Wortman and Silver's article did a great deal to instigate the deconstruction of process and task models of grief work, and the theoretical assumptions on which they rely (for example, Deutsch's claim that failure to exhibit distress following bereavement is indicative of pathology). In turn, this deconstruction underlined the rigidity and binarism of the traditional conception of "normal" versus "pathological" grief and encouraged a greater degree of lateralism and flexibility in terms of both conceptual and clinical approaches to bereavement.89 Ironically, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this revisioning was swiftly appropriated by popular, self help literature on the topic of grief. It is not uncommon, as a result, to be confronted with conflicting messages in these

58 texts. For example, while it might be claimed on one page that "there is no right or wrong way to grieve" and "everyone is unique", the next might instruct that "isolating yourself from others will only make you feel worse" or that "bottling up your feelings is not healthy". This contradictory approach reflects the fact that, while it is over a decade since the publication of their article, Wortman and Silver's "five myths" of loss persist, at least in quotidian terms. While lip service is paid to the notion that prescriptive models of grief are flawed, individuals who apparently fail to conform to them are still regarded with suspicion.

In the field of bereavement studies, however, Wortman and Silver's work ushered forth a number of new approaches to the notion of grief work that attempted to remedy the deficits of process and task models. Two prominent examples are Stroebe and Schut's "dual process" model90 and Shimshon Rubin's "two track" model.91 The "dual process" model represents an attempt to account for mourning as a non-linear experience in which the subject alternates between periods of deep meditation upon her loss and periods of energy conservation where such meditation is less intense and consuming. Focusing on the notion of "oscillation", Stroebe and Schut argue for a model of grief that redresses traditional grief theory's "failure to represent dynamic processing that is characteristic of grieving".92 They propose the idea that grieving consists of "a dynamic, regulatory coping process of oscillation, whereby the grieving individual at times confronts, at other time avoids, [its] different tasks".93 This is essentially a modification of cognitive stress theory, particularly the version developed by Horowitz, who, in elucidating his stress response syndrome analysis,94 identifies an antithetical "intrusion-avoidance" process as the defining characteristic of trauma reactions. Notably, Stroebe and Schut's model troubles the terms according to which the pathology of mourning has been traditionally understood.95 It also provides an explanation of why mourning can appear to progress in fits and starts rather than according to a smooth and predictable pattern.

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The "two-track" model of grief proposed by Simon Shimshon Rubin is similar to Stroebe and Schut's "dual process" model in that it conceptualises grief work "along two distinct but interactive axes".96 However, Shimshon Rubin identifies these axes not in terms of meditation and conservation, but rather, maintaining individual functioning and managing the bereaved's ongoing emotional attachment to and relationship with the deceased.97 The former axis is viewed as overt, the latter, covert. While the "two-track" model assumes that, eventually, the bereaved subject will "return to a physiological, cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal homeostasis",98 it attempts to allow for individual difference in terms of the intrapsychic experience of mourning. Thus, maintaining individual functioning is not conceived as being dependent on a particular specification of managing the ongoing attachment to and relationship with the deceased. However, a renewed attention to the concept of attachment and the application of meaning reconstruction theory represents, perhaps, the most significant aspect in which conceptual approaches to loss and grief have recently developed. I will discuss these in turn.

"Continuing bonds" theory

In place of the Freudian-impelled emphasis on the role of decathexis in mourning, there has been growing acceptance that, following bereavement, "people do not necessarily let go [of], but transform their former relationships by renewing their meanings about them and continuing the relationship in new ways".99 "Continuing bonds" theory attempts to account for this, revisiting the Kleinian question of the "intrapsychic legacy of mourning" to investigate how object-relations are influenced and modified by bereavement in on-going ways.100 Its progenitors101 argue, as Bowlby suggested, that maintaining some form of relationship with the deceased is not necessarily pathological and furthermore, that it is a common, empirically observed occurrence. To this end,

60 the work of psychologists Klass, Silverman and Nickman, who introduced the term "continuing bonds", was groundbreaking when it appeared.102 "Continuing bonds" theory represents a significant development in the advancement of grief theory in that it has focused attention on the myriad ways in which individuals are observed to continue investing libido in the other long after the other has ceased to physically manifest. The clinical concern with distinguishing healthy from pathological responses to bereavement persists, however, with certain manifestations of continuing libido investment viewed as problematic and as indicating a resistance or refusal on the part of the bereaved subject to proceed with mourning.

What is particularly interesting and important about "continuing bonds" theory, however, is the extent to which it facilitates a conceptual approach to bereavement that is interested in the ethical dimension of mourning, and one that has applicability—at least potentially—in a therapeutic context. The work of John E. Baker illustrates this. Though Baker relies on the clinical language of pathology in elucidating his model of a "healthy internal relationship after loss",103 the degree to which this model suggests an engagement with what philosophers call the "ethics of alterity" is notable. Baker suggests that a "healthy" continuing bond is one characterised by:

1. neither constantly present nor constantly absent preoccupation with images and memories of the deceased 2. a realistic internal representation of the deceased; that is, neither an exclusively idealised or exclusively devalued construction 3. a degree of voluntary control by the mourner over his or her access to memories; and 4. labile memories of the deceased; that is, memories that are open to change. 104

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Having said this, the ethical dimension opened up by "continuing bonds" theory tends to be submerged by psychology in order to accommodate its ongoing preference for the language of normativity and pathology. "Continuing bonds" theory has not been without its critics,105 and, like Wortman and Silver's "myths of loss", the degree to which it has exerted influence in quotidian terms is debatable. However, it is more or less accepted in the bereavement studies field as providing a legitimate and important framework for approaching the experience of mourning.

Phenomenology and meaning-reconstruction theory

Currently, the most ubiquitous approach to mourning in the bereavement studies field is one that draws heavily on phenomenology and meaning-reconstruction theory to examine the effect of mourning on the immanence of bereaved subjectivity. There is no doubt that this approach is a product of the postmodern critique of structuralism and positivism. It is also indicative of the growing inter-disciplinarity of contemporary bereavement studies. Thomas Attig is a philosopher prominently associated with this most recent trend. Attig proposes that mourning is best understood as a phenomenological process of "relearning the world",106 arguing that the value of this trope lies in its capacity to facilitate a general description of mourning which is non-prescriptive. For Attig, the most significant and important task of mourning is the reconstruction of meaning, where meaning is understood to constitute the subject's sense of her self and place in the world. The broader field of construct theory clearly influences Attig's approach. Constructivism proceeds by the notion that "[a] person co-creates the personal realities to which she responds".107 The basic supposition of constructivism is that

62 meaning is not intrinsic to an event, situation or person, but is rather actively constructed and negotiated.108 Thus:

[w]ith respect to those experiencing loss, we need to understand the contrast between the perceived world of the person that existed prior to the loss, the world that was, and the perceived world of the person following the loss, the world that is. Therefore, the same loss will be perceived differently by every person affected by it, and one person cannot fully know the perception of the loss as another experiences it.109

Perception, and in turn meaning, are not realised in a social vacuum. Constructivism postulates that an individual’s experience does not occur in isolation from his or her environment. Loss, for instance, occurs (and is interpreted) in a social context and the specificity of this context affects the experience of mourning.110

Meaning-reconstruction theory represents an attempt to move away from the idea that "successful" mourning involves returning to the same reality that the subject occupied pre-bereavement, only minus the presence of the lost other.111 Rather, it recognises that the world the subject occupied prior to the loss has been significantly altered by what is a "profoundly disorienting experience".112 Mourning, according to this view, involves adjusting to this alteration, and negotiating its effects in order to construct a "new" reality. Thomas Attig has explained that this process of adjustment and negotiation:

is not simply a matter of mastering information and developing theoretical constructs to organize and systematize that information…[r]ather it is a matter of grasping the practical importance of that which is encountered; of discerning its value and significance…[it] involves the recovery of one's bearings in

63 the world and the appropriation of understanding which give direction to and ground a sense of purpose in ongoing living.113

Attig is at pains to stress the "organic" nature of this process, claiming that "[i]t is artificial and distorting of the nature of the phenomenon to analyze the experience into physical, emotional, intellectual and social components".114

Psychologist Robert Neimeyer takes Attig's ideas further by arguing that mourning is a process necessitating the re-construction by the bereaved subject of a coherent, personal narrative.115 For Neimeyer, meaning- reconstruction thus understood "is the central process in grieving",116 at least for the majority of bereaved individuals.117 It can be defined as:

1. the attempt to find or create new meaning in the life of the survivor, as well as in the death of the loved one 2. the integration of meaning, as well as its construction 3. the construction of meaning as an interpersonal, as well as personal, process 4. the anchoring of meaning making in cultural, as well as intimate, discursive contexts 5. tacit and pre-verbal, as well as explicit and articulate meanings; and 6. the processes of meaning reconstruction, as well as its products.118

What is important is not so much the content of the narrative, but the extent to which narrativisation occurs. In other words, "meaning making is more an activity than an achievement".119 One aspect of this activity, Neimeyer suggests, is "the ability to tack back and forth among different styles of narrating…experiences, between objective, external accounts, subjective, involved narratives, and reflexive self examination".120 The objective of this

64 process is to find a new existential mode of formulating one's self concept and life direction.121 Mary-Frances O'Connor has made the important point that meaning reconstruction theory "is in contrast to [the] 'return to base-line' model upon which adjustment [theories are] implicitly based".122 In other words, while Freud (or at least the Freud of "Mourning and Melancholia"), Bowlby and process/task theorists proceed according to the notion that "successful" mourning involves returning to pre-bereavement functioning, meaning reconstruction theory views bereavement as rather a place for the subject to go on from. Bonnano and Kaufman have proposed, along these lines, that Freud's notion of "working through" bereavement should be replaced with the concept of "working towards" the reconstruction of a new subjective reality.123

Summary

In this Part I have provided an introduction to modern grief theory, identifying its most salient contributors and themes. It is important to do this because, for most of the last century, the phenomenon of bereavement has been almost wholly approached with reference to it. Though origins are often spurious, the genesis of grief theory is unequivocally attributable to Sigmund Freud. Freud's concept of Trauerarbeit was revolutionary in its time, and it has exerted enormous influence on the way in which bereavement has been understood ever since. The legacy of this influence is the view, put crudely, that grief is the result of the disruption to the ego caused by loss. Mourning, in turn, is the work of overcoming this disruption, with its objective being to reconstitute the integrity of the ego. In this scheme of things, mourning is a reparative, regulatory process requiring the internalisation of the other followed by the acceptance of a substitute for him/her.124 Problems are assumed to occur when this process does not unfold as it should, and these problems are, in essence, indicators of pathology. While Freud recognised in the latter part of his career that the practical application of the concept of

65 Trauerarbeit was not without problems and contradictions, its cultural influence was not diluted.

Freud's concept has been modified in significant ways by subsequent researchers and theorists. Contemporary grief theory is increasingly concerned to elucidate the intricate nuances of mourning rather than adhere to an overarching, heuristic framework. This concern has crystallised around key areas such as the continuing bond with the dead and the reconstruction of meaning following loss. Yet, what is common to the approaches that I have discussed here is the apprehension of mourning in psychological terms, that is, as a process that chiefly concerns the functioning of the self in relation to the self. In this drama, the other is consigned to the role of ego prop. In the most extreme rationalist version articulated by Freud, the other is the instigator of "my" decline and the obstacle to be overcome in achieving "my" recovery. Later, in process and task theory, the other seems to drop out of the picture altogether. "Continuing bonds" theory re-enlists the other, but, by and large, s/he retains a certain instrumentality even here.

Above all, I would make the point that in contemporary grief theory, mourning is configured as a regrettable necessity rather than a dynamic conjuncture. Freud's great achievement is to privilege mourning as a significant moment in the life of the psyche, but he is interested in this moment primarily because of what it illustrates about the psyche’s normative functioning. Klein emphasises the agency of the subject in negotiating mourning, and recognises the utility of mourning, but, like Freud, she is beholden to the primacy of (re)establishing normal psychic functioning. Bowlby's mantra that there is no grief without attachment is indispensable, yet his theory tends to reduce mourning to a symptom wrought by the disruption of (an) attachment. And so on. The closest that mainstream grief theory comes to recognising mourning in productive terms is in the application of the phenomenological notion of meaning reconstruction. Yet meaning

66 reconstruction theory posits the opportunity of mourning in terms that tend not to go beyond the idea that bereavement can have personally enriching effects; this is the leap that I wish to make in this work.

In the next and subsequent parts, the debts I owe to the approaches I have outlined in this Part will be developed. On the other hand, the remarks I made in the Introduction to this thesis ought to make clear in broad terms where I depart from the ideology that these approaches tend, to one extent or another, to embody. In this Part, however, I have not delineated the major oppositional strand of thinking about mourning that has emerged in the wake of post-structuralism. This thinking achieves representation primarily in the work of contemporary European philosophers whose interest lies in a radical questioning of assumptions about subjectivity. If the major paradigm of mourning that I have outlined in this Part might be described as constructivist, these philosophers might, concomitantly, be said to articulate a deconstructionist mourning.125 From here on in, my engagement with this work will become crucial to the perspective I am seeking to unfold.

1 See Riccardi, op.cit. 2 New York: New York University Press, 1994. 3 Lechte, op.cit. p21. 4 (1917) The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol XIV. [1957].Trans. James Strachey et al. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1964. 5 (1914) The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol XIV. 6 Tammy Clewell, "Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis of Loss". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2004, 52 (1). pp.43-67. 7 Clewell, op.cit. p45. 8 Sigmund Freud, "Our Attitude Towards Death" (1915). Standard Edition Vol XIV. p298. 9 Freud, "Our Attitude Towards Death". p293. Melanie Klein takes up this insight and develops it into one of her most important contributions to psychoanalysis. 10 Klein suggests that this guilt recalls the infantile depressive position, instigated by the loss of the breast, which the infant believes itself to have engendered by its own hatred. 11 Freud, "Our Attitude Towards Death". p290. 12 Freud, "Our Attitude Towards Death". 291. 13 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p243. 14 However, it is important to understand that in referring to mourning's "normalcy", Freud is remarking on mourning's existential inevitability. For Freud, mourning is always epistemologically located in the realm of pathology. 15 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p244; my emphasis. 16 This is a good point at which to emphasise that Freud's epistemological biases must be located and understood within the context of the modernist imperative.

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17 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p245. 18 ibid. 19 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p244. 20 ibid. 21 John Wheway, "The Dialogical Heart of Intersubjectivity", Mace (ed.), op.cit. p107. Freud was to subsequently comment, in 1930, that "[l]ife, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks." (Quoted by Robyn Ferrell, Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan. Routledge: London, 1996. p34.) 22 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p255. I would argue that this is largely because Freud remains so attached to a rational, positivist, hermeneutic model. 23 Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia". p255. 24 Clewell, op.cit. p46. 25 Clewell, op.cit. p47. 26 Clewell, op.cit. p48. 27 The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol IXX. [1957].Trans. James Strachey et al. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1964. 28 The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol IXV. 29 Quoted by Clewell, op.cit. p58. 30 Lechte, op.cit. p23. 31 Clewell, op.cit. p61. For further discussion on the psychoanalytic concept of identification, see H. Loewald, "Internalization, separation, mourning and the super-ego". Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1962, 31. pp. 483-504 and E. Furman, A child's parent dies: Studies in childhood bereavement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. 32 Clewell, op.cit. p61. 33 Clewell, op.cit. p62. 34 Freud, quoted by Clewell, op.cit. p64. 35 Clewell, op.cit. p65. 36 Clewell, op.cit. p64. 37 "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States" [1935] and "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States" [1940], Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1975. 38 Julia Segal, Melanie Klein. London: Sage, 1991. p35. 39 Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States". p.266. 40 Klein, "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States". p349. 41 Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States". p266. 42 Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States". p354. 43 Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States". p353. 44 In Bitter, Bitter Tears: Nineteenth Century Diarists and Twentieth Century Grief Theories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), P.C Rosenblatt suggests that the preoccupation of contemporary grief theory with the need for decathexis or detachment of the deceased is historically specific. Rosenblatt does not find evidence for a similar degree of preoccupation in the texts he analyses. 45 Klein, "Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States". p353. 46 Segal, op.cit. p32. 47 John E. Baker, "Mourning and the Transformation of Object Relationships: Evidence for the Persistence of Internal Attachments". Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2001, 18 (1). pp. 55-73. p61. 48 See George Hagman's "Mourning: A Review and Reconsideration". International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1995, 76. pp. 909-925, for a comprehensive list of references. 49 Riccardi, op.cit. p24. 50 Hagman, op.cit. p909. 51 Riccardi, op.cit. p18. 52 Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 6. pp. 12-22.

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53 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, "Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia", Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlocher (eds.), Psychoanalysis in France. New York: International Universities Press, 1980. 54 Clewell, op.cit. p50. 55 Anna Gibbs, "Writing and the Flesh of Others". Australian Feminist Studies, 2003, 18 (42). pp309-319. p314. 56 Baker, op.cit. p58; my emphasis. 57 For a discussion about the limiting implications of this location see G.A. Bonanno, "New Directions in Bereavement Research and Theory". American Behavioral Scientist, January 2001, 44 (5). pp. 718-725. 58 See Charles A. Corr and Kenneth J. Doka, "Master concepts in the field of death, dying and bereavement: Coping versus adaptive strategies". Omega, 2001, 43 (3). pp.183-199. 59 Significant contributions to the literature focusing on pathological grief include M. Stroebe et al., "On the Classification and Diagnosis of Pathological Grief". Clinical Psychology Review, 2000, 20 (1). pp. 57-75; T. Rando, Treatment of Complicated Mourning. Champaign: Research Press, 1993; S. Jacobs, Pathologic Grief: Maladaptation to loss. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1993; M. Horowitz et al., "Pathological Grief: Diagnosis and Explanation". Psychosomatic Medicine, 1993, 55. pp.260-273; S. Wilkinson, "Is 'Normal Grief' a Mental Disorder?", The Philosophical Quarterly, July 2000, 50, (200). pp. 289-304; B. Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement, New York: Basic Books, 1983. 60 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (Vols. 1 & 2). London: Hogarth Press & Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973/1974; The Making and Breaking of Affectational Bonds. London: Tavistock, 1979. For an excellent overview of how attachment theory has influenced clinical approaches to bereavement, see Nini Leick and Marianne Daidsen-Nielsen, Healing Pain: Attachment, Loss and Grief Therapy. [1987]. Trans. David Stoner. London: Routledge, 1999. 61 Judith Murray, "The Journey Through Grief Theory: the interplay between loss and grief theory and other psychological understandings". Paper presented at the Conference of the National Association of Loss and Grief (NALAG) Australia, Melboure, 2001. 62 Murray, op.cit. 63 John Bowlby, "Processes of Mourning". International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1961, 42. pp. 317-340. p322. 64 Rose J. Cleary, "Bowlby's Theory of Attachment and Loss: A Feminist Reconsideration". Feminism and Psychology, 1999, 9 (1). pp.32-42. p37. 65 ibid. 66 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (Vol 3). New York: Basic Books, 1980. p94. 67 For more recent elaborations of attachment theory, see C. Hazan and P. Shaver, "Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987, 52. pp. 511-524 and M. Sperling and W. Berman, Attachment in adults: Clinical and developmental perspectives. New York: Guilford Press, 1994. For discussions of the contribution of attachment theory to psychoanalysis more generally, see S. Mitchell, Relational concepts in psychoanalysis: An integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 and J.D Osofsky, "Perspectives on attachment and psychoanalysis". Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1995, 12. pp. 347-362. 68 Baker, op.cit. p61. 69 See Cleary, op.cit. 70 Cleary, op.cit. p37. 71 Cleary, op.cit. p38. 72 In her essay "Grief and the Loss of Self" (Kathy Charmaz (ed.), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA. London: Pallgrave McMillan, 1997), Kathy Charmaz has criticised "[n]arrow American definitions of significant and worthy relationships [that] grant certain bereaved entitled grief and priority status." (p235). 73 Kenneth J. Doka, Disenfranchised Grief. Lexington: Lexington Books, 1989. See also Charles A. Corr's "Enhancing the concept of disenfranchised grief". Omega, 1998-1999, 38 (1). pp.1-20. 74 For a discussion of the concept of adaptation, see Corr and Doka, op.cit. 75 New York: Macmillan, 1969.

69

76 While writing this thesis, it was common for people from various backgrounds to respond on hearing of my topic by referring to the "five stages" of grief. 77 Lorraine Hedtke, "Multiplying Death, Dying and Grief Narratives". www.rememberingpractices.com/webDocs/multiplying.pdf. Accessed 12 June 2005. 78Robert Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". Death Studies, September 2000, 24 (6). pp. 541-558. p554. 79 Rando, op.cit. 80 J.W. Worden, Grief Counselling and Grief Therapy. London: Routledge, 1981. 81 Murray, op.cit. 82 Thomas Attig, quoted by Murray, op.cit. 83 Hedtke, op.cit. For a rigorous critique of stage models, see Thomas Attig, How We Grieve: Relearning the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 84 Tony Walter, "A new model of grief: Bereavement and biography". Mortality, 1996, 1 (1). pp. 7-25. p8. 85 Allan Kellehear, "Editorial". The Medical Journal of Australia, 2002, 177 (4). pp. 176-177. p.176. 86 Neimeyer, op.cit. p544. 87 In "Enhancing the concept of disenfranchised grief", Charles A. Corr argues that "[w]hen we use the language of symptoms to describe all expressions of grief, we have pathologized grief and invalidated or disenfranchised its fundamental soundness as the human reaction to loss." (p10.) 88 Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1989, 57. pp. 349-357. For a detailed response to this article, see M. Stroebe, J. Van Den Bout and H. Schut, "Myths and misconceptions about bereavement: The opening of a debate". Omega, 1994, 29 (3). pp.187-203. 89 See M. Stroebe, "Bereavement Research and Theory: Retrospective and Prospective". American Behavioral Scientist, January 2001, 44 (5). pp.854-865. Stroebe argues that despite the huge influence of Wortman's and Silver's article, the psychodynamic account of grief work articulated by Freud remains the primary influence on contemporary bereavement research and theory. 90 M. Stroebe and H. Schut, "The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description". Death Studies, Apr/May 1999, 23 (3). pp.197-224. 91 Simon Shimshon Rubin, "The two-track model of bereavement: Overview, retrospect and prospect". Death Studies, December 1999, 23 (8). pp.681-714. For a related approach, see G. Bonanno and S. Kaufman, "Toward an integrative perspective on bereavement". Psychological Bulletin, November 1999, 125 (6). pp. 760-776. 92 Stroebe and Schut, "The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description". p197. 93 ibid. 94 M. Horowitz, Stress response syndromes. Northvale: Aronson, 1986. See also Robyn Robinson, "Finding the trauma in loss and the loss in trauma". Grief Matters, Winter 1999. pp. 25-28; S. Shimshon Rubin, R. Malkinson, and E. Witztum, "Trauma and Bereavement: Conceptual and clinical issues revolving around relationships". Death Studies, October 2003, 27 (8). pp.667-690; B. Raphael, "Trauma and Grief". Grief Matters, Winter 1999. pp. 22-24; and Charles R. Figley, Brian E. Bride and Nicholas Mazza (eds.), Death and Trauma: The Traumatology of Grieving. Washington, DC: Taylor and Francis, 1997. 95 For instance, see Deutsch, op.cit. 96 Rubin, op.cit. p681. 97 ibid. 98 ibid. 99 Kellehear, op.cit. p177. 100 Baker, op.cit. p62. 101 D. Klass, P.R. Silverman and S. Nickman, Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Washington DC: Taylor and Francis, 1996. See also Baker (op.cit.) and S. Shuchter's Dimensions of Grief. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1986. 102 Klass, Silverman and Nickman, op.cit.

70

103 Baker, op.cit. pp. 66-67. 104 ibid. 105 See, for example, N.P. Field, C. Nichols, A. Holen and M.J. Horowitz, "The relation of continuing attachment to adjustment in conjugal bereavement". Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1999, 67. pp. 212-218 and M. Stroebe, M. Gergen, K. Gergen, and W. Stroebe, "Broken Hearts or Broken Bonds?" American Psychologist, 1992, 7. pp. 1205-1212. 106 Thomas Attig, op.cit; "Relearning the world: On the phenomenology of grieving". Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, January 1990, 1. pp. 53-66. 107 M.J. Mahoney, "Constructivism and the study of complex self-organization". Constructive Change, 1996, 1. pp. 3-8. p4. 108 Mary-Frances O'Connor, "Making meaning of life events: Theory, evidence and research directions for an alternative model". Omega, 2002-03, 46 (1). pp.51-75. p53. 109 Murray, op.cit. 110 For a relatively recent example of this approach, see Tony Walter's On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999. 111 For a critical discussion of the concept of recovery in mourning, see D. Balk, "Recovery following bereavement: an examination of the concept". Death Studies, 2004, 28. pp. 361-374. 112 Attig, "Relearning the World: On the Phenomenology of Grieving". p60. 113 Attig, "Relearning the World: On the Phenomenology of Grieving". p61. 114 ibid. 115 Neimeyer, op.cit; Lessons of Loss. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 116 Neimeyer, Lessons of Loss. p110. 117 Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". p545. 118 Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". pp. 546-547. 119 Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". p546 120 Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". p549. 121 Neimeyer has extrapolated from his theory a number of narrative strategies for use in the context of grief counselling. See R. Neimeyer, "Narrative strategies in grief therapy". Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 1999, 12. pp. 65-85. See also Lorraine Hedtke, "Reconstructing the language of death and grief". Illness, Crisis and Loss, 2002, 10 (4). pp. 285-293. 122 O'Connor, op.cit. p52. 123 G.A. Bonanno and S. Kaltman, "The assumed necessity of working-through memories of traumatic experiences", P.R. Duberstein and J.M. Masling (eds.), Psychodynamic Perspectives on Sickness and Health. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2000. See also M. Horowitz, "A Model of Mourning: Change in schemas of self and other". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1990, 38. pp. 297-324. 124 Marshall W. Alcorn, "Loss and figuration: Paradigms of Constructive and Deconstructive Mourning". The Centennial Review, 1991, 35. pp.501-518. 125 Following Alcorn, op.cit.

71 Yonder Revisited

One's practices reflect biographical, historical, and particularised social locations. Accordingly, each of us sees from 'somewhere'. No one can be 'nowhere' or 'everywhere'. – Laurel Richardson 1

I

The way it is now is the way it was then, only different. Sometimes it is easy to forget what depths reside in difference. When I was there, it was "here". Now that I am "here", it is "there". How I got from there to here was between, via "yonder". As Siri Hustvedt explains, "you can never really find yourself yonder…[t]he fact that here and there slide and slip depending on where I am is somehow poignant…".2

The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them…3

Hustvedt's "truth" is also my own. In a way, the entirety of the textual adventure rendered here is an attempt on my part to map the mental place/space created through the process of remembering having once been "elsewhere". "Here and there ", notes Hustvedt, "are in a relation of constant strain that is chiefly determined by memory."4 We all experience the traversal of this private geography. Precisely how, differs with individuals. Some of us are overly enamoured of fences and other contrived borders, and are completely overwhelmed by a lack thereof. As for myself, I am like most people: ambivalent, inconstant. There are memories I can conjure vividly with almost no effort, others only with great effort, others still to which I am drawn, unwillingly and without cooperation. Some happily entice me to roam, while others threaten to

76 swallow up and obliterate me. A few manage to straddle all of these alternatives. In the context of my subjective history, it is these places/spaces I find most compelling.

§

I easily recall my father telephoning to say it was a clear night, and would I mind if he drove up with his telescope? I was somewhat surprised but did not mind, and said so. I have no memory of the date this occurred, except that it was somewhere between the 11th and the 15th of December. I was standing at the stove stirring something when the doorbell rang. When I opened the door both my father and mother were before me. For the second time that day I was somewhat surprised, but unperturbed. I greeted my parents casually. The television was on and I said, wasn't it sad that Andrew Olle had died? I went on to say that I had actually felt a tear come to my eye when I heard the news, although I did happen to be chopping onions at the time.

In all the years since, I have never asked my parents how they came up with the excuse about the clear night and the telescope, nor why they felt an excuse was needed at all, although I imagine it was at some point decided that I should not receive the news over the telephone. I have also never asked what they said when M.'s sister phoned to tell them. It must have been odd for her, imparting such terrible and intimate news to strangers who could have been her parents, but were not.

I knew the instant they told me that it was suicide. For me this has always been a source of profound guilt, since it suggests I was expecting it, and therefore could have done something to stop it. The word itself was not used. They said she had died and I said, it was something terrible

77 wasn't it? And my mother said, yes, she thought so. She made me a cup of tea, which I rejected. I said there were people I had to call and took the telephone into the bedroom. The conversations were mostly humiliating because it became apparent I was next to last to know; everyone had conspired to ensure I would not find out while alone. I have always imagined that during the time I remained in the bedroom my father cleaned up the kitchen. I do not know why I think this. I have never thought about what my mother did. Perhaps she took care of the spilt tea.

In the car I sat in the back seat, alone. My father drove three hours to Anna's. When we got there Anna made tea and everyone drank it and a conversation took place around me, the details of which I cannot remember.

§

I have often revisited this memory, or rather, these memorial fragments. I think this is because they are what divide before from after. Also, they preface everything that comes next. I have tried hard to recall what it was I was stirring on the stove. I do not know why this detail is so important to me. On the other hand, I could quite easily confirm the exact date on which these events took place, since I know I was at a party the previous evening, and I happen to still possess my diary for that year, and moreover I know for a fact that the party is recorded in it.

As hard as I have tried to remember what I was stirring at the stove, I have sought equally to banish another fragment that remains of that night. It is 4am. I know this from the lurid green digits on the microwave, which I pass through the kitchen. I am standing at the open

78 back door of Anna's house. The door is open because it is summer. The grain of wood on the doorframe seems magnified a thousand times. The scent of frangipani mocks my despair. Air silently leaves my lungs. I crumple slowly, an inflatable thing rendered useless. The nearby ocean crashes in my ears, making me dizzy. My knees buckle and I fall in slow motion. A terrible noise is coming from my mouth. Nearby, the cat I did not see, flees.

I wrote the eulogy the following morning. It did not tell the truth.

§

It takes two hours to drive across Sydney to the funeral, through industrial wastelands; past burned out cars and brown paddocks with falling down sheds. Anna has asked me to navigate, a significant error of judgment on her part. I am fearful of other traffic and newly dyslexic to boot.

Are we there yet, rea we tehre yte?

We are there and it is a small church. I open the car door and fall out; apparently I have become paraplegic. Anna drags me across the car park gravel; now my legs are spastic. I remember the indignity of this moment bodily; also, the feeling of my mouth as if glued down permanently at each end, my tongue, heavy and dumb inside it. V. is watching me from afar. Shame rises inside my throat like bile.

My signature in the attendance book is spidery. I was a twenty year old girl and now suddenly I am an octogenarian, half-blind and palsied. It's hard to forget this feeling of having grown old overnight, like time-lapse

79 photography or one of those pitiful children whose faulty genes make them ancient at five. Into the grave I threw this:

Live, Live because of the sun the dream, the excitable gift.5

§

…through the weeds, the weeds cannot hold her who is all rancour, all valves now, all destination, dizzy with wanting to sink back in, thinning terribly in the holy separateness.6

What does my mother remember, who never was Demeter. What does my father remember, who never was her husband. What is this remembering in which now a girl with a weed and a notebook appears.7

And Anna who saw the wild things roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws

Anna who rowed her private boat into the territory of the wild things and smiled at them and

80 Anna who scooped me over the side and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into her warm bed.

What does Anna remember of the summer that burned too hot, the useless water I wept…?8

§

K. drives me to Coogee beach after the funeral. Later I write a letter severing our friendship on the grounds that she does not know what it means to suffer. How histrionic I was in those days (I dreamed last night I apologised. I woke and wondered if a great pain has beset her yet.)

Some people go half a lifetime before they are confronted by death. I can't imagine what that's like, what it would be like to be sixty and for one's parent to die, say of natural causes, and for that death to be one's first encounter with mortality. My friend O. is infertile and equally incredulous. She makes her way down the supermarket aisle and looks at women with babes in arms or slung on hips and thinks to herself: you will never know the exquisite loss and pain that I know. O. would never wish it on anyone exactly, but occasionally she would like to see the smug expression of a yummy mummy well and truly wiped off the face of the earth. Not—we agree—that there is a hierarchy of suffering. Everything —we assure one another—is relative. Still it remains that some people seem to live remarkably untroubled lives.

§

81 The thing is (I imagine her saying) That I just couldn't stand it any longer. Being a librarian wasn't What I imagined for myself Growing up And the boy I liked Had ignored me for months.

You didn't seem to understand It was clear you had Other things on your mind Apart from moving in together I don't know what you saw in That other girl she was a flake and What was with that dress she wore.

I always knew I'd do it And why you thought it was An accident in spite of all the evidence The fact I burned my stuff and kept clear Of you for weeks I really don't know Although I suppose Those last essays I handed in threw you.

Ironic, don't you think? You spent all your time obsessing About a suicidal poet, dead twenty years While before your eyes you would not see My young self

82 Combusting, self-destructing Leaving no poems to cryptically explain why.

§

Without any wilful assistance on my part, I turned twenty-one two months after the funeral. I wore my new blue dress and accompanied my parents to a fancy restaurant. I don't remember what I ate. My mother seemed annoyed that I was unhappy. This was not what she had imagined for all those years that went before. I don't recall feeling sorry for this. I don't recall feeling anything other than cold in my blue dress although it was wholly appropriate for the season.

After that I forget everything. This is not strictly true but it is the way I prefer to remember it.

§

Last night I dreamed of chocolate cupcakes. Woke early and consulted my dream dictionary: "To dream of sweet cakes, is gain for the laboring and a favourable opportunity for the enterprising. Those in love will prosper". I cannot imagine this, or anything that has not yet come to pass. As long as I revisit the past, interpreting and reinterpreting events, I blind myself to the future and what it may hold. For the first time I consider this flaw in my psychological make-up. I'm the driver who accidentally rams into the back of the car in front while obsessively consulting the rear view mirror.

I was watching a dreadful American TV drama last night and it ended with the most cliched voiceover, but I thought how true it is: "Things

83 just happen—they just happen. And we're left to pick up the pieces. And that's what we're all doing, all the time—picking up the pieces and going on".

§

21 August 1997

Nothing suffices. Nothing satisfies. Not even words, those dumb dollar bills. Dumb bunny, dumb mule, you are locked in your own mind, in a trance, in a blue fugue. God — do you hear me? I would like to find my place in the sun and curl up there for all eternity. Say a certain time comes. M______'s did. Say when it comes all you hear is the alphabet insisting on repeating itself. Say what you do is sit in your kitchen smoking cigarettes. Smoking kills. So does this. Little wonder suicide notes never make much sense. I am cold. I could go on, I guess, never choosing to kill myself (I never could). Or did I? All that time worrying I would go mad, and I already was.

Looking back, this must have been one of the worst times. Looking back, it's easy to see what happened as madness unembellished. And yet by the 5th of September I am writing about making soup for lunch. Eight days later I become an aunt. On the 4th of October I note Sexton to Snodgrass: "The trouble with everyone up and dying like that is that there are no faces left to throw your emotions at: love or hate. What do you do with the emotion? It's still there, though they are gone".9

It's easy to look back and think that all this happened in the absence of other people. Yet here is a letter from my brother-in-law, and an ultrasound photograph of my niece. There is a saved paragraph in the

84 Writers' Centre newsletter describing my sister as "one of the great white hopes of Australian poetry". And it's true I had lunches and cups of tea and letters and phone calls from America and from France. It's what Joan Didion describes as the utter superficiality of sanity, or what J. says is the constant hovering at the abyss. Some suicide-wrecked people fall over the edge, thus eviscerating the compulsion to ask "why" and the requirement to bear no answer.

§

I am afraid of writing, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don't hold. I don't know what's there, but I'm pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self? Perhaps that is more accurate. The wound is static, a given. The writing self is multiple and elastic and it circles the wound. Over time, I have become more aware of the fact that I must try not to cover that speechless, hurt core, that I must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear.10

§

My Catholic upbringing, though lacking in constancy, can soothe me in ways that the continental philosophers cannot. To everything there is a season, as Ecclesiasticus laid down.

The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid. The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my

85 voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears (Psalms 18:4-6).

But I have lost the thread. There is more to remember, like that time I stole the lipstick in the small town. Having lost what seemed the world I succoured myself through shoplifting inessential items. If I correctly recall, also among my stash that summer was a packet of one hundred safety pins, a miniature parmesan grater, a handy guide to common food additives and preservatives, an emergency rain poncho, two packets of maraschino cherries and one travel-size Johnsons baby powder. I was never caught, but can't resist contemplating, all these years on, my hypothetical Legal Aid defence:

"My client has never previously been in trouble with the law, your Honour. My client is an A grade university student who has recently experienced an emotional upheaval following her exposure to a traumatic event for which she harbours irrational yet painful feelings of guilt and responsibility. Your Honour my client admits to the offences for which she comes before the court and deeply regrets her behaviour. She has agreed to undergo counselling. Your Honour my client is highly unlikely to offend again. I respectfully request that the charges against my client be dismissed with a section 10 bond".

I kid myself, of course. I would never have gone to court. A nice girl like me, educated, well dressed, with no track marks on my arms? A caution, likely. A fine at worst. And who, let's face it, ever heard of a Legal Aid solicitor using the (albeit bastardised) language of psychoanalysis?

§

86 Autumn has arrived. The cupcake dream, its interpretation and my subsequent revelation have made me anxious. I go to the park and watch small children fly an orange kite. My sister phones. She no longer writes poetry. My sister says that anxiety is a psychological prompt and that I should pay attention to this prompt and avoid turning the anxiety into the main object. I hang up the phone and consider this. I decide to make cupcakes. From the pages of my grease-stained cookbook a small card falls. On one side is printed the prayer of the Legion of Mary.

The prayer was slipped in my letterbox years ago by "Terry and Angelina" who happened to be door-knocking my street for the local Catholic church. ("We regret that you were not at home, but we hope to be able to visit again in the near future. Our Parish Priest sends his blessing and best wishes"). It's been a long time since I've seen the card. I don't know what it's doing in the cookbook between basic soft polenta and Maggie Beer's carte du jour. I remember fishing it from the letterbox and wedging it in the corner of my dressing table mirror where it remained for many months.

O Mary, conceived without sin, I prayed to you despite my doubt.

The unexpected reappearance of the evidence of Terry and Angelina's random house call has sparked in me the need to recall other ephemeral objects that furnished those despairing years. On the dressing table there still sits a cheap green glass candlestick, cracked and stuffed with ancient wax. This was M.'s birthday gift to me the year she died. It came wrapped in brown paper and string.

In the top dresser drawer there is a faded yellow envelope on which is copied 1 Corinthians 13, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Philippians 4:4-9,

87 Matthew 6:24-34 and more. I choose at random Romans 5:1-11: "Rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts…". It is startling to hold in my hands this evidence of what I had forgotten, this clinging to my childhood faith.

From the top of my wardrobe I retrieve my journal from the year 1996. Haphazardly secreted inside it are the following: the (12) Principles of Attitudinal Healing copied onto a sheet of blue-lined notepaper; a Theosophical Society pamphlet entitled Release Into Light; four verses (photocopied) of a poem by Alice Walker; a note from my sister (Dear Bec: Just ignore the messiness! Help yourself to any food you want— there's not much—and I'll cook us some pasta for dinner when I get home —6'sh—if later, will call you. Love xo); a Hertz rental car receipt; a letter from the Director (Buildings and Grounds) at the university concerning the proposed memorial to M.; one receipt issued by IGA Newtown (eggs, tampons, bananas, spaghetti, toothpaste).

From inside my wardrobe I locate my old cherry cords (size 8) that no longer fit, a green checked skirt c. 1994 stapled at the hem, the floral scarf that used to smell of M.

On my bookcase I spy Franny and Zooey, Billy Budd and Other Stories, Practical Candleburning Rituals, Toulouse-Lautrec and The Yellow Wallpaper.

In the old box of CDs I keep under my bed are Julianna Hatfield, Dinosaur Jnr, Janis Joplin and The Carpenters.

88

On my face as I pass the hall mirror there are lines that no longer belong in this catalogue of historical artefacts.

§

The difference between Despair And Fear — is like the One Between the instant of a Wreck — And when the Wreck has been according to Emily Dickinson.11 By this logic my current anxiety is less despairing and more fearful. It is difficult to admit that I do not know what I will do once this compulsion to write about mourning is dispensed with. Will I become a serial cupcake baker for instance? Take up volunteer work in my local "community"? Commence IVF? It is not well acknowledged that the anticipation of liberty can bring on a bad case of panic among those who have been long constrained. My cat sits atop the computer as I write this. Her expression plainly concedes that she can not understand my problem.

No matter—it eats at me. Food and oral metaphors fly thick today. Realising this makes me nervous. I pour a glass of wine although it is not yet 5 o'clock. The cat is apparently offended and relocates to the windowsill. I try to recall what it is I wanted to say. I am trying hard to remember though the alcohol is already going to my head.

Suddenly—for the first time—it occurs to me that I've been doing this to assure myself that I will remember.

89

I feel like an analysand oblivious to her own subtext whose analyst has lost patience and filled her in.

I feel—utterly transparent.

§

I look back from the perspective of a woman who is and is not the girl to whom these things happened. This is a riddle I try periodically to solve.

II

Once, about two years after my bereavement by suicide, a very personable sociologist visited my home to interview me about my experience. I was genuinely interested in his research and wanted to assist. Despite this, at the end of the two allotted hours, I sensed that I had been unable to provide a solid, reliable account—one that would help substantiate his nascent theory about the role of "telling one's story" in recovery from grief.

I did not resist providing such an account on principle. Nonetheless, I was floored (flawed?) from the outset when the sociologist instructed me to "start from the beginning". The interview went badly after that, with my answers to his questions stilted and trailing off at inopportune moments. When he later forwarded the transcript for my verification, I found myself embarrassed by my efforts. Worse, I recognised how a practitioner trained in a certain method of psychotherapy might interpret them. Lacking in narrative linearity and cogency, I could be analysed as having failed to adequately integrate and concatenate my trauma. I never

90 followed up on the findings of the sociologist's research. Having sensed that I was an unsatisfying subject (in more ways than one), I was unwilling, perhaps, to resubmit myself for confirmation.

The anecdote illustrates my familiarity with the cultural requirement to mediate (or produce) the "private geography" of memory in a way that satisfies certain presumptions pertaining to discourse and its role in the maintenance of the subject. My awareness of my incapacity to meet this requirement suggests a degree of anxiety about my status as a "proper" (or conforming) subject.

Over a number of years, I have learned to inhabit this anxiety in a way that is playful and thus productive. Writing is the main conduit for this activity. In my writing, I turn my incapacity into an unwillingness to capitulate to the cultural requirement that I produce "a good story". To tell "a good story" requires one to inhabit a grossly egocentric state, since it assumes that one can be symbolically 'everywhere' at one time, that time being the point of narration. Ethically, such egocentrism troubles me. ("Narrativizing, like all intentional behavior…is a site of moral responsibility".)12 Thus I traverse the memorial landscape of my bereavement by suicide in a way that acknowledges the cleavage between "here" and "there", that preserves, in other words, the mysterious space/place of yonder.

Despite taking issue with the cultural requirement to tell "a good story", I do not resist narrative itself, as such. Believing that one can sustain a position of being symbolically "nowhere" is as problematic as believing that one can be symbolically "everywhere". However, my interpretation of narrative is expansive rather than reductive. Like Laurel Richardson, I

91 approach the act of narrativising as being "open ended and polysemous, allowing different meanings and systems of meaning to emerge".13 Narrative, in this interpretation, is viewed as dialogical14 rather than "impinging".15 "Working from that premise", writes Richardson, "we are freed…to tell and retell. There is no such thing as 'getting it right', only 'getting it' differently contoured and nuanced".16

Yet, far from implying an abrogation of responsibility, the dialogical model of narrative implicitly acknowledges that "[n]o textual staging is innocent".17 It achieves this by rhetorically exposing the moments of friction and discontinuity that reveal the work-in-progress, its intentionality. In this way, it also reveals the subject-in-process, undermining the egocentric identity that refuses to admit the other into its consciousness.

My writing through and about bereavement does not lend itself readily to an ethnographic analysis. I choose not to alienate "myself" from my "products". I render the journey through my private geography—my yondering, if you like—in a way that is intended to invite speculation, identification, resistance to identification, and above all, other ways of telling stories. I conceive of this occupation as an exercise in intimacy, that is, as attentiveness to "the resonance of the other".18

What to write about yourself in a research text is a puzzling postmodernist problem. The problem as I now see it is to discover and write about yourself without 'essentializing' yourself by the very categories you have constructed to talk about yourself and without 'valorizing' yourself because you are talking about yourself. — Laurel Richardson 19

92

1 Laurel Richardson, "Trash on the Corner: Ethics and Ethnography", Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996. p103. 2 Siri Hustvedt, "Yonder". A Plea for Eros. London: Sceptre, 2006. pp.1-2. 3 Hustvedt, op.cit. p2. 4 Hustvedt, op.cit. p4. 5 Anne Sexton, "Live". The Complete Poems. 6 Jorie Graham, "Self Portrait as Both Parties". The End of Beauty: Poems. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1987. 7 Jorie Graham, "To the Reader". The End of Beauty: Poems. 8 Some of the words in this section are taken from Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are. London: The Bodley Head, 1967. 9 Anne Sexton, letter to W.D. Snodgrass, 9 June 1959, Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (eds.), Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters [1977]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. p79. 10 Siri Hustvedt, "Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self". A Plea for Eros. p228. 11 Emily Dickinson, Poem 305. 12 Laurel Richardson, "Narrative Knowing and Sociological Telling". Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. p34. 13 Laurel Richardson, "Narrative Knowing and Sociological Telling". p31. 14 One way of defining dialogism is to say that, inter alia, it seeks to invite rather than impose interpretation(s). 15 In Intimacy and Alienation (London: Routledge, 2000), Russell Meares characterises an "impinging narrative" as one "made in isolation and shut off from the domain of discourse. No discrepant information can enter into it. It is a system of 'facts'…retold in a repetitive, changeless way." (p83). 16 Laurel Richardson, "Writing Matters". Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. p91. 17 Laurel Richardson, "Speakers Whose Voices Matter". Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. p58. 18 Meares, op.cit. p4. 19 Laurel Richardson, "Trash on the Corner". p107.

93 Part 2: Mourning against monumentalism ______

I have never been truly able to act the drama that is myself or that I am in because everything has already been assigned to me as theater.1

We need to take back our private lives, to retrieve them from the intrusive interest of the market and of social discipline (norms) so that we can live them in private.2

Grief, when beliefs and institutions come under review, is a

state of rebellion.3

One of the challenges of evincing any new kind of knowledge, as Jane Flax has pointed out, is "to make the familiar seem strange and in need of explanation".4 In Part 2 I will try to achieve this effect in relation to mourning. To do so, I will borrow and develop the insights of a number of contemporary thinkers, including Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Dominick LaCapra, to suggest that a gainful way of thinking about mourning is to consider its status as a significant ethico-political intervention or "place of regard" within contemporary culture. More specifically, I will entertain the idea that mourning can be regarded a form of local subversion, or, to use Kristeva's term, "revolt". I will suggest that the "narcissistic crisis"5 involved in mourning can effect a deconstruction of one of Western culture's most integral constructs: the normative discourse of "identity".6 In this context, I will focus on the enabling potential of the narcissistic crisis rather than its deleterious effects. Mourning may instigate, I suggest, an ethically desirable practice of

94 "respect for the irreconcilable".7 It is this practice, in turn, which characterises what I call "productive mourning".

I dread therefore I am: Western culture and its discontents

Some years ago I delivered a paper on fear as an instrument of female socialisation, to which an audience member responded by commenting on the "culture of dread" that pervades Western societies. Although he did not elaborate further and I did not pursue the comment, I have since returned to it within the context of thinking about mourning and mourning's significance for the culture in which I am constituted as a subject. The expression "culture of dread" is an evocative one. Dread has been characterised by one commentator as "a burden we lift into experience that acts as a shield against the threat of life".8 One way to interpret this assertion is to think of dread as constituting a strategy of deferral. In collective terms, what dread seeks to defer is whatever remarks on the vulnerable and violable—that is, risky—nature of subjectivity. The reason for this aversion, I suggest, is that our culture’s integrity depends on the maintenance of the imperturbable, unassailable entity known as "I".

The fictitious subject of identity

The pursuit and maintenance of identity is a defining characteristic of post-industrialist, capitalist society. The modern notion of identity is a product of the Enlightenment. In Thinking Fragments, Jane Flax provides a useful summary of Enlightenment tenets. At the top of Flax’s list is the "coherent, stable self" of reason.9 This self is an atomistic entity posited as inherent, legible and continuative. Although its deconstruction is one of postmodernity's most ubiquitous themes, it would be a misnomer to suggest that the Enlightenment self has been rendered culturally obsolete. The contemporary prevailing discourse of identity is underpinned by it and, as I have indicated, this discourse has a normative function in contemporary life. To "have" an identity is to essentially occupy "a subjectively rendered world

95 and… refuse or ignore the interference of exteriority or alterity".10 In other words, "I" am the absolute core about which everything else revolves. In his article, "The empty self: towards a historically situated psychology", Phillip Cushman argues that an economy of "self-contained individualism" sustains the capitalist, consumerist ethic that dominates contemporary Western culture.11 This ethic promotes a version of selfhood that denies the significance of structures that exist outside it. It is responsible, inter alia, for the form of splitting known as "objectification". This splitting tends to mystify the subject’s fundamental situation of dependence in relation to the realm of otherness and indeed, to others.

The demystification of this dependence forms one of the objectives of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ famous treaty Totality and Infinity: an essay on exteriority.12 There, Levinas argues that Western philosophy and culture are deeply rooted in ontological interpretation and that this interpretation "reduces the other to the same".13 The "totality" of ontology resides in this reduction, and is exemplified by the Enlightenment concept of "knowledge", in which "to know amounts to being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity".14 Another way to put this is to say that knowledge is conceived as certainty, a logical, rational and uncontestable enclosure. Robyn Ferrell describes knowledge thus constituted as a form of "paranoia…since it is the 'mistaken' belief in one's own projections as literal objects outside the self, whereas they are in effect products of the relation of the inside to the outside".15 In other words, what we call knowledge is always inflected with the subjective, but in post-Enlightenment culture this is characteristically denied. For Levinas, the totality of ontology is characterised by a lack of self-reflexivity.16 This lack perpetuates the fiction of a self that is masterful, complete and invulnerable to difference, an atomistic entity that forms relations with other atomistic entities. "[N]ot allowing [myself] to be alienated by the other",17 "I" exist "as a strategy of knowledge", in fundamental enclosure.18 "I" am assured of my autarky only to the extent that I succeed in

96 objectifying an other who exists separately, as if in another realm of existence, "over-there".19

According to this totalising logic, "identity refers to self-identity, to the same. It designates a reality which is if possible fixed, not subject to change, not modifiable by the event or by the other."20 To put this in slightly different terms, "I" have an identity, "I" do not engage an identification.21 My inner life is reduced to a "self-referential proposition" founded upon the phenomenology of "the One".22 Luce Irigaray argues that ontology as a philosophical priority needs to be understood within the context of a long tradition of "patriarchal mythologies" wherein "becoming on the basis of one has been inscribed as origin". According to Irigaray, becoming on "the basis of two" has been effaced by these narratives, remaining at the level of the pre-discursive.23 At the centre of this effacement is the assumption of what Irigaray calls "a mistaken interiority", a "hallucinated completeness or form of autism that constricts the passage or space which would make intersubjectivity possible".24 Where I thus fail to apprehend the specificity of the other, I make the faux pas of reducing her "to a mere meaning, to my meaning".25 In other words, I conceive of the other in instrumental terms.

Irigaray deconstructs the ubiquitous statement "I love you" to illustrate the symbolic enactment of this designation. "I love you" is for Irigaray an appropriative utterance. When I say it, she argues, I am ostensibly addressing the other, but I am really speaking for my own benefit, since "the other is not defined in his or her actual reality".26 The "you" merely indicates "not I", and as such, the other is designated only in relation to my-self. The other remains an abstract entity; whether "inferior, superior or equal to me",27 s/he functions as "support for the perpetuation of the same, the eternal guardian of my image, my ideal".28 "I love you" is in this context a consumptive or cannibalistic representation expressing the will to possess the other. It inscribes the other as a mere fact, "a present objective reality".29 The other loses, in my eyes, her own

97 qualities as a subject30 and is apprehended merely as a "function of [my] energetic relation (libido) to him or her".31 Relations according to this fantasy are "reduced to a cause of appetite, of appropriation".32

Of course the other, whether a literal subject or, more broadly, whatever is irreducible to ontological totality, resists such appropriation; something that Melanie Klein's theory of object relations demonstrates.33 In this way, and ironically, the other is a constant rem(a)inder that underlines the limitations of ontological totality. The irrepressibility of otherness generates profound ambivalence and even resentment in a culture invested in perpetuating the normative discourse of identity. Numerous cultural commentators have speculated on how these qualities are collectively manifested.34 Julia Kristeva is one such commentator. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva describes the other as "the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode...".35 In other words, the other is that which undermines our sense of ourselves as unitary, continuative and rational beings. Its presence is therefore a cause of great anxiety and dread. For Kristeva, the figure of "the foreigner"—the immigrant, the refugee, the exile—is a receptacle for both the individual and cultural antipathy produced by this anxiety and dread.

Kristeva describes the foreigner as "a scar": a mark of what is left over or out.36 Confronted by the foreigner, we are confronted by our difference, by the possibility that we are "other" than what (who) we think. Kristeva argues that we neutralise this confrontation by projecting our anxieties onto the foreigner. This is one explanation for the prevalence, across cultures, of racism. The other becomes "a symptom"—"psychologically he signifies the difficulty we have of living as an other and with others".37 Other commentators, such as Simone de Beauvoir and later Luce Irigaray, have analysed the other in relation to the cultural politics of gender, recognising the same dynamic that Kristeva describes as being responsible for the symbolic oppression of "the feminine" and the actual oppression of women.

98

Significance versus meaning

But what of the consequences of repressing otherness for the self qua self? Kristeva suggests that alienation and depression are two outcomes: "The other, stifled within myself, causes me to be a stranger to others and indifferent to everything".38 Liberal individualism, which is the dominant lingua franca of our time, has little time for the foreigner or for otherness more generally. I want to suggest, following Kristeva, that the repression of otherness implicit to the normative discourse of identity extrudes one crucial consequence for the self qua self: the expunction of significance. In order to explain what I mean by "significance" I will contrast it to "meaning". When I use the term meaning, I am referring to a quite specific conceptual product rather than the vernacular use of the term. I understand meaning as constituting a strictly symbolic interpretation. Its discursive vehicle is narrative, in which all thematic elements are causally related.39 Contra, I understand significance as a meta-discursive field, comprised of semiotic elements, from which meaning is extracted, as something other, therefore, than a declarative facility. The major preoccupation of meaning is totality, that is, ensuring the scenery (or narrative) "hangs" together convincingly. In order to generate this illusion, meaning must divest itself of otherness. Significance, on the other hand, admits alterity, undermining the totality of meaning. In this way, significance and meaning are in constant dialectical relationship.

The problem, as it were, is not meaning as such, but rather, the extent to which a culture attempts, by mystifying significance, to present meaning/s as natural and implicit. This constricts experiences of subjectivity by disabling the ability of individuals to occupy and interpret significance in ways that acknowledge their own specificity. Acknowledging a debt to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, Julia Kristeva argues that contemporary Western culture is increasingly mired in a form of "psychological objectivism" that "is gradually

99 burying us in…secondary realities."40 Psychological objectivism refers to a process by which, as social subjects, we become increasingly alienated from significance and increasingly interpellated by meaning/s—"secondary realities" —that are mass-produced for our unquestioning consumption. As Susan Sontag puts it, "[r]eality has bifurcated, into the real thing and an alternative version of it, twice over. There is the event and its image. And there is the event and its projection."41 Or, one might say, there is significance and there is meaning. Particular meanings, or "scenes", are played out repetitiously, that is to say, fetishised, in Western culture. The effect of this is delimiting:

[f]ree to choose [people] may be, but what they can choose from is already chosen; not specifically by anyone but by default and by virtue of what is discursively available for individuals to use, to be or not to be actors in particular scenes.42

In this way, we are arguably a culture that, more and more, "eats indiscriminately".43 For political theorist John Raulston Saul, this indiscriminate consumption both produces and is a product of an "unconscious civilization".44 Situated, local knowledges derived experientially are subordinated and subsumed by totalising, normative discourses, that is, by "particular scenes" which may, but more than likely do not, adequately represent those local knowledges.45 In this way, what distinguishes us—our specificity—is nullified. In Kristevan parlance, the interior life of the subject is neutralised46 and is replaced by an "instrumental subjectivity".47

Adam Phillips has suggested that the expunction of significance proceeds courtesy of vocabularies "that offer themselves up as fetishes, or for identification". Such vocabularies function as quasi "instruction manuals",48 yoking pre-determined meanings to particular events. The effect of this is to eschew the significance that those events presage. One of the most visible

100 fetishistic vocabularies of our time is disseminated through the genre of "self help". Thanks to the proliferation of this genre, "everything is now increasingly subject to expertise—from mourning to making love".49 The self help genre, which Kathy Charmaz has described as embodying the "professionalisation of emotional response",50 encourages individuals to subordinate their local knowledge to this expertise, even as particular texts sometimes claim to suggest otherwise. In this way, they promote an epistemologically impelled subjectivity. Further, knowledge is assumed as something that the subject can apprehend via a representation alone. This representation is characteristically presented in the form of a series of truth-claims clothed in the "jargon of authenticity".51 The author of these truth-claims typically defends their legitimacy by recourse to a story of origin(s). Thus, calling on a) the author’s "personal" experience of whichever topic on which she professes expertise or b) the pronouncements of another "expert" or cohort of "experts" or c) more often than not a combination of both of the above, the rhetoric of the self help text works to posit a set of epistemological instructions to be followed by the reader, not unlike those that accompany self-assemblage furniture. Get the instructions right, is the underlying message of the "lifestyle solution"52 on offer, and you too can create a fully functional (semblance of an) existence.

Self help texts usually perpetuate the Enlightenment tale of selfhood. In other words, the self is considered to be intrinsic and dormant, primed for awakening. Further, this self is perceived as being subject to an existential narrative that is teleological in nature. This perception has the effect of stressing attention to how matters will evolve into the future.53 Typically, the ultimate "destination" is a morally inflected one: the (re)establishment of the self’s propriety. As blogger Donnali Fifield puts it, "the destination isn't heaven, but growth, personal transformation, a positive ending."54 What is urged is something approximating the practice of an ascetic religiosity55 marketed as deeply intimate, but which actually amounts to a plainly banal genericism. In the discourse of self help, the self is posited as the ultimate locus

101 of salvation. To reach this destination, the individual is counselled to prioritise "hard work, individual responsibility, personal control and achievement".56 In other words, self help promotes a "sentiment of total self-reliance".57 Within this context, particular life events or situations are presented as able to be "demystified and rationally resolved".58 Carefully constructed narratives, or "authenticities", are enacted around such events or situations in order to facilitate this resolution. For example, in relation to bereavement, David McCooey speaks of the production of "authenticities…of grief".59 One of the most salient authenticities of grief involves situating bereavement as a redemptive practice, presenting "coercive pieties"60 as "a consolation prize" for the pain of loss.61 Among other things, this has the spurious effect of positing the lost other as "a moral dimension of my life".62 I will return to this notion in Part 3.

According to McCooey, authenticities, whether of grief or any other human experience, reflect a cultural requirement that individuals must be "soothed, organised and [re]made cohesive"63 above all else. As such, they tend to reinforce values and ideas with which we are already comfortable rather than those likely to challenge or confront us. For example, the idea that as individuals we are responsible for everything that happens to us, and that we can more or less control our lives, is a popular truism in self help. To suggest otherwise engenders anxiety for subjects who understand their relationship to the world and to others in terms of a self-sufficient and immutable identity. Authenticities reflect an ethic of anti-suffering, exemplifying the notion that "we are supposed to consume extreme experiences but not risk living them".64 In other words, they promote the symbolic recuperation of experience in ways that foreclose on the opportunity to occupy significance. Philosopher Salman Akhtar suggests that "societies built around industry, consumerism and production" fail to provide adequate containment for the experience of suffering,65 which is essentially uneconomic. In this context, authenticities provide "reassuring fictions of so-called insight". However, as Adam Phillips

102 has pointed out, these fictions are "a poor substitute for people’s capacity to transform their worlds".66

Mourning as a crisis of meaning

In a culture where meaning is venerated at the expense of significance, the productive capacity of mourning is realised in the form of a crisis that testifies to the excess of the event. Certain events are "excessive", I suggest, because they resist the imposition of meaning. Unsurprisingly, these are often the same events that attract the form of interdiction—for instance, via the production of authenticities—which I have described above. Events that simultaneously resist and invite the imposition of meaning do so because they gesture towards the lability of the thetic. The "thetic" is the threshold between the realms of the semiotic and the symbolic, marking, to use Jacques Lacan's terms, the point of entry from the Real into the Imaginary, that is, the entree of the subject. The semiotic is the foundation of language, "a kind of origin, but not one that is nameable".67 It is "that region where boundaries are yet to be drawn and a (self)conscious, signifying subject is yet to emerge".68 Although it can never entirely denude itself of semiotic influx, the Imaginary (being the discursive field in which we are interpellated as subjects) depends upon its repression in order to maintain the illusion of the transparency of the symbolic. Events that gesture towards the lability of the thetic are therefore those which undermine this illusion by "remembering" the semiotic. In other words, they point to the fact that the symbolic is "a substitute for what is missing from its place"69 (the Real). As a result, they evince abjection.

The subject of her famous treatise, Powers of Horror, abjection is fascinating for Kristeva chiefly because it testifies to the subject at its most absolute, constitutive limit. Kristeva defines the abject variously as what is "beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable";70 what "disturbs identity, system, order"; what "does not respect borders, positions,

103 rules" and as "[t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite".71 Abjection is the spectre of absolute otherness, drawing the subject "toward the place where meaning collapses".72 In Western culture, what is abject is what undermines the machinery by which we recognise ourselves as discrete ontological entities, as the hero-self of Enlightenment mythology. Ordinarily, abjection is sublimated by the business of "maintenance, repetition, management"73— otherwise referred to as life. The encounter with abjection beckons only when an excessive event erupts. Bereavement arguably triggers such an eruption.

Freud attributes the "narcissistic crisis" of bereavement to the sudden withdrawal of the target of one's object-love, which is in turn a repository for the projection of ego-love. I want to refigure the narcissistic crisis in somewhat different terms, however. The loss of the other is experienced as a loss of some essential part of the self, and the narcissistic crisis is produced, I suggest, when the subject discovers—too late—that she has no power to retrieve it. Thus, the crisis is an outcome, I suggest, not so much of dispossession as of the disillusionment—literally—that it engenders. This disillusionment effects an almost intolerable "ontological distress"74 for the subject. Bereaved individuals often describe their experience as akin to having had a part of their body amputated or removed, violently ripped out or torn away.75 In mourning, the most sensitive and vulnerable folds of the "libidinal skin", to borrow a trope from Jean Francois Lyotard,76 are exposed. Mourning recalls the "immemorial violence"77 of the subject's entry into the Imaginary, the relinquishing of the other. In other words, it remembers the interstitial moment between Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Mourning, according to this view, is quite literally a dis-organised, un-civilised state78 teetering on a site that is "fragmented, dominated by absences and filled with tensions".79 In fact, it is something like an encounter with the unconscious, the place where the imperial relation with the other is disrupted and "the subject [is] pitted against itself".80

104 Comparative philosopher Amy Olberding has noted that how a culture regards death and mourning reveals a great deal about how it defines and understands the self .81 If it is true, as George Hagman suggests, that in Western culture death "reverberates in the [collective] unconscious" in a way that conjures "threatening fantasies",82 I would venture to suggest that those fantasies anticipate the event of mourning and involve "a loss of narcissistic perfection"83 and thus the dissolution of the Enlightenment hero-self, the "sharply individual character…who, notably, must first and foremost affirm her self".84 Mourning undermines the cultural mythology that leads to the convincement of self-hood as a "prodigious memory to nurture and protect".85 In its wake, the normative discourse of identity is revealed to be a contrived and unstable cultural product. It is for this reason, perhaps, that mourning has tended to be viewed in modern times as an infection of the body politic, something to be "treated, shortened, erased".86 How might we apprehend mourning in less conservative terms? I want to suggest that we pay heed to its subversive quality and consider its status as, potentially, an instance of revolt.

Revolt

In "Who needs identity?" Stuart Hall critiques the Foucaldian approach to subjectivity on the grounds of its incapacity to theorise resistance. He critiques in this approach:

the absence of any attention to what might in any way interrupt, prevent or disturb the smooth insertion of individuals into subject positions constructed by [normative] discourses…This leads to an overestimation of the efficacy of disciplinary power and to an impoverished understanding of the individual which cannot account for experiences that fall outside the realm of the 'docile' body.87

105 Kristeva's work on "revolt" counters this deficiency by revisiting the notion of the subject-in-process. I refer here to Kristeva’s more recent writings on revolt, namely, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and Revolt, She Said. It is important to make this clear because there are significant differences between the "revolt" that appears in these later texts, and the "revolt" that Kristeva invokes in her earlier work, most notably in Revolution in Poetic Language. Brandt describes Kristeva’s latter version of revolt as "a less conflictual, less transgressive notion"88 than that which appears in Revolution. There, Kristeva was interested in evincing a "dialectical model of revolt which [assumed] a dramatic confrontation between the law and its transgression",89 identifying "poetic language" as the (performative) stage where this confrontation is at its most intense. However, as Marilyn Edelstein notes, "Kristeva has become skeptical about the likelihood of large-scale political movements leading to genuine institutional change".90As a result, her more recent writings are characterised by a concern for "the status…of the individual".91 Kristeva writes that it is "by banking on the individual microcosm, by rehabilitating and valorizing it…that society has a chance to avoid ossifying into the mere act of managing business".92 Tilottama Rajan distinguishes this concern with the subject from metaphysics, arguing that Kristeva's project is a post-phenomenological one in which "the condition of [ethical] possibility" is the subject-in-process.93 The "subject-in-process" is a concept which acknowledges that:

the subject is never simply the static, punctual subject of consciousness: it is never simply the static phenomenon captured in an imaginary form of one kind or another—one that may be communicated to others; it is also its unspeakable, unnameable, repressed form which is only knowable through its effects.94

It is the subject-in-process, for Kristeva, which reveals the subject's capacity to "revolt", that is, to displace the prohibitions of the symbolic in the arena of psychic life.

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Put simply, we can think of an instance of revolt as one that "allows the conflicts of the individual to take place".95 Comprising, in this view, a constant "calling into question of the psyche as well as the world",96 revolt is dangerous, since it places the subject "in the vortex of meaning’s position and deposition".97 Revolt exposes contradictions that cannot be solved, irreconcilable "differences" that cannot be absorbed, and therein lies its ethical dimension.98 Kristeva's work on revolt needs to be appreciated within the context of what Kelly Oliver has described as Kristeva's broader concern to "link ethics with negativity".99 The negative, thus invoked, is the underside to identity and meaning, or, to put it another way, that space in which the notion of a unified thetic is challenged. Since this notion is concomitant with that of the atomistic subject, the negative is also the space in which narcissism—a "means of…bringing unreal closure to the very unsettling process that is the subject"—is exposed.100 If narcissism involves, as Jean Graybeal suggests,101 a foreclosure upon or denial of the crisis of the thetic subject, Kristeva's "negativising of narcissism" can be read, as in Oliver's account, as a converse attempt to elaborate upon it. In this way, to the extent that it can facilitate "a relational, dialogical practice in which one acknowledges both the otherness of the other and the otherness of the self to itself",102 the crisis exists, for Kristeva, as a foremost site for engagement.

The crisis is necessary, she argues, in order to neutralise the chief effect of psychological objectivism, namely, that "we lack being particular".103 What Kristeva means by this is that, culturally, we lack the space within which (a) subjectivity can be specified rather than normalised in the form of (an) identity. As I noted above, Kristeva argues that this lack results in symptoms of alienation such as depression. In order to militate against such psychic impoverishment, "we need an experience… surprise, pain or delight, and then comprehension of this impact".104 In other words, the subject must have an experience that enables her to wrest back significance, or, to borrow a poet's

107 metaphor, to engage "the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth".105 Brandt has described such an experience as one that "unleashes…the pulsional forces of the semiotic", thereby preventing the subject "from closing itself off, from becoming a fixed and unchanging identity".106 In other words, the experience would act to restore the subject's interiority, which Kristeva describes as "a subjective intimacy that allows [the subject] to acquire a psychic autonomy and…through that, a capacity for creativity and challenging things".107 Revolt is valuable, for Kristeva, because it embodies a potential for "making gaps, rupturing, renewing",108 for "giving voice", as Brandt has put it, "to the heterogenous processes that lie within the most 'intimate' reaches of the self".109

In The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva begins by saying that she wants to "wrest [revolt], etymologically, from the overly narrow political sense it has taken in our time".110 She stresses the older connotations of the term revolt, particularly its Latin derivatives with meanings such as "turn" and "return", suggestive of a particular temporal quality. Kristeva is especially interested in elucidating the role, and the power, of revolt in the contemporary context in which, as subjects, "we are, in effect, normalised".111 She essentially argues that "an experience of revolt may be the only thing that can save us from the automation of humanity" that results from excessive normalisation.112 Normalisation is excessive and destructive, for Kristeva, when it denudes the inner life of the subject, or "[the] psychological space we call a soul".113 In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristeva is particularly interested in the revolt against identity, that is, against the structuring of subjectivity that elevates the self at the expense of the other. Through an experience of revolt, "'I' express my specificity by…constantly deconstructing ideas/concepts/ideologies/philosophies that 'I' have inherited…".114

Mourning, I want to suggest, is potentially one such experience of revolt against identity, of realising the other as "a complex dynamic" rather

108 than as simply a function of my own ego.115 Given that, in Western societies, "we are surrounded by anti-suffering campaigns in which we’re encouraged to try to protect ourselves by assuming the illusion of control”116—something to which the self help genre testifies only too well—this suggestion is perhaps an uncomfortable one. Kristeva has been critical of the modern tendency "to prescribe medicine to appease people’s anguish rather than [guide] them to confront the pain of living",117 while Germaine Greer goes still further, arguing that because it is "uncomfortable and creative", it is specifically mourning that "consumer society cannot tolerate".118 I concur with Greer, and suggest that mourning has the potential to instigate a deep questioning of "the assumptions we bring" to our experiences of self and self-in-world.119 This questioning takes the form of expressing "the struggle in which [the subject] is immersed",120 and can enable us to begin imag(in)ing subjectivity and its discursive possibilities differently. Clearly, this is not something that is in the interests of a culture invested in the omnipotence of the normative discourse of identity.

To apprehend mourning as an instance of revolt it is necessary to re- figure the Freudian "wound" of bereavement. As I noted in Part 1, Freud refers to mourning as a process in which the bereaved subject cannot help but aggravate, by concentrating all her libidinal energy upon it, the ego-wound engendered by loss. For Freud, successful resolution of mourning (at least in "Mourning and Melancholia") occurs when the subject ceases to compulsively "return" to the wound, here conjured abjectly as the mark of the lacuna effected by the loss of the object, a signified without a signifier. Freud, then, figures the wound in terms that suggest betrayal. Its occupation can lead only to negative consequences, namely the interminability of melancholia. In this way, the toxicity of the wound is emphasised.121 In a positivistic context, the collapsing of the abject and the toxic is predictable, but in order to appreciate the aspect in which mourning can be apprehended as an experience of revolt, it is necessary to uncouple this relation.

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The wound is abject because it is a site that straddles the inside and outside, poles which correspond to the self and the other. The wound, in other words, contests the subject, testifying to the conditions of its emergence, the thetic boundary.122 It is uncanny123 rather than toxic, representing the incursion of a "limit situation".124 A limit-situation, "like a well-aimed bullet…makes a hole in the symbolic fabric of which the history of the subject is composed";125 it does not so much efface the signifier as effract the signified. A limit-situation can be viewed as an existential opportunity—something potentially affirmative rather than destructive—"for seeing difference as an ontological possibility for subjectivity".126 I want to apprehend mourning in precisely this way. To do so, I will invoke the notion of "working-through", contrasting it to that of "acting-out". The former corresponds to Kristeva's concept of revolt, an uncanny experience, while the latter is akin to the positivistic view of the toxic wound.

"Acting-out" and "working through"

Dominick LaCapra has identified "acting-out" and "working-through" as non-binary, interrelated modes of responding to loss.127 LaCapra has argued that mourning might be regarded as an instance of working-through, melancholia as an instance of acting-out. For LaCapra, acting-out is a traumatic response. That is to say, it emerges in response to an experience of "something I cannot form the least representation of [yet which] can nevertheless concern me to the point that my psychical survival depends on my capacity to respond to or escape from it."128 Freud famously claimed that the subject typically resolves this dilemma by exchanging the "something" for a symptom. The symptom becomes disconnected from its source and "takes on a life of its own".129 In this way, although the event that instigated the trauma is absent from consciousness, the trauma "is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present".130 Where this occurs, we might say that the subject has stalled her affective response at precisely the moment she has faced

110 abjection.131 Suffering takes the place of the wound, and, "by condensing it, [gives] it back an exorbitant intensity, imperceptible by sensations and representations".132 "I" refuse to identify the trauma; rather, "I" identify with the trauma.133 Another way of putting this is to say that "I" do not allow the story behind "my" affect to emerge.134 Rather, "I" "arrive" at a premature conclusion, one that evokes "melancholic paralysis".135 In this context, "[t]he most the self can anticipate or hope for in mourning is to find a language to articulate the presence of absence".136

Conversely, in working-through, the subject identifies the trauma as arising from a loss rather than identifying with it by collapsing it with a constitutive absence. As such, she is able to engage in "repetitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance".137 The loss is contextualised, and can then be mourned. In the process, the subject is able to actively participate in "feeling itself violated and vulnerable".138 It is important not to regard acting-out and working-through in dialectic terms, but rather, as I have suggested, in the form of a continuum. It may be, as LaCapra points out, that an event is never worked-through, as such, to completion. Likewise, acting-out may be the only viable response in some situations. Neither acting-out nor working-through should therefore be inflected with moral sensibility.

Having said this, I want to suggest that the ability to engage in working-through depends on the availability of some sort of symbolic containment for the subject's affective and cognitive projections, that is, a "transitional space". "Transitional space" is a term invoked by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and, as I interpret his work, he uses it to refer to the potential dimension between the individual and his or her environment, between "the subjective and that which is objectively perceived".139 This dimension becomes apparent during the separation-individuation phase of subject formation. In infancy, the child imbues a particular object or objects with the transitional function. Hence, the "transitional object" comes into play

111 (quite literally) and is the means by which the subject achieves individuation, which Winnicott describes as the capacity "to accept difference and similarity".140 Thus, individuation represents a less-narcissistic, more- perspectival subjectivity, or, to paraphrase Winnicott, a move from thinking that one is responsible for what is (out) there, to noticing what is there. Bearing in mind that Melanie Klein theorises mourning as an experience that recalls one’s infantile development towards subjectivity, it is perhaps not as strange as it might at first seem to borrow from Winnicott’s own theory of child development in order to elaborate on the differences between the responses of acting-out and working-through loss. In fact, Winnicott’s theory is partially an extension of Klein’s, an elucidation of the mechanics of the depressive position.

We might think of acting-out as resulting from an inability to enact the shift required of the depressive position in response to a particular loss; this tallies with LaCapra's point regarding its melancholic dimension. Working- through, on the other hand, performs an ability to do so. It re-avows perspective, permitting the possibility of (re)interpreting the event. Working- through involves pain, but it does not finally equate the subject with pain. This is possible, I suggest, because the wound is actively experienced rather than absorbed into the structure of the self. The subject apprehends her pain as a transitional object, something with which to "play". To put this differently, the subject acknowledges the wound, but as a "not-me" possession.141 However destructive pain is experienced to be it cannot, finally, destroy her. Here is Winnicott:

[t]he destructiveness, plus the object’s survival of the destruction, places the object outside the area of objects set up by the subject’s projective mental mechanisms. In this way a world of shared reality is created which the subject can use and which can feed back other-than-me substance into the subject.142

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In other words, working-through instigates a place for the subject to go on from, an opportunity to effect "an expansion of the self-representation".143

What I have been working towards suggesting is the idea that productive mourning can facilitate an enabling experience of subjectivity, that is, one transversal to the psychological objectivism that characterises our time, one intimately in touch with significance rather than oppressed by meaning. I have inferred that such an experience is predicated on a "limit situation", which I have described, in turn, as calling into question core assumptions about the self and the self-in-world. In responding to loss by acting-out, the subject denies this reflexivity by fashioning a traumatic identity. Contra, by working-though, the subject resists traumatic identification, avowing the vulnerable and violable status of her subjectivity. In doing so, she confronts her negative self-aspect, that is, her otherness. What is notable about this confrontation is that it can enable the subject to recover her singular structure; her own unique, specific inner life or “strangeness”. It is the acknowledgment of the “stranger in ourselves”—of our own being in the other—that Kristeva regards as critical, both in terms of sustaining an inner life that is something other than chronically alienated, and of engaging in an ethical relationship with the other(s).

What revolt is not: dissident versus disintegrated subjectivity

Before going further I want to address the question of what revolt is not—specifically, the radical dispensation of the subject. While Kristeva does describe revolt as effecting the "near loss of the self",144 she qualifies this statement in several important ways. Firstly, she argues that an experience of revolt can never be "pleasurable"—at least not in the conventionally held sense of the word. Revolt, then, does not have the appeal of a narcotic, to invoke the most obvious metaphor. Secondly, however close the subject comes to "losing"

113 the self in an experience of revolt, in the end she does not.145 In revolting, the subject only ever contemplates the loss of the self. Admittedly, this distinction marks out a fine line—"a destructuration of the self…may remain as a psychotic symptom or fit in as an opening toward the new, as an attempt to tally with the incongruous"146—but there is no doubt about the line’s existence. Thirdly, it is the ability to recognise, as a result of this contemplation, difference as an ontological possibility for subjectivity, that demarcates this line. The three qualifications I have pointed to make it clear that Kristeva is arguing for neither the disavowal of the subject nor of the symbolic structures that delimit subjectivity. As Kelly Oliver has said, "revolt is not a transgression against law or order but a displacement of its authority within the psychic economy of the individual".147 What Kristeva is advocating for is a temporal (and temporising) experience that would enable the subject to question the constitutive aspect of these structures, and therefore what contrives to formulate her identity. It is through undertake this questioning that the subject is less likely to feel oppressed by meaning, and more likely to feel engaged by significance. In this way, the subject will theoretically become more open to singularity—to difference—and less vulnerable to the effects of inhabiting a totalising identity, a chauvinist "I".

One of the important points made by Jane Flax in her book Thinking Fragments is that some postmodern musings on "the subject" risk valorising psychotic or para-psychotic states as instances of, or metaphors for, the supposed subversiveness of a non-unified subjectivity. "Those who celebrate or call for a 'decentered' self", writes Flax:

seem self-deceptively naive and unaware of the basic cohesion within themselves that makes the fragmentation of experiences something other than a terrifying slide into psychosis…Only when a core self begins to cohere can one enter into or use the transitional space in which the differences and boundaries

114 between self and other, inner and outer, reality and illusion are bracketed or elided.148

Like Flax, I reject at the outset the idea that mental illnesses (often clumped together under the romantic rubric of "madness") can be thought of as expressions of a politically radical praxis of some kind. Although I concede that mental illness may be implicated in a resistance to, or protest against, certain repressive aspects of the symbolic, I also maintain that there is nothing productive about such resistance/protest for the individual. The effects of being afflicted with the symptoms of mental illness (however we might want to interpret them) are real and devastating. To be mentally ill in Western culture is to be radically disempowered socially and politically. As cultural critics, we perform a deeply unethical, as well as futile, act when we utilise rhetoric that implies the radical dispensation of the subject as somehow politically desirable.149 A clinician as well as a theorist, Kristeva makes this point over and over again: "[r]evolt is not simply about rejection and destruction; it is also about starting over".150 Jane Flax acknowledges this perspective when she argues that:

[i]t is possible to construct views of the self in which it does not experience difference as irreconcilable…such a self would…feel no need to foreswear the use of logic, rational thought or objectivity, although it may play with them. Neither would it lose itself and imagine the I to be merely the effect of thinking or language rather than also its cause.151

Dissident subjectivity

Indeed, one of the things that most attracts me to the more recent elaboration of revolt in Kristeva’s work is precisely its stress on the possibility of another structuring of subjectivity, but of a structuring nonetheless, one that

115 is not conflated with normalisation. Here, we are not in the abstract realm of a romanticised, permanently displaced/ dispersed/fragmented subjectivity. We are dealing, instead, with a subject(ivity)—a "dissident" subject rather than one that is permanently and hopelessly exiled. The idea of "dissident" subjectivity is one I have borrowed from moral philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers who uses it to distinguish a particular, politicised speech-form.152 For Tietjens Meyers, "dissident speech" refers to "the activity of giving benign figurative expression to non-conscious materials that would otherwise distort moral judgement".153 In other words, it is a form of expression that calls attention to the attendant fictions of identity, most notably, that "identity" it is an unfeigned, intransmutable, imperturbable and value-free entity. "Dissident speech" operates to draw attention to the contrived nature of the structures against which we erect cultural values. A dissident speaker, then, is a kind of margin dweller, who by "[f]reeing the imagination and mobilising its powers of representation…[acts to] 'demystify' the established social order and envisage alternative social forms."154

Tietjen Meyers notes that Julia Kristeva uses the term "herethics" (heretic + ethics) to refer to the product of dissident speech. I prefer Tietjen Meyers’ “dissidence” for its unromantic overtones as well as its specifically political resonance. However, the politics that interests me is, somewhat paradoxically, more closely aligned with Kristeva’s than with Tietjen Meyers’. Kristeva is primarily concerned, as I have elsewhere pointed out, with approaching questions of politics from the perspective of consideration for the inner life, that is to say, as questions which are more or less "about" the psychic dimension of subjectivity. Tietjens Meyers, on the other hand, ascribes a proportionately different weight to the inner or psychic life in approaching questions of politics. Whilst readily acknowledging that dissidence is seeded in the inner/psychic realm of the subject, her interest tends to lie more with how the dissident self exercises agency within the context of particular exteriorly manifested socio-political events.

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Although Kristeva is cognisant of the event thus constituted, and by no means dismissive of it, she tends much more to want to analyse the sort of culture in which the event is embedded. Refiguring the event depends, for Kristeva, on the subversion of the symbolic. Dissidence only occurs where revolt is facilitated and revolt is engendered, first and foremost, within the realm of subjective interiority. In my account, productive mourning engenders dissidence of the sort Tietjens Meyers describes, but is politically significant in the terms Kristeva suggests. Productive mourning is a kind of dissident speech-form to the extent that it engenders a confrontation with the lability of meaning, with the "other" of being and with being as "otherness". The ability to tolerate this confrontation involves the effort of imagining differently the affective basis of thought itself.155 Kristeva uses the term "a-thought" to emphasise the resistance of this kind of effort (which she locates in revolutionary writing) to "knowledge and action". "[A]-thought discovers with provocation" those "processes of the production of signification" ordinarily repressed156 by the symbolic. "Everyone wants an illusion and insists on not knowing that it is one", says Kristeva.157 The subject who mourns productively, I would suggest, insists on precisely the opposite. The sort of psychical and libidinal energies that are called forth in the work of productive mourning are those that render to consciousness the processes that constitute the subject itself.

For Levinas, Irigaray, Kristeva and others, a progressive, ethical culture can only exist when and if it is able to "receive within itself the mystery of the other as an unavoidable and insurmountable reality".158 Yet we must be careful, Irigaray stresses, not to reduce the other "to a moral dimension of my [individual] life", for there again lies the path towards effecting an appropriation and refusal of the other.159 This is tricky ground to negotiate. For Irigaray, to sustain an ethical relationship with the other demands that I "think without renouncing you, me, us. [To] love to you, [t]o love to me". But how to

117 engender this cognitive shift? In Part 3 I will elaborate on this question by considering the spectre of narrativisation in mourning. I will suggest that productive mourning engages narrative in such a way as to give expression to "a self that works on itself to develop critical responsiveness to that which it is not".160 Narrative preoccupation in productive mourning embodies a "transitional language" and this language, I suggest, has the capacity to effect "a more personal, less compliant idiom", 161 a passage from "the normalised self to [an] active subject".162

1 Carla Harryman, There Never Was A Rose Without A Thorn. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995. p73. 2 David Smail, quoted by Tana Dineen, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People. Montreal: Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing, 2001. p283. 3 Donnali Field, "Let the guinea pigs speak: Detaching grief from theory". www.timetwopublishing.com/wwaggrieved3.htm. Accessed 19 October 2005. 4 Flax, op.cit. p21. 5 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p14. 6 Hereafter quotation marks will not be used around "identity". 7 Diana Tietjens Meyers, Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge. 1994. p58. 8 Alex Gorelik, "Dread", www.hybridmagazine.com. Accessed 24 July 2003. 9 Flax, op.cit. p30-31. 10 R. Clifton Spargo, Elegy as Narrative: The relation to other in the work of mourning. PhD Dissertation, Yale University, 1995. p7. 11 Philip Cushman, "Why the Self is Empty: Towards a Historically Situated Psychology". American Psychologist, May 1990, 45 (5). pp.599-611. p599. 12 Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979. 13 Levinas, op.cit. p42. 14 Levinas, op.cit. p44; my emphasis. 15 Ferrell, op.cit. p69. 16 Levinas, op.cit. p47. 17 Levinas, op.cit. p42. 18 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: the power and limits of psychoanalysis. p67. 19 Of course, this "success" is fantasised, for it is always illusory. 20 Stephen Pluhacek and Heidi Bostic, "Thinking life as relation: an interview with Luce Irigaray". Man and World, 1996, 29. pp.343-360. p353; my emphasis. 21 In Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), Judith Butler writes that "identifications are never fully and finally made; they are incessantly reconstituted, and, as such, are subject to the volatile logic of iterability." (p105.) 22 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. p7. 23 Irigaray, I Love to You. p40. 24 Irigaray, To Be Two. p51. 25 Irigaray, To Be Two. p9; my emphasis. 26 Irigaray, I Love to You. p61. 27 ibid. 28 Irigaray, I Love To You. p56. 29 Irigaray, To Be Two. p16; 17. 30 Irigaray, To Be Two. p40.

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31 Spargo, op.cit. p11. 32 Irigaray, To Be Two. p50. 33 As discussed in Part 1. 34 Franz Fanon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Babbaha, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray and others. 35 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. p1. 36 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. p98. 37 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. p103. 38 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. p26. 39 See Brian Richardson, "Recent Concepts of Narrative and the Narratives of Narrative Theory". Style, Summer 2000. pp. 1-7. 40 Irigaray, I Love to You. p14. 41 Susan Sontag, "AIDS and its Metaphors", Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 1991. p174. 42 Stuart Clegg, Frameworks of Power. London: Sage Publications, 1989. p29. 43 Anna Gibbs, "Eaten Alive/Dead Meat: Consumption and Modern Cannibalism". Re: Public (Ien Ang et al. eds.), Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Kingswood: Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, University of Western Sydney, 1997. p77. 44 John Raulston Saul, The Unconscious Civilisation. Ringwood: Penguin, 1997. p67. 45 Flax, op.cit. p41. 46 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. p373. 47 Jeffrey T. Nealon's Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. p32. 48 Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. p63. 49 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. pxiii. 50 Charmaz, op.cit. p229. 51 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p83. 52 Cushman, op.cit. p607. 53 Susan Sontag describes this tendency as "an inevitable by-product of a more sophisticated (quantifiable, testable) understanding of process, social as well as scientific". op.cit. p175. 54 Field, op.cit. 55 Phillips, Darwin’s Worms. p28. 56 Charmaz, op.cit. p229. 57 Naomi Klein, No Logo. London: Flamingo, 2001. p268. Klein writes, quoting Tom Peters, that we live in the era of "Me Inc." where individuals are encouraged to view themselves as "Chairperson/CEO/Entrepreneur-in-Chief" of "a Brand called You." (p252). 58 Charmaz, op.cit. p229-30. 59 McCooey, op.cit. p72. 60 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p79. 61 Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery. p44. 62 Irigaray, To Be Two. p109. 63 Cushman, op.cit. p560. 64 Stephanie Dowrick, Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love. London: Viking, 1997. p239. 65 Salman Akhtar, "Mental Pain and the Cultural Ointment of Poetry". International Journal of Psychoanalysis 2000, 81. pp. 229-243. p240. 66 Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery. p44. 67 Lechte, op.cit. p142. 68 Lechte and Zournazi (eds.), op.cit. p5. 69 Lechte, op.cit. p69. 70 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p1. 71 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p4. 72 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p2.

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73 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. p12. 74 Ferrell, op.cit. p6. 75 Even a cursory glance of any of the available literature on experiences of loss and grief will attest to this. The "when she died, part of me died with her" is such a common utterance that, in popular culture, it has become a cliched melodramatic cue. 76 Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. p206. 77 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p10. 78 Kristeva, "A Question of Subjectivity - an Interview". Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader. London: Hodder Arnold, 2001. p129. 79 Patrick Fuery, Theories of Desire. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,1995. p12. 80 Fuery, op.cit. p12. See also Ewa Ziarek, "Kristeva and Levinas: Mourning, Ethics and the Feminine". Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing. London: Routledge, 1993. p69. 81 Amy Olberding, "Mourning, Memory and Identity: A Comparative Study of the Constitution of the Self in Grief". International Philosophical Quarterly 1997, 37 (1). pp. 29-44. p29. 82 Hagman, op.cit. p919. 83 Flax, op.cit. p95. 84 Olberding, op.cit. p30. The contributors to Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning focus similarly on the event as an instance of symbolic rupture that simultaneously interrupts and reveals what the culture abjectifies. Thus, for Anna Gibbs, what "returns" as a result of the event of Diana's death is our culture's cannibalism, while for Ruth Barcan, what returns is the feminine. 85 Constantine Boundas (ed.), The Deleuze Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. p13 86 Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death. London: Oxford, 1991. p99. 87 Hall, op.cit. p.25. 88 Joan Brandt, “Revolt of Consensus? Julia Kristeva in the 1990's”. L'Esprit Createur, Spring 2001, 41 (1). pp85-96. p91. 89 Brandt, op.cit. p88. 90 Marilyn Edelstein, "Towards a Feminist Postmodern Polethique: Kristeva on Ethics and Politics", Oliver (ed.), op.cit. p206. 91 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p4. 92 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. p86. 93 Tilottama Rajan, "Trans-Positions of Difference: Kristeva and Post-structuralism", Oliver (ed.), op.cit. p217. See also Jacqueline Rose, "Kristeva: Take Two", Oliver (ed.), op.cit. p46. 94 Lechte, op.cit. p142. 95 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. p101. 96 Kristeva, The sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p19. 97 Kristeva, The sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p105. 98 See p173 of Kristeva's The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. 99 Kelly Oliver, "Introduction: Julia Kristeva's Outlaw Ethics", Oliver (ed.), op.cit. p1. 100 Jean Graybeal, "Kristeva's Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical", Oliver (ed.) op.cit. p34. 101 Graybeal, op.cit. 102 Edelstein, op.cit. p196. 103 Kristeva, Tales of Love. p7. 104 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p11; my emphasis. 105 Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck". Diving into the Wreck. 106 Brandt, op.cit. p90. 107 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. pp.33-34. 108 Kristeva, Revolt, She Said. p85. 109 Brandt, op.cit. p86.

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110 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p3. 111 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p5. 112 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p7. 113 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p8. 114 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, p19. 115 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p67. 116 Young-Eisendrath, op.cit. p7. 117 Sichiere, op.cit. p124 118 Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday, 1999. p171. 119 Young-Eisendrath, op.cit. p49. 120 Blau du Plessis, "For the Etruscans". p283. 121 In the course of my research I came across an article entitled, "Psychological Toxicity of Bereavement: Six Months After the Event" (R.W. Bartrop et al., Australian Psychologist, November 1992, 27 (3). pp192-196). The authors describe bereavement as a "toxic life event". 122 See Dawn McCance, "L'ecriture limite: Kristeva's postmodern feminist ethics" (Hypatia, Spring 1996, 11 (2). pp. 141-161) for a discussion about the significance of the figure of the wound in Kristeva's work. 123 Kristeva describes the uncanny as "a destructuration of the self" that occurs when the subject encounters something that reminds one of nothingness. (Quoted by Noelle McAffee, "Abject Strangers: Towards and Ethics of Respect", Oliver (ed.), op.cit. p131). 124 Emmy Van Durzen, "Existentialism and existential psychotherapy", Mace (ed.), op.cit. p224 125 Bernet, op.cit. p164. 126 McAffee, op.cit. p130. 127 LaCapra, "Trauma, Loss, Absence". 128 Bernet, op.cit. p161. 129 Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora, 1994. p34. For Lacan, on the other hand, even the misrecognition of trauma as a symptom is rendered impossible; rather, the subject is brutally negated by it, "fading away before the monstrous manifestation of a signified without significance" (Bernet, op.cit. p165). 130 My emphasis. 131 Bernet describes trauma as "the event of the encounter of the subject with something totally foreign that nevertheless irremediably concerns it and does so right in its most intimate identity." (op.cit. p162). 132 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. p87. 133 Franklin R. Sollars, "Mourning, Trauma and Working Through". Psychoanalytic Review, April 2004, 91 (2). pp.201-218. p.209. 134 Sollars, op.cit. p211. 135 LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss". p703. 136 Olberding, op.cit. p38. 137 LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss". p703. 138 Bernet, op.cit. p178. 139 Winnicott, op.cit. p50. 140 Winnicott, op.cit. p6. 141 I am again drawing heavily on Winnicott. 142 Winnicott, op.cit. p94; my emphasis. 143 Winnicott, op.cit. p208. 144 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p191. 145 ibid. 146 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. p188. 147 Kelly Oliver, "Revolt and Forgiveness". Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, affect, collectivity: The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. p79. 148 Flax, op.cit. p219

121

149 For an interesting analysis on this point, see Marta Caminero-Santangelo's The Madwoman Can't Speak: Why Insanity is Not Subversive. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 150 Kristeva, Revolt, She said. p123. 151 Flax, op.cit. p219. 152 Diana Tietjens Meyers, Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1994. 153 Meyers, op.cit. p59. 154 ibid. 155 See Rosi Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy. Trans. Elizabeth Gould. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. 156 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989. p51; original emphasis. 157 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p106. 158 Irigaray, To Be Two. p110 159 Irigaray, To Be Two. p109 160 William Connolly, quoted by Nealon, op.cit. p166. 161 Adam Phillips describes psychoanalysis in these terms in On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, London: Faber & Faber, 1995. pxx; my emphasis. 162 Lechte, op.cit. p199.

122 Twenty-nine anecdotes

The anecdote is not necessarily a confessional genre in any straightforward sense, but functions to orient it more properly to produce a particular pragmatics. – Anna Gibbs 1

§

1. We talk of "death" for convenience, but there are almost as many deaths as there are people. We do not possess a sense that would enable us to see, moving at full speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that. Often they are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their duties...2

A night in December, sufficient years past. Something happened; a bloody event. It is never pleasant (the paramedics will tell you) even when it’s a woman & thus (so the statisticians say) usually non-violent. But at last the room had carpet.

We had shared a lover—our first—with a lust entirely sustained on the basis of its necessary bifurcation. Or so I had thought. In the last months there were clues that it could not last. Of course before they were clues, which is to say afterwards, they were only words, gestures; the absence of words, gestures. There was one strange day outside a bar when I might have anticipated this afterwards, but did not. It ought to be one of those devastating scenes in my recollection of this story, but what I remember best is that I had been drinking Guinness.

126 On the night the news came I would again taste it my mouth, the texture suddenly redolent of stale smoke and piss. Violently offended, I would stand at the toilet and uselessly retch. I could never again raise that drink to my lips, such was my knowledge of the conspiracy that it came to represent. The truth hit me smack across my mouth and down to the solar plexus, my genitals. It hit me so hard I fell to the ground, sending the tea my mother had made flying.

My youthful and dour feminism had at first precluded me from laying any blame at her feet. I would have kissed them if I could, tasted her sweetness and begged for her return. Clearly fault lay with our lover, who had tricked and seduced her into carrying out this twist, and with myself, who had failed to stop him. It was not until much later that I began to rewrite the script—how she had stolen him away from me, deviously concocting their midnight escape. (They had eloped in the night leaving me the scorned and humiliated party).

2. Sometimes, hysterically, my own body produces the incident.3

Rude menstrual blood oozes down my left leg. My uterus is like a punctured jellyfish. I smell like bread, soggy & damp from the baby's mouth. They are putting you into the hard ground. Your mother is folding herself as if she might re-conceive her dead child. I want to wipe the salt from my cheeks and place my fingers in her mouth. Blood blooms there too, the sort of violent cut which explains nothing. We leak under the December sun. Everyone but you stinks of bodies under duress. Your holes have all been stopped; Tampax in your ears, nose & mouth. While a lone bird flies overhead I am counting tissues in my purse. Later, in the ladies room of a roadside cafe that serves steak and kidney pies, I will bunch the bleached squares between my legs. I will call up the stench in

127 my nostrils and transfer it in one quick & practised gush also. The abattoir is less than 500 metres from where you now lie; the pies are fresh made on the premises, according to the sign.

Knowing what I know now I want to invert the flow, unbleed a conception, bring forth your inheritor. I am in rural Sydney & I am eastside (this is later, at the beach, where no surf ever swells).

This is how (her) death becomes me. This is how my part in the history of the violence that occurred is announced. This is how what happened happens to me. This is how the event becomes mine.

3. Do I want to explain myself in a cheap, obvious little play, film, dialogue, story? 4

Her absence was in those days permeated with the sweetly sour scent of contemptuous triumph. In response I wore my poverty like the wedding veil I would now never warrant, reverted to Catholicism and spoke only in tongues. Subsumed by my madness I remembered only everything or nothing. Either she was my rage or my holiness, my persecutor or salvation. She was my dying day, or the gift of my life—depending. Everything became like or not like, the world making sense only according to these terms. Words and meanings grew intransigent. Cockroaches crawled everywhere; there was no longer a need to sleep. At mass the bread and wine was her body and blood; I ate and drank her sacrifice waiting for word of the life to come. Despite this I grew evermore anorexic. My supplications were few, my confessions many. It was months of lying prostrate and staring at bare walls. There was nothing but waiting, nothing but this.

128

One August morning nine and a half months later, I awoke to the brute realisation of what she had done: cut off my hands such that I could never give my (self) death. For my leavetaking, however executed, could now never escape hers. She had exposed the cliche of the gift—I did not wish to receive it—and denied me my romance (I had wanted to be the girl with the red shoes, dancing myself to partial yet bloody death). Her attempt at creating metaphor had become my impossibility.

Our lover was (a) suicide. He was an incorrigible flirt.

4. Confession treats ritually what is absolutely untreatable.5

I mourn within the most sensitive and vulnerable folds of my libidinal skin.6 Now do I see myself as merely an assemblage of parts precarious at the join. Now do I feel myself to be uncontrollably fragmented. Wherever I once stood in certainty now becomes violable. Wherever I once stood is now a hole where you pierced me. It’s the same damn pop songs ringing in my ears. Raw where the shot leaves me gagging for the arrow.7 And if you leave me can I come too, and if you go, if you go...8

When death aimed itself at me I wanted to be worthy of the event. (The event was pain: a word for it exists, therefore the feeling).9 I do not tell any of this to the tattooist who concentrates his energies for so long on a 1" X 2" patch of my skin. I do not invoke my god and fall to my knees begging mercy. I do not tell the tattooist that if he will only say the word, do the deed, I will be healed. He's a dumb witness to a murder, an assassination of the two who were we, between my love, her love,10 the dismal love now rendering us unequal, and as pale imitations born of

129 some grievous myth we never really understood. What is there to say but that I had not chosen this violence separating me forever?11 Therefore, I had to choose its mark.

The story of this event could end here. Except that all violence has a history,12 even non-violence, even the violence that due to a superior product leaves only the slightest stain on the carpet. It's true I'm obsessed with the carpet. Mostly because this is where she fell. Because this was the last bit of ground beneath her feet. Because it was soft and her dying was hard. Because three days after they put her in the ground and I lay my palm where she fell, clarity descends & into my mouth like a piece of bread she puts the words: "One of us shall die. I don't die because you are the dead one. This is my life schema".13

(I am interested in the way that this form of writing enables me to talk about what happened without exposing me to the charges of hysteria, sentimentalism, hysteria, sentimentalism, pathology. I can’t go back. Then, well-meaning and ill-meaning doctors, parents, lecturers, undertakers, florists and manufacturers of sympathy cards occluded my mourning. Now, there is no excuse.)

5. For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it….14

We had done ENGL255 together with the Feminist Professor. We had matching postcards of V. Woolf on our dressers, the famous one with the rolled-up hair. Every week a pre-verbal grunt (Mrs Rochester),15 a drowning (Edna Pontellier),16 a stomach pump (Esther Greenwood)17: “suicide…the opposite of the poem”… 18 not that you’d know it; every feminist adores a madwoman (she gives good metaphor). There’s something nauseating about this, for in the days that followed your

130 death, the cast of mourners who "paused" to pay their respects inevitably filled their pauses with the kind of sanctimonious remarks which cast you as "terribly tragic" in the singular, the only actress (sic) in a one woman play. No one seemed to want to snap you up for the next retrospective on Feminist Heroines of the Twentieth Century. No one expressed a passionate desire to poke their fingers down your throat & sick up the pills in order to restore the proper meaning of your life.

6. The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment.19

The best anyone can say is that you ceased living sometime in the early hours of the morning. Later, when I enter your room for the first time without you in it, I place my palm hard over the stain of blood that is the only evidence. Cream shag pile. I wish your head lay there still, I think— I would cradle it; either that or I would smash it. But the first time I enter your room without you in it is two days after they have put you in the ground.

Contusion; that word.

I was mad that your mother attempted to clean away your blood. I never saw it flow from you in life, except once when you had a papercut. We never enacted that dumb ritual; bloodsisters hardly gets at the violence of it, not now.

She died & I did the bleeding for her. How else to explain the slow leak which began while Father Eugene went about initiating the prayers of the faithful. This one time in my life I was glad of tradition, the black

131 wool skirt that grazed my ankles & absorbed my blood in its weave like a kitchen sponge. I was thinking of the word miscarriage when my mother reached across to put her palm on my shoulder. I imagined her thighs smeared with pink blood, one unknown sibling sticky on each limb.

& I register, then, as if this fact was previously imperceptible, that you are one of three sisters to my two. They are over there, in the adjacent pew, your green girls. They do not blink or weep. One twists a handkerchief in her hands. One grits her teeth and sucks in her stomach. You lie, stitched up as a North Shore debutante, in your two thousand dollar box.

Proust wrote, "memory has no power of invention...it is powerless to desire anything else, let alone anything better, than what we have already possessed".20 I cannot agree. On the whole I don't think many women would agree.

7. What a live person can tell, being alive, would finally kill a dead person: flippancy. Therefore, one cannot, unfortunately, cling to the facts, which are too mixed up with chance and don’t tell much. But is also becomes harder to keep things separate: what one knows with certainty, and since when…21

The Feminist Professor did not attend the funeral of her student, who, three days after submitting her term paper on "Ideological Conflicts in Thomas Keneally’s A Dutiful Daughter”, swallowed five different kinds of pills and thus greeted the 165th anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s birth with her own death.

132 I delivered the eulogy as requested by the family and afterwards went to stay in a small town with a lake. My own paper on "Jung, Psychopolitics and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” was by this time overdue. I applied for Special Consideration and got it, one of the finer ironies of this story. In the small town I was quickly declared insane. The Feminist Professor answered none of my letters from the pit. However, she did mail back my paper, marked “A” & “Brilliant”. After the fifth letter, and in between praying to St Jude, I began hoping that the Feminist Professor blamed herself for the suicide and thought frequently of upping the ante of her guilt, but did not.

I remember now, all this time later, hearing earlier that same year about an older, eminently more sophisticated girl—an Honours student—who had been hospitalised for a nervous breakdown. The story went that she spent the entire period of her incarceration with her nose stuck in a book. The book was a post-structuralist treatise; I forget by whom. Everyone had laughed at this story when it circulated—how pretentious and affected it proved the girl to be, what evidence that she had taken the whole thing too far it constituted.

By the time, perhaps a year and a half later, I was spending my days sleeping and my nights deciphering dense and unfamiliar texts translated from the French and borrowed from the university library, the girl was dead, and I had forgotten the story.

8. Her grief expresses itself in fits of fury/over details, details take the place of meaning...22

133 Sometimes I think I have forgotten how this all began. Almost nothing remains from that time. A skirt perhaps, frayed. A small bundle of letters marked "return to sender". When I touch these objects my fingertips become numb. Sometimes, my body begins to freeze and I retreat to a hot bath. There I trace what remains most vividly, not the story but its scar. I will not begin, but I will begin by saying something about this scar.

My parents drove up from Sydney to tell me. The radio was on in the kitchen; Andrew Olle had just died. This was the beginning of my event.

You are terrible if you imagined that I would be impervious to it.

9. Lost words. Obscure lost words. Secret lost words. Messages. I was saying. I meant to say. What I saw, noticed, understood.23

It was a loss they called phantom, those doctors who examined me and could not find a reason for the pain. I got the tattoo to make the pain bearable. A prosthetic device, my way of showing what once there was.

The tattoo. Memorial incarnation of the bodily organ24 I hallucinate: that which I have lost, that which has been ripped from me. And gone where? Taken from me without my permission, and leaving a gaping wound that causes others to avoid me on the street. It weeps, it festers, it makes sense only as the manifestation of the new gash in my understanding of the world, of which I comprehend nothing, except that the world is no longer viable. Without this organ I am alien; my existence defies comprehension: everything points to the outcome of death. And it is a death, this wounded life, a living death that places me, separates me, even as it curses me to wander, to stray in search of what I have lost.25 This

134 existence makes a pariah of me. It has no name or passport; it has nothing but nothing.

I am not you, and yet I am consumed by you. You are no longer here, yet you are here again, & again, not somewhere else but here. You are nowhere to be found, you are found then lost. I am lost; I cannot find you. You no longer look for me; it is all I can do to look for you.

Walking through Hyde Park on the day of my consecration, war imposes its flat, concrete existence upon me and I want to scream at the pain of its weight: "Anzacs, I do not begrudge you your mourning but I most certainly begrudge you your public monuments."

10. To be permanently in exile is to be permanently in disguise; it is an extreme form of self-protection.26

My ravaged body—torn, ploughed, ripped as in violent childbirth only no child, no product, nothing to justify, to moralise my suffering. You see me: then react, abreact. 27 I yearn to feel your eyes upon me; I yearn for something of my despair to send itself back to you. I condemn you for staring, for demanding to know how "it" happened, where "it" hurts.

Days here don't so much start & finish as endlessly re-present themselves with a terrible grin. Everything is God-awful in that tedious way of dreams where you wait all night for the bus to come & wake to find that you have meanwhile been run over by a truck.

The supermarket at 3am is a good place to go. Under the fluoro lights, one's veins come into sharp relief. One always knows though, after the

135 first couple of times, that it will not last the trip home to the knife. You are glad of this, sort of, for the pattern of giving and taking away has become as familiar as insomnia. You would not be yourself without it. You use this fantasy of composure to justify staying alive. If someone were to enter the supermarket & spray seven rounds of silver tip bullets, you would not offer your box of instant cheesy macaroni for a shield. But this is one thing & suicide another. The only tenable decisions in the active reside in the refrigerated compartment. Manufacturers of frozen food know this.

I could ask why me, why this, why now, but no one will answer. Or else everyone will, demanding payment by the hour, for the book, per hit. Nothing helps.

11. Autobiography is written out of the deaths of others, and into the death of oneself.28

I will tell you these things I remember. But you do not nor will ever know the full story of my event. Therefore, do not presume to sympathise with it. Do not ask me for the full story, or the true story. What use they are they? They are not the event. You may believe there are enough words to tell this or any story; you are wrong. You may believe there are the right words but there are not. Perhaps you do not understand events. Perhaps you try too hard to understand stories. Perhaps you are used to trying so hard that you will not even hear me when I whisper the words of the un-dead.

Everything of importance in my life, meaning my birth and my death, has registered on my skin. It was born infected. Too ugly, no photos exist of

136 me for the first year. I was a big purple wrinkle to my sister, who had herself been born perfectly on time, placid and porcelain.

When the infection cleared one great streak of purple remained on my stomach. All through my childhood I imagined that this birthmark was my punishment for having not wanted to be born. It was my personal latemark, and no amount of turning up to school on time could erase it. (Later, in my adolescence, a psychic told me that birthmarks represent the means of death in one's previous life. The psychic said that I had died with child, a casualty of a 15th century attempt at a caesarean.)

In this lifetime, the one in which I tell this story, there were a mere twenty years between my late birth and my premature death. In that time the birthmark had greatly faded. In the year that I died it reappeared, this time dispersed in tiny dots that covered the entire surface of my body. It was at first suspected that I was infected with meningococcal, but when my throat began to swell up like a giant squid the dots were put down to an allergic reaction. Treatment commenced. It took four months for the dots to retreat. By then I had long decided to claim back my skin.

It comes to me late in the story that there is the wound on the one hand, the scar on the other. The wound anticipates the scar; the scar recalls the wound. Varieties of wound invoke varieties of scar. A violent death brings forth multiple wounds, however cleanly it is enacted. Some of these wounds are silent, like the p in psyllium. There, all the same. Some, vulgar, demand the gaze—or are my metaphors mixed? Seeing and hearing are not so different. Like the wound and the scar. Two mutually referential points in one psychic trajectory.

137 12. Some people in mourning tidy the house and rearrange furniture, actions which spring from an increase of the obsessional mechanisms.29

In exile, it was books I sought to orient me. It seemed miraculous to me that books remained where so much else had been lost, destroyed. Their presence was fortuitous. Where else could I have been expected to turn? I was a literature undergraduate; I had learnt most of what I believed I knew about life from Proust & Flaubert & perhaps most of all from Wuthering Heights. I had always been "a bookish girl"; at seven, my teacher's rubber-stamp inking up my story: phantasmagorical! The notion that too much reading might "turn my brain" was one that held no truck with me. What were books for if not that? Too numerous "turns" to count had already taken place inside my head by my twenty-first year.

I read The Quest for Christa T. every May and November for the first 4 years after M. died. My copy, second hand, belonged to a Virginia Coventry. I often thought about Virginia and how many times she read this book. I often wondered if the stains on page 177 were produced by her tears. Virginia C. Christa T. Christa T., dead at 35. If thirty-five is “terribly young”,30 how much more terribly twenty-two? Did Virginia C. read this book at twenty-two? Thirty-one?

At thirty-five, did she exchange it for a forensic crime thriller?

It wasn’t until the eighth reading that it occurred to me that Christa Wolf might have written her own death, her own eulogy in the guise of Christa T's. Was this what my own bereavement meant? Was it all a means to an ends, to anticipating my end, to grieving for my loss as though I might be present to perceive it? Useless to pretend it’s for her sake.

138 Once and for all, she doesn’t need us. So we should be certain of one thing: that it’s for our sake. Because it seems that we need her.31 Did Virginia Coventry realise this on the eve of her thirty-fifth birthday? Did it frighten her? Was ridding herself of Christa Wolf an attempt to forget about Christa T./Virginia C.? Did Virginia Coventry marry exactly one year later, on the eve of her 36th birthday, to a man called Forrest? Did she become Virginia F., thus uncoupling herself from Christa T. at last?

At the last moment, one has the thought of working on her.32

How simple for Virginia C. to disappear. Not so Christa T: she simply appeared.33 Christa Wolf (Christa 1) was always thinking about this fact, and for how long Christa T. (Christa 2) had been present beforehand. She (Christa 1) liked to think of this uncertainty as a personal beast of burden. I couldn’t say what Christa 2’s opinion was. Worse, I can do what I like with her.34

This virtuous woman, though she die before her time, will find rest. As she was living among sinners she has been taken up. She has been carried up so that evil may not warp her understanding. Coming to perfection in so short a while, she achieved long life.35

Q: Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?36

(Now do I recall a lady author reminding me that technical words have no sex they have no scars or histories they offer no prizes & most often they haven't had time to live.37 Carla Harryman, I am also opposed to monuments and do not want to be harmed by using language in a

139 straightforward manner.38 The danger lies in justifying yourself, in explaining. I think that we must write brutally and disrespectfully.39)

A: Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die before my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I thought I could do nothing.40

13. …my language will always fumble, stammer in order to express it, but I can never produce anything but a blank word, an empty vocable.41

How to say any of this without invoking disgust at my own propensity towards badly-crafted romance—mourning as a spurious redemptive practice—without degenerating into the more coercive pieties that talk about grief usually brings in its wake.42 Spurious sounds like spew & the thought that I might unwittingly partake in the comfortable project of sentimentalising—& thus pacifying—what story there might be to tell does literally make me taste vomit where the words should be. I'm wary too of buying into the plot, the seamless narratives that prostitute themselves as viable options.43 I mean, how much more antithetical to suicide can you get? Then again I don't want to appear to be congratulating myself on my post-modern savvy either. This is not meant to be an exercise in autoeroticism.

Sometimes I think I have remembered how to say it. But then I dream of how she repulsed me, the once-imperfect oval of her mouth encrusted with yellow vomit, the distended belly, the bloated face.

It is important to point to what is unsayable, which, in the end, is perhaps not as unsayable as we think. It is important to do so in order to expand

140 the realm of the historical; to re-mark on the pages of accepted (acceptable) history. One cannot recover without recovering one’s history. One’s history need not be written but it must be able to be symbolised in some way—one cannot cathect air. It is sometimes enough merely to trace some words there, to connect the body with the memory, the memory with history.

14. She loved her. A hundred things happen when I write that sentence.44

My body shivers, convulses. The tattooist asks me if I have come to the studio of my own accord. What am I to say? I shrug; I am over eighteen, what does it matter? (Our murders are decided in an obscure and violent relation to jouissance;45 I am hardly about to declare my guilt.) I do not say that I am asking him to take the shame of my bereaved existence and create a direct mimetic introversion of her negation.46 I do not ask him where else this negation appears so glaringly than at the scene of the suicide. "On the face of it I realise this might seem crazy", I say, handing him the design. He does not argue the point; the buzz of the needle sets in. And then the terrible letdown, that the pain of it is nothing. What is the rule that says pain has a necessary correlation anyway? 47 I had wanted the tattoo to uphold this rule; had wanted, even through my benzo-induced fugue, to know I could make the pain true, real, inviolable. Have you ever dreamed of the word volition, have you ever wanted to feel your own intent? This was meant to be my memorial to what I had lost, the last nod to my familiar.

It isn't enough... for him to know that it was love, passionate.

141 (whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine)48

So, we wrote each other love letters. We fell deeply & madly in love. We were & did all of these things, we were & did none of these things—no chronicle of the world we shared would be enough.49

15. What is interesting…is how one writes images through the experience of dwelling. This notion of dwelling is about the spaces of being and the places from which meaning can be articulated. Dwelling, like meaning, can open onto a poetic imagination.50

This thing I asked for, I thought I could make it exist.

But where it hurt was in the destination, the alienating destination, the relentless, lifeless thud. The perpetual having to live harbouring a dead object, someone within, which could never be established as here or there, the wrist, the breast, the hip. You can forget any such points of identification, of composure. What's composure? Only a superstition of confidence in the integrity of the self.51 Bereavement makes itself apparent everywhere, and nowhere. I search for you, you cannot be found. I search for you; you are in my mouth, womb, eyes. The loss of the beloved other is also the loss of some essential part of the self,52 necessarily undesignated, and as such mythical, unreal.53 It resurfaces through shame, guilt, anger; resurfaces as undesirable, an unbearable experience of being. God help me when will this end, I cry, and yet you have not even started at my liver, elbow, thigh. This thing I invoke: it is only is a symbol, therefore it is more than that. It's a symptom and a program. Which is to say, among other things, that in traversing the libidinal skin, it both produces and is itself (an) affect.

142 One which desires somatic expression. So when I tell them she is dead and that I have lost my right arm, my anchor, a piece of my heart and they tell me I am hysterical, they are right. Only they don't know what they are talking about. You see, of course, what I mean... it was a straightforward enough problem; I thought I knew how to fix it. I did believe in those days that in the beginning was the word. I had to get back, back, back to you.54 What was needed was some point of reference, and there I almost did say reverence.

I was free-floating, light as a feather without that organ, the one I had lost, hallucinated but did not imagine. Unbearable, limitless55 sensation of falling, as in a dream, except I never do hit the pillow and you never do wake up. I was nauseous, not from the needle but from this. Hovering between what language uselessly describes as life and death. A third place, unreal but not imaginary. I was there but no one could see me. Just like invisible ink.

I went to that man and I asked him to paint me in.56 And he did, and that is how I killed you, dear heart—you who were already dead—such that I might live.

I got an infection, when the danger was supposedly passed. And there were pills to make me better where last time there'd been none.

16. You speak to me of narcissism, but I reply that it is a matter of my life.57

I took a course at the university about the ampersand. I was the only non-PhD in philosophy in it. I had to turn up, not unlike the balding retrenchee who has to scan six packs four nights a week, in order for

143 Social Security to pay my benefit, evidence of my self-administered “diversional therapy”. I say it was about the ampersand, this therapy, but it was more or less about the sexual relation. There was a guy in my class who was writing his thesis on "the conjunctive and conjugation". It was pretty much just a remotely more engaging form of daytime TV. No one cared that I'd been given special dispensation to attend, or why. Everyone there was as damaged as the next. My newly vacated body sensed these things.

I am never convinced of the validity of a theory. Of theories, yes; but as to this or that theory—there is no way I can commit myself to believe. I have never been a fashionable academician. Nor a fashionable mourner. (On the morning of the funeral I could barely dress).

As to the tattoo. No lover fails to notice it, and to question. Absurdly, I resent this. The lover reads my body, thus seeks to paragraph it.58 For it must mean something, this mark, this symbol of what? My aesthetic predilections? My ideological leanings? My pain thresh-hold? My exhibitionist tendencies? My need to rebel against daddy, my mother's schoolteacher nuns, the universe? Who am I to argue with what they want to believe? Intention and fervour—mine or theirs—do not make a text nor a woman of me.59

The lover who asks the most questions has not yet understood that surviving is not what we think.60 Surviving, in fact, has very little to do with the intellectual faculties at all. Surviving is what we do; surviving, at least within an old-fashioned Hegelian framework, which is to say insofar as it is a pure act, is a phenomenon that begs the question: how can individuals possibly be worthy of what is happening to them?61

144 (All of this happened after ENGL255 ruined Wuthering Heights, & thus my fantasy that a Heathcliffe type would save me…)

17. If you cannot remember, then there is no reality.62

I see my shrink every Thursday after the philosophy class. Each time is the same tedious business of undoing one sentence and putting another one together. My shrink's favourite word is "and". As in, and then I....and then we....and then she....(and then she died)….My shrink would dig on the conjunctive guy.

Frankly it tires me to think of having to cue the story. I want not to have to take the leap of faith involved in the "if you can imagine someone listening".

Writing does not help me get the meaning either. Obviously I was lax in my note taking; unlike Joan Didion I can't recall which songs were playing on the radio. I do know that on my stereo was probably some girl band. Also, my downstairs neighbours at the flat with the noisy plumbing played Columbian folk records. At that time I believed that my basic affective controls were no longer intact, but now I present this to you as a more cogent question than at first it might appear, a kind of kaon of the period.63

This doesn't seem to sum up the times. This doesn't seem to account for anything. (For the basic emotional states—notably grief and depression—it's hard to come up with new metaphors.)64

145 Joan Didion the foxy lady goes to parties. Meets Jim Morrison & Janis Joplin. Joan Didion the righteous babe knows Huey P. Newton, Eldridge Cleaver. Joan Didion tells sexy anecdotes.

18. I am addressing someone whom you do not know but who is there, at the end of my maxims.65

All this living and yet I was dying. Wanted, in fact, to wake up one morning from the monotony of my grief to the relief of finding myself dead. And yet how could I when what I wanted to effect was in fact a statement of my desire not to obliterate the picture, the scene of death, not to forget...66 But I was only to conceive of this later, much later, now, revising the immense history that lay behind it, aside it, in front of it.

Although they took the dead poet's words from above your bed, which in the coronial investigation became Exhibit Three, they chose to ignore others as hastily scrawled & haphazardly taped there.

Sometimes there is a word that will suffice but more often there is not. (I felt a rush of blood to my head & all we were talking was lies). The dishonesty of putting this down in a place I cannot easily erase. And in the bath earlier tonight, I put my head under water & thought: everything will be all right. What rude trick is that? It was my event & they would not let me have it.

19. I didn’t want to give the impression of coherence, on the contrary I wanted to give an impression of a sort of wound, a scar.67

146 This is my event of which you may have some, a sliver. Do not merely lick off the icing. That is a disgusting & juvenile habit. I do not wish to see the inside of your mouth as you chew.

A diary is not for telling stories of events. A diary is not for telling the truth. This is the mistake made by most people who bore themselves.

You are in no place to quarrel with the story of this event since it happened in another language you do not speak. This is the only translation.

An event can be anything that happens to you.

If anyone tells you the event and the story are the same they are wrong or lazy.

Do not expect your sliver of my event to fully satisfy you. It is not my problem if you are still hungry. It is not my problem if you do not like chocolate or are allergic to nuts.

Do not presume to blow out my candles or make my wish. Do not ask which event this is.

It is not my responsibility to inform you that this event may bore, offend, titillate, anger, amuse you.

20. In my own childhood, then in my adolescence, I received a maximum of information, words, the entire gamut of signs. All that caused me to go mad.68

147 At first it was the words unsaid that near destroyed me. All the books said this was normal. Personally, I thought they tried to make you feel too okay about it. No matter what failures, omissions or absences you may have brought to bear on the situation, it seemed you were never at fault. Guilt, self-blame & "beating yourself up" were always a waste of time & energy. Nothing you could have said or done would have been enough. Personally, I thought that was a crock. Later, it was the words said that undid me. Ugly, ill-bestowed objects, carelessly flung. These were the words I needed to "let go", according to the books. But, like floating turds, they always returned. They were irrepressible, and their abject contemplation was the aspect of my grief that disgusted me most.

It was my friend R. who eventually brokered a peace between the words hoarded and the words purged. The Barbara Blackman came first, I think. Then a Robertson Davies for Christmas. And so it went on, every month a package of books mailed express. I was hoping upon the new Lorrie Moore when the next package arrived. I fancy R. had built up to it. It was slim and written by a long dead Norwegian author, forebodingly obscure.

It was this book that finally drove me to my bed. Motionless, I lay for eight days and nights, unable even to fumble for something of God. Three at a time they piled the blankets upon me, but still I froze. By the final day I felt nothing. I had remembered reading that this was the last stage of hypothermia when suddenly all I could hear was the alphabet insisting on repeating itself. A regulation green-vegetable syntax. Forwards, backwards, singsong (elamenopee). I sat up and asked for an egg. This was my suffrage; this my defiant act.

21. …love never dwells in us without burning us.69

148

The absence of blood sings through me, each perfect note a torture that only my dog shall smell & witness. He breathes my madness & fits like a spastic frog. My dog dies on my birthday & everyone pretends it is not my fault. I find this ironic. I find this gets my blood back.

The truth is that your death pitted me against myself. And suddenly such ruptures, fissures, enormous absence I could not bear, unbearable but the only evidence of what you had meant to me. So I imprinted them upon myself, offering you up where I had no such right, offering you such that I might repossess you. Now in the lilt of my voice I hear nothing but words that make no sense. How long before clarity sets in? Levi-Strauss says twenty years.70

22. We hear her lists, her unstressed series, no punctuation even, no pauses, no settling apart and so everything joined with no subordination, no ranking. It is a radical parataxis.71

Dear Joan Didion,

Here is my attempt at producing my own sexy anecdotes:

# The IWS served strawberries, blueberries and cream cheese at its Christmas party. Five days before the fact.

# On the 3rd of March a coalition government was elected federally. Eighty days after the fact.

149 # 7th-18th July: went to Perth & saw Monika. 216 days after the fact.

# 400 000 people rally in Belgrade. Tony Bullimore is rescued at sea. (?) days after the fact.

# Saw film adaptation of Lilian's Story. Afterwards drank Campari. What seems like years after the fact.

# Rally in Sydney re: education funding. Entirely irrelevant to the fact.

# E. Bishop's proliferativeness pissing me off. Note to self: need to read Levinas. Constantly after the fact.

# "I am exhausted, I am exhausted" - S. Plath (Beekeeper??). Forever after the fact.

In the bath I touched the scars of these cuts and knew they could not be used to make anything. You cannot read them. It is only a bit of skin. It does not tell a story. It does not mean anything. It is not the truth of my event.

My mourning is a randomly salvaged note/the pen that wrote it, chewed/at midnight; lupine/my face on the cat's neck/is naked on the floor to Carole King/awful rum/my mourning is cottage cheese sandwiches for twelve days/six eggs tossed over the balcony/any city- circle train/the laundry, flooded/my mourning is stewed tea/a crack(ed) pot.

150 23. I have never known how to tell a story.72

Sometimes I imagine that when I am finished writing I will have spent every word I know. There is a sense in which I like to imagine myself as a wordless being. But it's not the fantasy of returning to a pre-linguistic, semiotic state. It's the post-linguistic I want, the total elimination of the gap between affect and language.

Yesterday, it being a Saturday, I immersed myself in domesticity. Faux- dusted my dresser, made note to clean mirrors, found errant, unpartnered earring. Stopped to gather up her photograph, to brush the tips of my fingers across her lovely face, to compare, for the first time & with shock, my own ageing reflection against her own, forever young. Baulked first at my sentimentality, and then at the lines around my eyes. Hid earring in a box. Replaced photograph on dresser, took up vacuum cleaner. Frightened first the cat then myself. Took to my unmade bed and produced precisely seven tears. Remarked at the poetic improbability of seven tears for seven years.

I try hard to say what I am saying and I say it to understand the effect of the scene without ever later having to nuance it.73 This is a reflection on the enormity of the world. I am not in possession of all the facts.74

Sometimes I almost can explain why I do not want my writing to be like petit-point embroidery. Vehemently.75 Contrived, sentimental, archaic. Sometimes that is what I am saying.

24. I confess that the particular fate of my loves… exacerbates the failing of my discourse….76

151

She refuses to dedicate this work to her. She knows she would hate any kind of memorial. She knows this. She does not place notices in the newspaper to remember her. She sometimes send flowers, but she's not kidding herself or anyone—the flowers are for her mother, her sisters— what use has she for flowers?

S has emailed me. “The thing about writing the personal, that really gets to me, as I might have indicated in that paper, is that you have to draw boundaries, make choices about what is said…”

25. The memory of the pain makes the blockage the refusal.77

When I go back there now, not for the duration of an entire season, but perhaps for a day or a week, it is as if I am dreaming up the whole thing. It is as when a friend explains to you that she was in her mother’s kitchen, yet really it was her high school science laboratory… you know how that happens in dreams. You do know that happens, but you do not know how; only, where you stood then is not where you stand now. There is no exactness about the substitution, no metaphor that can be plainly translated. For a time I believed that I had been transformed into a modern day Persephone. It was years before the bleeding obvious revealed itself to me: that although I had been stolen away, sort of, my Demeter had never come searching, nor ever been.

In the white space of the page, the gaps and aporia of collage which are the place of simultaneous beginnings and endings, we re-member the beginnings and rehearse the endings of the stories we have lived by…The gap is not always a comfortable space. For those who invest heavily in a dominant narrative, its

152 interruption is an occasion for dismay, anxiety. The gap is a placed marked by death.78

There is that gap. Deathly, yes. But what began as a paralysing thing has morphed into shelter. The gap is not merely a place marked by death; the gap is death. Once, I made it my home. Now, I choose to be home-less.

The things that used to bother me are numerous. References to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Twenty-first birthdays. And the expression, “go and top yerself why dontcha”. I try these days to summon the impetus for my distress, but cannot. In its place I find only telephone bills, dripping taps, politicians. On Sundays I record these details in my computer and try to remember what any of them has to do with the story.

I am different now, you see. I would even say Dramatically Different if that did not happen to be already trademarked by a particular up-market brand of moisturiser. (Moisturising in winter is a beauty essential. I read this in a magazine while standing in line to pay for my groceries. Winter is harsh. Winter strips the skin and it is necessary to rehydrate on a daily basis.)

Once, I could not brush my own hair for being haunted by her own. 26. In terms of the final reckoning, everything still hangs in the balance.79

In my writer's dictionary I linger decorously over elan. I want to say it somewhere. Can't think where. Write it on a post-it note. Stick it under the windowsill. All winter see rain, wind, snow & elan. (Fulfilments: they are not spoken.80) The energy of commentary shifts, follows the path of substitutions….81 "Like this" implies "not like this". Why bother going

153 to the effort of the metaphor? It's like a trauma model—therefore lacks context. Absences, fissures and the like. Hysteria/double- consciousness… whatever: it's not attached to an event. I don't want to be available to anyone like this—not linguistically, not symbolically, not actually. Lots of interested experts. Too bad I don't want to interest them. I don't like scientifica (or meat, dirt, cars).

27. To speak of "us" is not an analysis, it is a history that analyses itself.82

I don't want to say it, even now, this thing—but it is begging out in a way I don't want to have to evoke cliched metaphors about labour and birth to describe the scene that is me at my desk in awkward discomfort not unlike the dull thud of menstrual pain except in this case all over, & no poultice to be found.

So I will tell you how I am writing against the distant whirr of the sewing machine two rooms away, where S. sits making curtains, & the slight fuzz of the radio she has on. Outside it is grey. An ancient and half- drunk cup of tea is on my desk, the milk having settled to scum in a way that makes me feel queasy. I am also frustrated that I cannot escape the theoretical implications of this reaction, the fact that I think unnaturally often of the word abjection. All day the cat has avoided me.

I know I don't have to be saying any of this, which is something that makes me hold my stomach, and sigh. a) I am in the throes of anguish, my hands at my throat, my eyes wild with delirium, moribund. I am about to make a startling admission before lapsing into a coma from which I will never wake. I am a

154 romantic heroine in a 19th century novel; I am Cathy, Emma, Anna; I have the weight of literary history to support me as I fall. b) I have no revelation to make; my situation is banal. So it is that it happens; I eat a Jaffa, I file the nail of my left index finger, I get to the point.

This being that I hardly even think of her anymore except by initial. I have reduced her to the equivalent of a monogram on a handkerchief of the kind she would never have used. It's cheap and it's cringe-worthy, like those $5 boxed mother's day sets they sell by the dozen in Woolworths. And it's all I can do to say: Jesus. Sudden enormous pain & childish frustration at my inability to come to terms with it, even now; to articulate its meaning, the relevance of it not only to my writing, but my life.

How fatuous that I should say any of this; how necessary. I want to speak of her, & I want to do so not in a way that announces: this is artful, this is a theoretical illustration, this is very interesting. The hurtfulness of what has come to pass has nothing but scorn for poetry. The hurtfulness of what has come to pass is assuaged only by poetry: where to now? I make a thin thing. I consider walking the fifty paces from front door to car. I consider, carefully now: the precise manner in which I might put on my sunglasses, ignite the engine, and drive to the cemetery. How long has it been; should I bring flowers; will I remember which tree marks the spot.

I cannot but think such thoughts, I think, before facing up to my own untruthfulness, the actual substance of my motivation. Which is determined, perhaps, by a desire to relieve the tedium of this day, even to get out of the house as the housewife in me is wont to say. Also, a certain

155 recurrent faithlessness on my part that seeks confession—ha!—the hilarity of it when I put it like that, that I should ask absolution of a stone (which is all I can hope to find should I procrastinate thus). I know this, five & a half years on, but I know it in a way that requires a certain detachment of my-self from what I might possibly say about it; I cannot speculate, therefore, beyond this point.

28. Scars are created within and without, a culture of scars cultivated in petri dishes, welded onto our skins and etched undeniably into our minds.83

As a child you wished for a broken limb, the drama of it, or of the ice- cream and jelly a tonsillectomy reputedly would bring, or your school to burn down, a never-ending holiday. Later, you wished for something to break your heart & grow you up. But like the drama, the ice-cream & jelly and the endless summer, growing up proved no compensation at all, and like the broken limb, the tonsillectomy and the burned down school, your broken heart was finally just that: something which hurt. And with it, new things of which to be afraid.

Once, early in my grief, I stretched my body over the ground that covered her own, & felt then a sob rise in my throat, & knew the meaning of a broken heart. Afterwards, I invented stories about events that had never actually happened, places we had never in fact been, conversations we had certainly never had. I did this with absolute conviction, & I did it with her collusion.

Once, early in my grief, something besides a stone was there. I felt it, deep in my gut; it gave rise to idiot, bitch, sweet love, silly girl, bitch, bitch, honey-oh and why; it pleaded please, I'm sorry, don't know, had to, g'bye.

156

Once, I had thought that the creation of "us" was important, we two.84 It made me yell at stones. (Thus deflecting my personal distress. It cannot write itself in this text.)

29. Grant that separation not stop attacking, and may I never begin to bear the unbearable.85

I want to convey truth, not poetry, when I speak of my severed hands. I am no longer religious, nor mad; I have no need of performing my crucifixion to the world. I do not wish in these days to take my own life, nor resurrect hers. My confessions have become few; I have ceased waiting for the word. That it came in the beginning was a lie. This is what happens in its wake.

Dear Joan Didion,

I do not really feel sedated when I read what you have written.

I do go someplace outside of (my) history.

The distance between "then" and "now" is far. I sat there for a long time.

But now, no longer. Voila! (What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.)86

1 Gibbs, "Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism". 2 "We talk of death...duties": Marcel Proust quoted by Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. London: Vintage, 1998. p3. 3 Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments. [1977]. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1984. p70. 4 Elizabeth Smart, On the Side of the Angels. Alice Van Wart (ed.), Toronto: Harper Collins, 1994. p93. 5 Cixous, op.cit. p41.

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6 See Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) for his discussion of the "libidinal skin". 7 "Raw where...arrow"; The Breeders, "Roi", Last Splash, Shock Records (Australia),1993. 8 "And if you leave....go"; Mental As Anything "If You Leave Me (Can I Come Too)", Cats and Dogs, Mushroom Records (Australia), 1982. 9 See Cixous, op.cit. p36. "The word exists; therefore the feeling". 10 See Cixous, op.cit. p15. 11 "I had not chosen...forever": Anna Gibbs, "The Gift", Kerr and Nettelbeck (eds.), op.cit. p37. 12 "all violence has a history": Cixous, op.cit. p47. 13 "One of us shall die....schema": Cixous, op.cit. p34. 14 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own [1929]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. p109. 15 In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. 16 In Kate Chopin's The Awakening. 17 In Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. 18 Anne Sexton, quoted by Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography. London: Virago, 1992. p107. 19 Sylvia Plath, "Edge". Ted Hughes (ed.), Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1981. 20 Marcel Proust quoted by Phyllis Rose, op.cit. p229. 21 Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T [1968]. Trans. Christopher Middleton. London: Virago, 1982. p 23. 22 Judy Grahn, "1. Helen, at 9am, at noon, at 5.15", The Work of a Common Woman. Freedom: CA: The Crossing Press, 1978. 23 Smart, op.cit. p79. 24 See Jacques Lacan's "Alienation" (The Four Fundamental Principles of Psychoanalysis. Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.). Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978) for his discussion on the libidinal organ and the tattoo. 25 See Kristeva's Powers of Horror. The subject in confrontation with the abject is "a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself) and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings." (p8). 26 Mary Gordon, quoted by Susan Johnson, Hungry Ghosts. New York: Picador, 1997. 27"react, abreact": Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p3. 28 McCooey, op.cit. p71. 29 "Some people...mechanisms": Klein, "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic- Depressive States". p356. 30 Wolf, op.cit. p4. 31 Wolf, op.cit. p5. 32 Wolf, op.cit. p5. 33 Wolf, op.cit. p6. 34 Wolf, op.cit. p4. 35 Book of Wisdom 4: 7-15. 36 Grahn, "A Woman is Talking to Death". The Word of a Woman. 37 Marie Cardinal, In Other Words. London: Women's Press, 1996. p72. 38 Harryman, op.cit. p51. 39 Cardinal, op.cit. p72. 40 Grahn, "A Woman is Talking to Death". p124.

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41 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments.p19. 42 Phillips, Darwin's Worms. pp.79-80. 43 After Himani Bannerji, "The Sound Barrier: Translating Ourselves in Language and Experience", Wendy Waring (ed.), by, for & about: feminist cultural politics. Toronto: Women's Press, 1994. p52. 44 Louise Bernikow, Among Women. New York: Harmony Books, 1980. p157. 45 "Our murders...jouissance": Cixous, op.cit. p25. 46 See Jennifer Biddle's "Shame". Australian Feminist Studies, 1997, 12 (26). pp. 227- 239. "Shame is a direct mimetic introversion of the other's negation". (p229). 47 "What is the rule...correlation": Rachel Wetzsteon, quoted by Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p33 48 Rich, "Twenty One Love Poems". 49 Rich, "Twenty One Love Poems". 50 Mary Zournazi, "Historical Fictions, Uncanny Homes", Lechte and Zournazi (eds.), op.cit. p68 51 "a superstition of confidence in the integrity of the self": Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. p41. 52 "the loss...self": see Freud's "Our Attitude Toward Death" and "Mourning and Melancholia" for the classic psychoanalytic exposition of this view. 53 See Jacques Lacan, "The Subject and the Other: Alienation". Trans. Alan Sheridan. Jacques-Alain Miller (ed), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. p205. 54 See Sylvia Plath's "Daddy". op.cit. "At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you". 55 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: "...unbearable limit...[t]he initial fleeting grasp." (p140). 56 "Paint me in": from the book title Painting Myself In by Nina Mariette. Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1997. An illustrated account of recovery from abuse through art therapy. 57 Artaud, quoted by Anne Sexton, epigraph to "Suicide Note". The Complete Poems. 58 Cixous, op.cit. "Since you read with your body, your body paragraphs"(p23). 59 "Intention and fervour...of me": Nicole Brossard, Picture Theory. Trans. Barbara Godard. New York: Roof Books, 1990. p15 60 "Surviving is not what we think": Cixous, op.cit. p13. 61 "how can individuals...to them": see Boundas (ed.), op.cit.p9. "The ethical question is how individuals can be worthy of what is happening to them". 62 Raulston Saul, op.cit. p5. 63 Joan Didion, The White Album. [1979]. London: Flamingo,1993. p46. 64 Rose, op.cit. p174. 65 Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments. p74. 66 "not to obliterate...forget": Cixous, op.cit. p7 67 Julia Kristeva, quoted by Dawn McCance, op.cit. p147. 68 Cardinal, op.cit. p50. 69 Kristeva, Tales of Love. p4. 70 Rose, op.cit. p247. 71 Blau du Plessis, "For the Etruscans". p278. 72 Jacques Derrida, "Mnesmosyne", Memoires for Paul de Man. [1989]. Trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler, E. Cadava and P. Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. p3. 73 Brossard, op.cit. p18.

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74 Carla Harryman, There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn. San Francisco: City Lights, 1995. p6. 75 Smart, op.cit. p133 76 Kristeva, Tales of Love. p1. 77 Smart, op.cit. p127. 78 Anne Brewster, “Fictocriticism: Undisciplined Writing”. p32. 79 Luce Irigaray, "He Risks Who Risks Life Itself", Trans. David Macey. Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. p214. 80 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. p55. 81 Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. pp.73-4 82 Julia Kristeva, "My Memory's Hyperbole". Trans. Athena Viscusi. Domna Stanton (ed.),The Female Autograph. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1984. p220. 83 Rex Otto, quoted by Toni Davidson, Scar Culture, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1999. p4. 84 Bernikow, op.cit. p119 85 Hélène Cixous, extract from "Manna to the Mandelstams to the Mandelas", Susan Sellers (ed.), The Hélène Cixous Reader. London: Routledge, 1994. p178. 86 Didion, The White Album. p208.

160 Part 3: "Where such unmaking reigns":1 narrative in productive mourning

______

Life is the performance of texts.2

Arranging everything into a story is a bourgeois mania.3

What is at stake is turning the crisis into a work in progress.4

At the end of Part 2, I suggested that one of the salient features of productive mourning is its treatment of narrative, and that this treatment is a product of the disruption to the self-other/subject-object dialectic that mourning provokes. In Part 3 I want to elaborate on this proposition. I will look firstly at the idea of narrative and its relationship to mourning in general terms. I will then consider the work of two philosophers—Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray—as a way of further nuancing this relationship. Both Derrida and Irigaray endorse "respect for the irreconcilable", to which I referred in Part 2, as an ethically desirable practice at both the subjective and cultural level. I will look at how this practice might be narrativistically embedded. Thirdly, I will make some comments on two cultural texts that represent bereavement and mourning. They consist of a novel, The Quest for Christa T, by Christa Wolf and A Grief Observed, an autobiographical memoir by C.S. Lewis. My comments will be directed primarily at picturing productive mourning in situ by considering the narrative treatment embedded in the texts. I will conclude by invoking Hélène Cixous’ notion of "violent potential" to describe the "gift" that productive mourning offers the bereaved subject.

161 Narrative and mourning

The narratives with which subjects are encouraged to identify form part of the socio-cultural apparatus through which power and control are exerted, as my discussion of the genre of self help in Part 2 illustrated. These preferred narratives tend to be heavily invested in what Julia Kristeva calls the "phenotext"5, that is, the influence or dimension of the symbolic. In the language of the narrative therapist Martin Payne, they are "thin", leaving "unexamined cultural and political assumptions".6 In other words, they are narratives that acquiesce to the "scenes" on offer without questioning their appropriateness or effect. For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, such narratives thereby act to neutralise and pacify events.7 Contrary to what some postmodernist theorising might appear to suggest, there is not a limitless supply of narratives on offer to subjects, at least not if they wish to be socio- culturally enfranchised.

What chance, then, of finding a genuinely good discursive "fit" for the uniqueness of one's most affecting experiences? In a sense this is the wrong question to be asking. If, as Levinas and Kristeva suggest, our most unique and affecting experiences are those in which we come face to face with our own being in the other, they are also those that exceed the containment offered by the symbolic. Therefore, the question of discursive fit becomes somewhat redundant. The significance of mourning—the crisis and distress it provokes— can never be adequately expressed in language. The more apposite question is one about the relationship between experience and discursivity and those events that disrupt it. I suggested in Part 2 that mourning is one such event. I want to propose now that productive mourning is characterised by its exploration of the disruption of the relationship between experience and discursivity, and that this exploration is what characterises its narrative (pre)occupation.

162 By "narrative", I am referring to the internal, pre-verbal monologue of the bereaved subject and to the discourse she employs to exteriorise—for the ostensible benefit of others—this monologue. I am concerned here with narrative content around the bereavement itself, the beloved whose death has occasioned it, and the relationship between the bereaved subject and the beloved. The narrativisation characteristic of productive mourning is, I suggest, "anti-elegiac". In Western culture, elegy is the traditional form of expression of lament for the dead. Elegy performs an acceptance of a symbolic substitute—a literary monument—for the loss of the other. Characterised by apotheosis, it seeks to render a transcendental portrait of the other, to specify precisely that which has been lost. In this way, elegiac texts claim to "know" the other, and to be capable of apprehending that knowledge via a representation. In other words, they do not admit alterity either as a temporal dimension between the self and the other or between experience and discursivity. Moreover, while seemingly directed at exalting the other, elegy in fact appropriates the other for the purpose of a project aimed at re-establishing the self, thus reducing the other to "a subjective epistemology".8 The bereaved subject emerges, in turn, as (a) moral survivor.

Against the monumentality of the elegy, Peter Homans has proposed the concept of "countermourning", an anti-encomiastic response to loss. Homans suggests that countermourning would involve "a principled, deliberate, and self-conscious refusal to mourn".9 While I want to temporarily appropriate the concept of countermourning in order to illuminate my own notion of productive mourning, I do not agree with Homans' proposal that it must necessarily involve a refusal to mourn. Rather, I suggest that (a) countermourning could involve the bereaved subject performing a resistance against the elegiac narrative compulsion. To this end, an experience of productive mourning would be one in which the subject remains "unseduced by monuments".10 It would be a mourning that engages the subject in what R. Clifton Spargo calls the "unpleasure of anti-elegy".11

163

Spargo ascribes to anti-elegiac discourse the moniker of "traumatic lyricism".12 Traumatic lyricism is characterised by a self-consciousness about the lament it performs. This self-consciousness, a relation "in which the self figuratively overhears itself",13 is directed towards acknowledging the disruption of the relationship between experience and discursivity—the excess of the event—and resisting the symbolic appropriation of the other. In Spargo's words, it works to "[fragment] lyrical totality as an anxiety about identity and the relationship between identity and representation".14 Anti- elegiac discourse "prevents the thetic...from inducing the subject reified as transcendental ego."15 An alternative way of putting this is to say that it breaks with the psychological objectivism that dominates Western culture. To evoke Kierkegaard, anti-elegiac discourse expresses "mastered irony", that is, "the ability to detach oneself sufficiently from one's situation to be able to see oneself in some perspective".16 Anti-elegiac discourse, then, is a contingent, ambivalent discourse that draws attention to the contrived status of narrative and in particular, what narrative displaces or excludes in order to cohere; namely, alterity. It undermines the singularity of the event and accordingly resists the "inclination to isolate, identify and limit the burden of meaning" ascribed to it.17 Specifically, anti-elegiac discourse, or "traumatic lyricism", avoids "the painful encryptment of static, idealized representations of the lost".18 Rather, it marks "the ethical permanence of [the other]"19 by troubling the relationship between identity and representation. Instead of enacting a narrative upon the lost other, the bereaved subject confronts her own propensity to narrativisation. She does not abandon narrative as such, rather, the act of narrative monumentalism. In this way, she allows for the re-construction, in time, of other "scenes" for reflection apart from the originary "scene" of death. Anti-elegiac discourse is repetitious, but its repetition does not turn, so to speak, on the story's facts. Rather, it turns on the fact of the story itself.20 It engages what Jeremy Holmes refers to as the "dialectic between story-making

164 and story-breaking",21 recalling Robert Neimeyer’s description of the subject's "ability to tack back and forth among different styles of narrating [her] experience, between objective, external accounts, subjective, involved narratives and reflexive self-examination".22Another way to put this is to say that anti-elegiac discourse performs "a combination of narrative and commentary".23

In Part 2, I described the relation to loss of "working-through" as a process enabling the subject to engage in "repetitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance".24 I suggested that working-through is a capacity that depends on the availability of (a) transitional space, and that the subject who achieves this capacity does so by apprehending her distress as a transitional object. I want to now propose that this apprehension is formalised in terms of narrative pre-occupation. In productive mourning, then, narrative is the cipher for the subject's "play". It is very important to properly understand the meaning of this expression. As I invoke it, "play" is the means by which the subject interprets and re-interprets a dilemma with which she is faced, a dilemma that has a critical impact on the subject's understanding of her self and her self-in-world. Winnicott describes play as a mode of displaying the ideas that happen to be preoccupying one's life at any given point in time.25 Because it "is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived", play is precarious.26 In mourning, the dilemma that preoccupies the bereaved subject concerns the relationship between the self and the other. Productive mourning gestures towards continually (re)establishing the scene of the self-other encounter in a way that does not consign either party to an oppressive truth-claim. One might say that "what matters is not so much the conclusions arrived at as the terms within which arguments are conducted".27 As Winnicott points out, playing is important as a thing in itself rather than as a function of its content or use.28 My suggestion is that the "play" of productive mourning "[liberates] narrative as an event, and the event within narrative".29 The disruption of the

165 relationship between experience and discursivity generated by bereavement is avowed, but not at the expense of the significance of the event of loss, that is to say, its "irreducible privacy."30

Where productive mourning is absent, on the other hand, so too is play. "Unmetabolised pain"31 generates an oppressive narrative in which the other's absence looms large, a narrative that induces aphasia. 32 This narrative "does not progress or develop in time, but remains stereotyped, repetitious and devoid of emotional content",33 a paranoid defence. The occupation of this state demarcates the death of the beloved as "a terminus",34 leaving nowhere for the subject to go on from. Amy Olberding captures well what is at stake when she describes a version of mourning in which the lost other is posed as "the object of address whose death functions as a 'final vocabulary' of remove and absence which the living survivor cannot speak".35 As such, the subject becomes inescapably preoccupied with lack. This response to bereavement has the effect of preserving, or more accurately rendering stagnate, the originary "scene" of death. It attempts an "encryption", to borrow Abraham and Torok's term, enacting a traumatic subjectivity in which everything remains transfixed at the point of trauma by recourse to a narrative that objectifies the other. Annabelle Pitkin has described this state as "egocentric", involving "the self which, focused upon itself, experiences lack, and… tries to satisfy itself by consuming something, literally or figuratively".36 This task can become such that it overwhelms the subject's life.37 Dominick LaCapra explains the effect in the following terms:

[w]hen loss is converted into…absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning and interminable aporia in which any process of working-through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.38

Morris Berman describes how:

166

[t]he logical end point of this worldview is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated 'thing' in a world of other, equally meaningless things. This world is not of my own making…and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it.39

By experimenting with narrative around her distress rather than enacting a narrative upon the perceived source of her distress (the lost other), the subject in productive mourning avoids this fate, choosing life over death even in the knowledge of her betrayal by the former. Her expression of traumatic lyricism acknowledges that "[t]he stubborn fact of loss, its unspeakableness, sets limits to invention".40 Crucially, however, it does not forfeit her resourcefulness. Winnicott identifies as crucial the capacity of the transitional phenomena to withstand the subject's aggressive, destructive impulses towards it; narrativised, pain is a "safe" object—whatever the bereaved subject does to/with it, it will persist. The obvious qualification that needs to be made about what I have been saying is that to use something, such as narrative, the subject must have developed a capacity for using it. If one lacks adequate experience of narrative, one will be resolutely unable to "play" with it. Ironically then, the subject must be enfranchised by the symbolic in order to subvert it. This returns us to my discussion in Part 2 about "madness" and why it is not a transformative subject position.

Narrative play in productive mourning

I now wish to pose two out of many possible ways that narrative play in productive mourning might be embodied by considering the work of Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray.

Jacques Derrida: contemplation

167

This is where the evasions begin. It’s not against oblivion that she must be protected, but against being forgotten. For she, naturally, forgets; she has forgotten herself, us, heaven and earth, rain and snow. But I can still see her. Worse, I can do what I like with her.41

For in turning toward the friend who has died, we turn not as already constituted beings toward someone outside us, or simply outside us as part of our interiority, but toward our law, toward what first forms our very interiority.42

In "Giving Death", Erin Soros writes that "[r]eading is a process of mourning, of approaching the other knowing that it is unreachable, of bringing the text in knowing that it can never be equal to myself".43 Jacques Derrida inverts this thesis in his published lectures about the death of his friend and colleague, Paul de Man.44 For Derrida, a productive mourning is contemplative; akin, perhaps, to reading, but to a certain kind of deconstructive reading. That is, a kind of reading that loops back on itself, that is attentive to how the narrative of "the text" is produced—to what investments are embedded in it—rather than the fact of the narrative itself or its "meaning". Specifically, Derrida suggests that a productive mourning is one in which the bereaved subject is attentive to the power afforded by her status—namely, the power to continue to discursively enact (upon) the other, now rendered impotent in death—and refrains from (ab)using this power. Derrida astutely observes that in mourning, "[e]verything is entrusted to me".45 In productive mourning, the bereaved subject does not exploit the fact that she can do what she likes with the lost other. In other words, she resists the temptation to encrypt her trauma by erecting a narrative monument to the other. Rather, she engages with the impulse towards narrativisation itself.

168 In mourning, this impulse is directed towards the function of memory. Derrida writes that, in the corporeal absence of the lost other, "[a]ll we seem to have left is memory, since nothing appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or to come, from the other to the present." "This is probably true", Derrida continues, "but is this truth true, or true enough?"46 For Derrida, the problem with memory, as it were, is precisely that it is so heavily invested in the rhetoricity of "the true", in its capacity to do violence to the other by filtering her presence through a narcissistic narrative cipher. Yet memory is ubiquitous in mourning; indeed, as Derrida suggests, it is perhaps at its most ubiquitous in mourning. In any case, since it is a psychic but also political space in which power is unavoidably implicated, the question Derrida wants to pose of memory is an ethical one: "[w]hat is said, what is done, what is desired through these words: in memory of…".47 Derrida implies that the bereaved subject has a responsibility—even a duty—to engage this question and thus the impulse towards narrative memorialisation. Not to do so would be to embrace "a movement in which an interiorising idealisation takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the other, the other's visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them".48

For Freud, as I illustrated in Part 1, it is precisely this movement towards incorporating the other that characterises "successful" mourning. For Derrida, however, it represents a psychosocial act of cannibalism. In eating (or attempting to eat) the other, I attempt to reduce her to my-self. Another way to put this is to say that I attempt to assert the omnipotence or "truth" of my narrative; "I am the author and the other is my character" and "what is important is authoring my text".49 In this way, I avoid confronting the limits of my own identity as a subject (my "narrative") and the extent to which these limits are revealed—that is, the extent to which my narrative is undermined— in the sudden corporeal absence of the other. Yet it is not a matter of opposing the act of appropriation/cannibalism by hypothesising some "pure" alternative. The fact is that "[u]pon the death of the other we are given to

169 memory, and thus to interiorisation, since the other, outside us, is now nothing".50 What Derrida suggests is that in order to mourn productively, I must contemplate the significance of the power that the death of my beloved delivers to me—the power to do what I like with her. This power is actually an illusory one, since the other can never be properly subsumed/consumed. Resisting the lure of this illusion is part of "working-through" mourning. On the other hand, to capitulate to it is to settle down in an hallucinated place of sameness; a place in which my reunion with the other comes at the expense of my own capacity for a less narcissistically-experienced subjectivity.

For Derrida, memory—like cannibalism—is as impossible as it is inevitable. It cannot contain the other; it can only preserve the other’s "proper name". To put this another way, memory "can only succeed in supposing the other", in telling one possible story of many.51 It is in this way that the "successful" mourning of Freud’s description fails. What is lost to its logic is precisely what exceeds it: "resistance, mystery [and the] difference between" my-self and the other.52 Penelope Deutscher offers one way of summarising what is at stake in Derrida's account, arguing that in order to imagine an(y) ethics that is invested in alterity rather than sameness, we are obliged to consider the inevitability of being "eating subjects". This way, the ethical question is not "to eat or not to eat?" but rather, "how to eat well?". 53A contemplative shift occurs in this transition. This shift can be expressed alternatively. To return to my earlier metaphor in which mourning is figured as a kind of deconstructive reading, Deutscher’s maxim might translate as: not "to read or not to read", but rather, "how to read well?" If to read well is, to use Erin Soros' definition, to "[bring in] the text knowing that it can never be equal to myself", to mourn productively can be thought of as "bringing up" the other in a way that acknowledges "the resistance and excess [of the other] to [my] memory".54 For Derrida, we come as close to the significance of mourning as we can ever come in our attentiveness to this shift, in our capacity to practise a kind of self-reflexivity, a less (as opposed to non) narcissistic way of relating to the other.55 Ultimately,

170 what we would come to appreciate is that "we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a 'self' is never in itself or identical to itself. This specular reflection never closes on itself".56 Or, we do not "invent" narrative; narrative "invents" us.

Derrida's key insight, therefore, is that mourning can only be "truly" experienced as "a tropological dislocation that precludes any amnesic totalisation of self".57 An extrapolation of this insight might be that to mourn productively is to resist seduction by (a) narrative that aspires towards memorialisation; that is, towards the erection of a psychological monument to what it cannot bring itself to face: the final irreducibility of the other, the illusion of my power. For in embracing "funereal monumentality"58 we "run the risk", suggests Derrida, "of wounding, in our memory, those whom it bears".59 For Derrida what is finally remarkable is the impossibility of a possible mourning and the possibility of an impossible mourning, in other words, the very resistance of mourning to if not interpretation, at least comprehension. Implicit in this account is an acknowledgment of the sorts of defensive, psychic structures that are routinely employed in mourning as codifications of denial against the nightmarish implications of such incomprehension.60

For Derrida, the bereaved subject has an ethical responsibility to confront these structures, to move towards an acknowledgment that "the other resists the closure of [my] interiorising memory".61 Or, as Penelope Deutscher has put it, that "the normal self does not possess integrity any more than the mourning self".62 A productive mourning is in this way one in which the bereaved subject confronts her own alienation, the very unthinkability of the paradox she straddles in the wake of her loss; the inevitability and unliveability, as it were, of her Erinnerung.63 Undeluded by the "truthfulness" of memory, the trace of the other is both present and not-present, mine and not-mine, true and not true. This is what Derrida is evoking when he writes:

171

I do not know if death teaches us anything at all, but this is what we are given to consider by the experience of mourning, which begins with the 'first' trace, that is, 'before' perception, on the eve of meaning, leaving no chance for any innocent desire for truth.64

A productive mourning might therefore look something like what Derrida describes as (a) "thinking memory", that is, "a memory that has done its mourning for the dialectic (which is mourning itself)…".65 "Thinking memory" is labile; "it thinks at boundaries, it thinks the boundary, the limit of interiority".66 It does not settle down in one particular narrative and thereby risk a memorialisation that imprisons the subject as well as the lost other:

true 'mourning' seems to dictate only a tendency: the tendency to accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it, and to enumerate coldly, almost like death itself, those modes of language which, in short, deny the whole rhetoricity of the true.67

Luce Irigaray: felicity

How do I love thee; let me count the ways…68

In more recent years Luce Irigaray’s writing has increasingly taken as its subject the discursive and ethical status of "love" in Western culture. Irigaray’s major thesis to this end is that "love" is yet to be appropriately realised, since the intersubjective realm of human existence has not been adequately imagined. In place of "love", which has been over-articulated to the point of becoming something of an empty signifier, Irigaray argues that what is required is the generation and nurturing of a culture of "felicity". With this expression she is referring to something approaching the classical notion of "Platonic love". Unlike "love" proper, Platonic love is less obsessed with

172 collapsing the space between two subjects. In fact, quite the opposite: Platonic love is "about" experiencing a mutually generative, inter-subjective space.

In Part 2 I introduced Irigaray’s deconstruction of the phrase "I love you" as a way of explaining the narcissistic profligacy of Western culture, that is, its obsession with collapsing intersubjective space. Now I suggest that the discourse of "love" is particularly ubiquitous in elegiac narratives. The loss of a beloved frequently generates in the bereaved subject an almost obsessive need to reiterate, ostensibly for the benefit of the other, the intensity of one's love for her. While this is understandable, particularly as an initial defence against loss, as a contiguous mode of mourning it is potentially non-productive. "I love you"—the high articulation of "love" in our culture—is, for Irigaray, an expression of "auto-affection". In its place she proffers the phrase "I love to you", explaining that:

[t]he 'to' is the site of non-reduction of the person to the object… also a barrier against alienating the other’s freedom in my subjectivity, my world, my language.69

In other words, the utterance of the "to" reflects an acknowledgment that the other is not equal only to my perception/experience of the other, of "a reality that is foreign to me, that will never be mine, but which determines me and with which I am in relation".70 It represents my attempt "to communicate and dialogue with the real other, before constituting you as…a thou that may as well just be another me".71 The "to" enacts, both literally and metaphorically, "a space between";72 that is to say, a certain temporality73 which "[enables] us to remain ourselves and to create an oeuvre with the other".74 It is where we "suspend already actualised action or truth".75 Put simply, to utter "I love to you" is to make an anti-appropriative gesture towards the other.

173 Bereavement is so surprising and painful precisely because the dispossession and subsequent disillusion it entails reveals the limitation of "being in love", that is, the irreducible nature of the "in-between" "me" and "you". I mourn productively when I am able to work-though rather than merely act-out this limitation, thereby moving past the idea of the other as merely "an inverted alter-ego".76 The difference between working-though and acting-out in this context is broadly akin to the difference between the statements "I am not who I (thought I) was without you" and "I am (nothing without) you". The former statement invites contemplation and (re)interpretation—self-reflexivity—while the latter refuses it and substitutes denial, providing no room in which to move. Irigaray is keen to advocate for this difference. In uttering the former statement, "I" make my own path, "an internal one, accompanied by that of [an other] who keeps him or her self outside of me, while pointing the way for me all the same".77 This offers an alternative definition of intimacy that is distinct from the enmeshment that "I love you" implies. In this spirit, an Irigarayan version of productive mourning would be one in which the bereaved subject strives to (re)create perspective. It is perspective that lends lability to meaning, which is to say, produces significance. Instead of endlessly and solipsistically intoning the funereal statement "I love you", the bereaved subject in productive mourning experiments with variations on the theme: I loved you; you loved me; we loved each other; who is the you I loved; who was the I you loved; what did we love; what is love; who were you; who am I? In this way, memory becomes a resource rather than merely a mode of consumption.78

In short, Irigaray argues for a discursively enacted "third dimension" between two subjects. She refers to this dimension in virtuous terms, "[n]ot as truth but as faithfulness to us", a faithfulness expressed by questioning the discourses of "love" and attachment.79 Clearly, the emphasis here is on the two rather than the one, and the iterative mode of dialogue rather than monologue. The issue of what constitutes felicity with regard to one’s relationship with

174 oneself, one’s "other", and to the meeting with the other, is a continuous theme running through Irigaray’s recent work. To simplify at the level of the abstract what is undoubtedly more complex in practice, the fundamental argument Irigaray makes is that a less-narcissistic subjectivity recognises one’s status as a "subject-in-process", that is, as a being who is not and can never be absolute. In productive mourning, "my" questioning would not necessarily arrive at answers, but "I" would be able, eventually, to tolerate the notion that "because you are you, you impose limits upon me. I am whole, perhaps, but not the whole."80 Such an acknowledgment allows for a perception of both my own subjectivity and the subjectivity of the other that transcends facticity and thereby stops before the inappropriable.81

It is important to note that Irigaray is not advocating an encounter which "[bestows] upon the other a capital letter, an excessively quantitative valuation".82 Idealisation of this kind is just as objectifying and unethical as behaviour that seeks, however consciously, to denigrate or obliterate the other.83 Both positions—excessive extrapolation and excessive appropriation— involve erasing the space that separates I from you. Partly to defend against idealistic codification of this sort, Irigaray proposes the figure of "the caress", which she explains as "an awakening of gestures, of perceptions which are at the same time acts, intentions, emotions…attentive to the person who touches and the one who is touched, to the two subjects who touch each other".84 Such an experience cannot manifest where the admiring subject has placed her other-object on a pedestal, where the disdainful subject recoils in abject disgust from the other-object, or where the indifferent subject fails entirely to perceive the presence of the other-object. In each of these cases I tend towards regarding the other in terms of my own ego, thereby reducing both the other and myself to a two-dimensional image, however visible or not. In other words, I avoid the relationship between the two of us.85 An "ethical" relationship is, within the scope of these terms, felicitous: a "sensible" one that transcends specularity. This is a definition that eschews the requirements of

175 the usual discourses of "romantic" and "passionate" love. As I have already pointed out, we are closer, within the Irigarayan context, to the properly understood notion of Platonic love, which may be sexual but is predominantly inclined toward the elevation of the spiritual. "Approaching you along a path which is solely phenomenal", writes Irigaray, "is not enough to establish an ethical relationship between us".86

While this is a position I find in many ways appealing, it is also one to which I suspect we may react, initially, with a somewhat counter-intuitive unease. My sense is that this is because Irigaray's version of ethical intersubjectivity lacks the (melo)drama and fervour which is frequently associated with the concept of "being in love" and which saturates our cultural representations of it. Irigaray is correct, I think, in emphasising the pathology of "love" as we know it in Western culture, characterised as it is by the exercise of enmeshment rather than intimacy, the fantasy of engulfing the other. In contrast to this, Irigaray’s call is for a temperate and indeed temporal model of love. Irigaray is opposing herself to the ideology of monumentalism in making such a call. This situates her work in sympathy with Julia Kristeva’s but, more importantly, it locates it within the context of a range of interventions seeking to analyse (and thus bring into signification) the "unconscious civilisation", to use Raulston Saul's term, that produces and is produced by Western culture. Like Kristeva and other cultural commentators, Irigaray is concerned to return our attention to those processes of significance that are ordinarily de-meaned (repressed) by the symbolic, which stabilises itself with recourse to abstractions like truth, knowledge and morality.87 She says, "the relationships between sensibility and thought, between affective life and the life of culture still remain unelaborated".88 It is no co-incidence that such a culture also promotes the pursuit of individualism as its highest aim, and the narcissistic ethos that supports it. At its command:

176 [t]he subject remains alone with the history of his affections, of his sensations, a history which he remembers, recounts and repeats. [He] does not construct an active temporality, a temporality-with, but becomes reactive, saturated with intensity, without freedom, without space for initiative or creation.89

"[T]he exchange of a meaning between us here and now" must be, for Irigaray, "beyond any exchange of [preconstituted] objects".90 Penelope Deutscher has responded—via Derrida—to this imperative that there is no pure difference between us; that "we could never be subjects with discrete identities who meet others" on these (Irigarayan) terms.91 I am inclined to agree with Deutscher on this point. However, bearing in mind Irigaray’s history of invoking the provisional as strategy, I am equally inclined to accept the rhetorical value of her stance on the basis that one need not argue the capacity for absolute transgression of existing structures to welcome the pulsion towards. While Irigaray may well hyperbolise certain of her presumptions—for example, the evitability of an apodictic "resistance to the cannibal"92—it is worth construing what such a resistance might entail.

It could be argued that Irigaray’s musings on ethics and intersubjectivity cannot be extrapolated to make a point about productive mourning, given that mourning is occasioned by the loss of the other.93 I have already noted that Irigaray invokes the figure of "the caress" as a sort of representation in situ of her proposed "I love to you". She insists that "it is necessary that two subjects agree to the relationship [of the caress] and that the possibility to consent exists".94 In I Love to You, however, Irigaray has the following to say:

I can be in relation (whether of intention, assistance or dependence) with a woman or a man who is not present, who never has been or will be present. I can be determined by a man

177 or a woman who is no longer here, by the historical relevance of what she or her says, or by their oeuvre, for example.95

Irigaray's other, then, is not equivalent to, say, Sartre's; it is "more than facticity, [than] a present objective reality".96 In this context it is worth citing again Irigaray's statement that "[i]t is no longer a question of looking for some thing, of appropriating a beloved, an ideal located outside the self. The path is an internal one".97

There are two questions here: whether a subject can engage in an ethical relation(ship) with the lost other; and, whether a subject can, in the face of the loss of the other, engage an ethical relation(ship) with the other (of) her-self, that is to say, with her "strangeness". This second mode of engagement, if realised, would itself subvert the dimensions of the originary relation(ship). I would argue that the first question cannot be understood without reference to the second. The potential for productive mourning resides in this nexus, wherein I interrogate my notions of love and faithfulness. Am I able to tolerate, however painful, the space that exists between myself and the other, a fact underscored by the other's death? Or is "our" enmeshment so critical to my experience of a viable self that I will do just about any kind of narrative violence to the other in order to preserve my fantasised integrity? This is one of the questions that a reading of Irigaray’s work usefully poses.

Two texts

In order to help picture, as it were, productive mourning, I want to briefly consider by way of a tangent two cultural texts that deal with the topic of mourning. These are a novel, The Quest for Christa T., by Christa Wolf and a memoir, A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. Notably, neither of the texts can be described as proffering a comforting narrative, although in both, the protagonists are seen to reach—if not "arrive at"—a greater tolerance of their

178 loss by the end of the respective narratives. The texts' focus, ultimately, is less on the absence of the beloved than on the fact of this tolerance as an active quality, something creatively wrought.

The Quest for Christa T. consists of a recollection of the life of the character, Christa T., by her unnamed friend. While ostensibly "about" Christa T., however, the theme of the novel is anticipated in Wolf’s epigraph, a quote from Johannes R. Becher: "This coming-to-oneself—what is it?". By the end of the novel it is clear that the "quest for Christa T." has been less important than the narrator’s quest for her self. The narrative revolves around one main question: must this "coming-to-oneself", as Becher calls it, entail "giving up" the lost other? The novel begins with the narrator expressing anxiety about her sense that Christa T is "disappearing". She feels compelled to "protect" her friend in death as she feels she failed to do in life; Christa’s death is perceived as proof of this failure. And yet, the narrator is aware that there is something disingenuous about this "compulsion to make [Christa] stand and be recognised".98 She proclaims that it is "[u]seless to pretend it’s for her sake. Once and for all, she doesn’t need us. So we should be certain of one thing: that it’s for our sake. Because it seems that we need her".99

Thus the novel begins with the narrator’s acute awareness of one of mourning’s most salient myths: that it is done for ("in honour of", "in memory of" etc.) the absent other. At the same time, she recognises the extreme pull of memory, and that she is not immune to it. The novel begins, then, not with a renunciation of memory, but with a self-consciousness about memory and the ulterior motives that its construction embodies. There is no sense throughout the narrative that what we are being presented with is a "true" account of the life of Christa T., even when the narrator quotes from Christa T’s diaries and letters. Rather, there are "only broken phrases".100 "With such a handicap", the narrator asks herself, "wouldn’t it be better to remain silent?" The answer she poses to this question is revealing: "Yes, if one had any choice. But it is Christa T.

179 herself who keeps implicating me".101 What the narrator articulates with this response is that in mourning, memory is a compulsion. There is no fault in this; indeed, "it is our right" as the bereaved, and "[a] reasonable right".102

However, with this right comes a responsibility to acknowledge that I construct memory; that is, I "decide what’s to be talked about and what is not".103 In this way my memory cannot possibly account for or contain the other. If anything, memory is a projection I make to seek to keep my self intact. It thus requires numerous "secret manipulations and evasions".104 The task of mourning, perhaps, is to acknowledge this fact. Memory, ultimately, is a scar. Mourning fails to be productive when the bereaved subject cannot invest in the scar’s mutual referent, the wound. That is, mourning is unproductive when the subject makes a fetish of her scar-memory, supplanting its original impetus. The product becomes more important than the process, the memory more important than the loss that occasioned it. "The goal of this account of Christa T. was to find her—and to lose her again";105 "her time is up, and only our time is left".106 Ultimately, the narrator recognises that the task of mourning is "[t]o become oneself, with all one’s strength".107 The difficulty lies in the shift that this requires—from signifying in the third person to the first, from beginning my sentences with "she" to beginning them with "I". That we must leave the figure "we obstinately insist on when we mourn"108 is the central theme of Wolf's novel.

A Grief Observed constitutes C.S. Lewis' reflections on the death of his wife. Brutal in its disdain for elegy, it shuns the conventional portrait of the mourner. Despite this disdain, the book has been widely read as a meditation on faith, an interpretation befitting of Lewis' reputation as a Christian theologian. I am less interested in reading A Grief Observed from this perspective, since it seems to me that the questions Lewis asks are relevant to the secular analysis of mourning that I have performed thus far. (Lewis himself describes his "notes" as being "about myself, and about H., and about

180 God. In that order."109) That "people get over these things"110 is a notion that initially exerts a hold on Lewis until "a sudden jab of red-hot memory" interrupts and commonsense "vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace".111 Lewis criticises the notion that grief can be rationally apprehended and managed so long as one has adequate "resources" to do so.

But Lewis saves his greatest criticism for what might be described as "sacrosanct" grief. Lewis' awareness of his bereaved preoccupation with himself—his thoughts, suffering and altered relationship to his wife—leads him to come to an understanding of grief as a process in which one's own subjectivity is profoundly undermined. One of his most potent insights is that the bereaved tend to project this crisis onto a mental image of the dead. Lewis suggests, albeit implicitly, that this is a form of violence, both against the other and the self. He describes this tendency as a kind of "self-pity". A panicked reaction to loss, it attempts to keep the other alive by constantly remonstrating over her absence. The effect of this is to install a version of the other that reduces her to a facticity, something to serve the needs of the bereaved. Referring to his wife, Lewis writes of self-pity "even while I'm doing it I know it leads me to misrepresent H. herself. Give that mood its head and in a few minutes I shall have substituted for the real woman a mere doll to be blubbered over".112

Lewis notes that this dwelling in "misrepresentation" is often justified in terms of fidelity to the dead. He describes this justification as a trap, even "an instrument of…tyranny".113 Perspective is renounced; everything proceeds from the point of view of the one who remains. The other becomes an imaginary figure. Her unmistakable otherness—"resistance"—is denied.114 "[T]he image has the…disadvantage that it will do whatever you want…It is a puppet of which you hold the strings".115 This "fatal obedience of the image"116 is disingenuous; ironically, for Lewis, its effect is to make the other even "more dead", "killing [them] a second time".117 It is, in his own words, "like

181 mummification".118 The subject "displaces the spectre of lack onto the figure of the other", thus denying the other a specificity of its own.119 Further, it entraps the bereaved subject in the same sort of non-reality. She "[falls] back to loving [the] past".120 There is no place for her to go on to.

In both A Grief Observed and The Quest for Christa T., what is notable is that the protagonists engage the fact of their bereavement—their loss and its consequences—rather than merely dwell on (and in) the absence of the other. To dwell on/in the other's absence is really to dwell on/in the absence of fulfilment of one's desires. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion notes that "absent fulfilment is experienced as a 'no-thing'". Further, "[t]he emotion aroused by the no-thing is felt as indistinguishable from the 'no-thing'. The emotion is replaced by a 'no-emotion'". In turn, the "no-emotion" represents "the 'place where the present used to be', before all time was annihilated".121 Symbolised thus, the future—somewhere to go on to—becomes an impossibility. What is particularly remarkable about both the texts I have outlined is the self-reflexive capacity of the protagonists. Each is aware that they are in a position of narrative control—that they can, to paraphrase Wolf, do what they like with the other.

In spite of, or perhaps because of this awareness, they do not project their pain onto the other by seeking shelter in her absence. The protagonists are more interested in the fact of (their) pain than in the fact of the other's absence. They are able, therefore, to question the assumptions they bring to (their) experience.122 To again evoke Winnicott, the quality of self-reflexivity— essentially, an acknowledgment of one's own perspective—has a "transitional" capacity. It is this transitional capacity that enables narrative play. "Grief", writes Lewis, "gives life a permanently provisional feeling".123 Rather than flee in terror from the ontological insecurity this sensation produces, both the narrators I have quoted apprehend the sensation to engender creative (re)interpretations. In these texts, "[t]he significance of the traumatic event

182 becomes a trace in self" and this trace "witnesses the significance and survival of an event or otherness".124

In this Part, I have argued that productive mourning is distinguished by its narrative preoccupation, and that this preoccupation is characterised by an anti-elegiac response to loss. This response is quite literally playful in the way it (re)iterates itself, experimenting with perspective and with power— specifically, the power that attends the bereaved subject. The radical import of this practice lies in its capacity to subvert the conventional subject/object dialectic that reinforces the primacy of imperial selfhood, that is, selfhood that is enacted at the expense of the other. In productive mourning, the other's absence is not symbolically exploited. Rather, the act of loss itself is considered an opportunity to question the assumptions the mourner brings to his or her intersubjective experience. Such questioning is itself a subversive act in a culture that actively discourages reflexivity. An engagement with the work of Derrida (on contemplation) and Irigaray (on felicity) is one way of considering the different forms that reflexive questioning might take, while the anti- encomiastic texts of Wolf and Lewis—examples of "traumatic lyricism"— demonstrate this questioning in practice.

The "gift" of productive mourning

I will conclude this Part by considering the idea that productive mourning "gifts" the bereaved subject. I mean this in a utilitarian rather than a sentimental or redemptive sense. Productive mourning, I suggest, equips the bereaved subject with a capacity to not only tolerate abjection, but to make use of it as well.125 Put simply, productive mourning exposes "the lack of intrinsic meaning".126 This is not intended as a nihilistic statement, rather, an

183 acknowledgment that, as Tammy Clewell puts it, "our social forms of mediation are human creations and hence, subject to change".127 The gift of productive mourning, then, is the affirmation of "sublimation without consecration".128 Unconstrained by the usual borders we enact around our existence, the trauma of bereavement can engender within the subject an appreciation of "fulgurating continuity";129 variegated, intransitive gestures or intercessions that insist on reaching "somewhere else". It is within the dimension of this "somewhere else" that our capacity for creativity exists (Freud recognised this in his famous anecdote of the fort-da).

For Hélène Cixous,"[t]here are two writings; one writes books, the other writes living".130 I suggest that productive mourning is an instance of the latter kind. "Writing", Cixous claims, "is learning to die."131 To die is to come face to face with one's constitutive limits, to confront "the staggering vision of the construction we are".132 In "First Names of No-one", Cixous writes that:

it is not a question of making the subject disappear, but of giving it back its divisibility: attacking the ‘chez-soi’ (self-presence) and the ‘pour-soi’ (for itself)…to show the fragility of the center and of the ego’s barriers to prevent the complicity of the ego as master with authority…with repression and its pretences, with property in all its forms.133

We need, according to Cixous, to befriend the abject, not cower before it.134 Consciousness, what we generally pass off as "life", "is always a question of a scene with a picture",135 Cixous insists, but a picture (content) that we generally repress. The experience of abjection can be transformed into an "effort not to obliterate the picture, not to forget",136 but rather:

to desoublier (to unforget), detaire (to unsilence), deterrer (to unbury) se desaveugler (to unblind), se dessourdir (to undeafen), in

184 an endeavour to displace all that has been repressed, incorporated, appropriated.137

A productive mourning could, in this context, be understood as an experience in which abjection is admitted to (narrative) consciousness. This would involve the bereaved subject posing difficult questions of her self.138 These questions might include personal variations on the following: what do we do with our own bodies and the bodies of (our) others when they die? Do we seek their annihilation? Erasure? Immurement?139

Cixous discusses the writing of a number of writers including Tsvetaeva, Lispector and Genet whose texts she views as exemplifying this practice of enquiry. Each, she argues, inhabits his or her text as if they were foreigners within their own familiar.140 That is to say, they do not shy away from the condition of exile, of "being absent while in full presence".141 To purposely situate oneself this way, that is, in diasporic relation not only to the world but also to the self, is, Cixous concludes, an "intolerable" subjection, since it brings one face to face with death, or rather with the desire for death, which for Cixous is only the desire to speak the unsayable.142 One could say that in making such an approach the subject seeks to manifest herself as both spectator and actor at the scene of the "crime" (of death).143 We can extrapolate from this a conceptual version of productive mourning, a version that enacts a recognition that "[e]ach of us, individually and freely, must do the work that consists of rethinking what is your death and my death, which are inseparable."144 And this would require us to:

go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not-knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable….

185

Or, as Kafka—one of Cixous' troupe of favoured writers—puts it: "to the depths, to the depths [one must go]". 145

Like Kristeva, Cixous speaks of poetic language that succeeds in bearing witness to this descent as coming into being via an act of "extreme violence".146 Cixous invokes a variety of terms to describe the movement that is thus effected: "transportation", "traversing", "journeying"147 and so on... always towards a "foreign country",148 toward "the foreigner in ourselves".149 It is in this sense that Cixous speaks of Tsvetaeva, Lispector et al. as "able to write the violent potential in themselves" and, in so doing, revealing "something ineluctably threatened and threatening, which appears as soon as there is a relation with the other".150 They are the writers who "know the extent to which we must bear what is unbearable", who understand that "we need the scene of the crime in order to come to terms with ourselves".151 The "gift" of productive mourning, I would say, is the gift of apprehending this "violent potential" within oneself and (re)producing it in the imaginary register.152 We have seen that Winnicott maintained that creative living, that is to say, the experience of inhabiting a rich inner life, depends upon the cultivation of tolerance for one's "most passionate destructiveness",153 seeking neither to obliterate nor to idolise but rather, to actively acknowledge it. Viewed in this context, the gift of productive mourning is perhaps the gift of knowing "a little how to suffer from suffering and how not to suffer".154 In Part 4 I will consider this “gift” in the context of bereavement by suicide. I will argue that suicide actively resists the imposition of elegiac discourse, thereby situating the mourning subject in symbolic exile from the outset. Suicide bereaved, I suggest, are in this way especially placed to radically embody—and make use of—(their) "dissident subjectivity".

1 Rich, "Natural Resources". 2 Michael White and David Epston (eds.), Experience Contradiction Narrative and Imagination. Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications, 1992. p81. 3 Aragon, quoted by Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p140.

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4 Kristeva, Tales of Love. p380. 5 Kristeva elucidates the concept of the phenotext in Revolution in Poetic Language. 6 Martin Payne, Narrative Therapy: An Introduction for Counsellors. London: Sage Publications, 2000. p102. 7 Andrew Gibson, Towards a postmodern theory of narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. p209. 8 Spargo, op.cit. p59. 9 Peter Homans, Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. p23. 10 Phillips, Darwin’s Worms. p12. 11 Spargo, op.cit. p18. 12 Spargo, op.cit. p68. 13 Spargo, op.cit. p64. 14 Spargo, op.cit. p60. 15 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language. p58-9. 16 See van Deurzen, op.cit. p230. In her essay "Kristeva and Fanon: Revolutionary Violence and Ironic Articulation" (Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonwska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, affect, collectivity: The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), Ewa Plonowska Ziarek describes the practice of ironic articulation as expressing a feminine logic, a "refusal of the fetishistic fixity of symbolic and psychic protections against finitude and the contingency it offers". p69. 17 Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure", Paul Hoover (ed.), Postmodern American Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1994. p655. 18 Julia Stern, "Live Burial and its Discontents: Mourning Becomes Melancholia in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", Homans (ed.), op.cit. p77. 19 Spargo, op.cit. p18. 20 Phillips, Darwin's Worms. p122. 21 Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory. London: Routledge, 1993. p159. 22 Robert Neimeyer, "Searching for the meaning of meaning: Grief therapy and the process of reconstruction". p548. 23 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. p212. 24 LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss". p703. 25 Winnicott, op.cit. p43. 26 Winnicott, op.cit. p50. 27 J. Shotter, quoted by Joady Brennan, "Wittgenstein and personal construct theory", Mace (ed.), op.cit. p81. 28 Winnicott, op.cit. p40. 29 Gibson, op.cit. p209. 30 Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. p67. 31 Holmes, op.cit. p154. 32 Olberding, op.cit. p30. 33 Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life Writing. New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. pxvii-xviii. 34 Olberding, op.cit. p29. 35 Olberding, op.cit. p32. 36 Annabelle Pitkin, "Scandalous Ethics: Infinite Presence with Suffering", Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2001, 8 (5-7). pp.231-246. p234. 37 Madeline Spregnether has argued convincingly that this is Hamlet's fate in her essay "Mourning Shakespeare: My Own Private Hamlet", H. Aram Veeser (ed.), Confessions of the Critics. New York: Routledge, 1996. 38 LaCapra. "Trauma, Absence, Loss". p696; my emphasis. 39 Morris Berman, quoted by Wheway, op.cit. p110-111. 40 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p79. 41 Wolf, op.cit. p4.

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42 Brault and Naas, op.cit. p26. 43 Erin Soros, "Giving Death". differences, 1998, 10 (1). pp.1-29. p2. 44 op.cit. 45 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". Memoires for Paul de Man. p32; original emphasis. 46 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". pp.32-33; my emphasis. 47 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p19. 48 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". pp.34-35. 49 Nealon, op.cit. p42; p47. 50 Derrida, “Mnemosyne”. p34. 51 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p32. 52 Penelope Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)". differences, 1998, 10 (3). pp.159-184. p161. 53 Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)". p.175. 54 Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)". p162. 55 According to Derrida "there is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other". (Quoted by Pleshette DeArmitt, "The Impossible Incorporation of Narcissus: Mourning and Narcissism in Derrida". Philosophy Today, 2000, 44. pp.84-90. p85.) 56 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p28; my emphasis in last line. 57 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p23. 58 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p43, nte 9. 59 Derrida, "The Art of Memoires". Memoires for Paul de Man. p87, nte 2. 60 Such structures tend to create, in the words of Jean-Luc Godard, "not a just image, just an image." (quoted by Lechte, op.cit. p123). 61 Derrida, “Mnemosyne”. p34. 62 Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)". p175. 63 Roughly, "interiorised remembrance". 64 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p31. 65 Derrida, "The Art of Memoires". p65. 66 Derrida, "The Art of Memoires". p71. 67 Derrida, "Mnemosyne". p31. 68 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How do I love thee?", Selected Poems. London: Gramercy, 2001. 69 Irigaray, I Love To You. p110. 70 Irigaray, I Love To You. p56. 71 ibid. 72 Irigaray, I Love To You. p86; my emphasis. 73 Irigaray, I Love To You. p148. 74 ibid. 75 Irigaray, I Love To You. p149. 76 Irigaray, To Be Two. p40. 77 Irigaray, I Love To You. p127. 78 Irigaray, To Be Two. p15. 79 Irigaray, To Be Two. p14. 80 Irigaray, To Be Two. p15. 81 Irigaray, To Be Two. p19. 82 ibid. 83 “To respect you requires that, in my perception of you…I refuse to be only moved by you”. Irigaray, To Be Two. p45; my emphasis. 84 Irigaray, To Be Two. p25.

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85 Irigaray, To Be Two. p40. 86 Irigaray, To Be Two. p46. 87 “Technical knowledge does not only appear in the form of nuclear centres or artificial insemination. It is true to say, however, that it always takes the path of fabrication”. Irigaray, To Be Two. p76. 88 Irigaray, To Be Two. p105. 89 Irigaray, To Be Two. pp.44-5. 90 Irigaray, I Love To You. p45. 91 Deutscher, "Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)", p182; my emphasis. 92 ibid. 93 As I pointed out in my introduction to this thesis, I am concerned with mourning occasioned by the death of the other. 94 Irigaray, To Be Two. p26. 95 Irigaray, I Love To You. p126; my emphasis. 96 Irigaray, To Be Two. p17. 97 Irigaray, I Love To You. p127; my emphasis. 98 Wolf, op.cit. p5. 99 ibid. 100 Wolf, op.cit. p29. 101 Wolf, op.cit. p44. 102 Wolf, op.cit. p45. 103 ibid. 104 Wolf, op.cit. p64. 105 Wolf, op.cit. p98. 106 Wolf, op.cit. p141. 107 Wolf, op.cit. p149. 108 Wolf, op.cit. p185. 109 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, London: Faber & Faber: 1966. p52. 110 Lewis, op.cit. pp.5-6. 111 Lewis, op.cit. p6. 112 ibid; my emphasis 113 Lewis, op.cit. p10. 114 Lewis, op.cit. pp.16-17. 115 Lewis, op.cit. p20. 116 ibid. 117 Lewis, op.cit. p47. 118 Lewis, op.cit. p48. 119 Penelope Deutscher, rehearsing Irigaray, "Irigaray Anxiety: Luce Irigaray and her ethics for improper selves". p8. 120 Lewis, op.cit. p36. 121 Wilfred Bion, Attention and Interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. pp.19-20. 122 Young-Eisendrath, op.cit. p49. 123 Lewis, op.cit. p29. 124 Spargo, op.cit. p31; p32. 125 As suggested by McAffee, op.cit. p117. 126 Van Deurzen, op.cit. p220. 127 Clewell, op.cit. p71. 128 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. p26. 129 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p481. 130 Quoted by Conley, op.cit. p116. 131 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. pp.8-9. 132 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p63. 133 Hélène Cixous, "First Names of No-one", extract reprinted in Susan Sellers (ed.), p29.

189

134 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p118. 135 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p8. 136 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p7. 137 Conley, op.cit. p107. 138 Kelly Oliver has noted that "intimate revolt depends upon this ability to continually question". "Revolt and Forgiveness". Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds.), Revolt, affect, collectivity: The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. p79. 139 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p27. 140 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. pp. 20-1. 141 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p21. 142 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p49. 143 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p53. 144 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. pp. 12-13; my emphasis. 145 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p63. 146 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p48. 147 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p64. 148 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p59. 149 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. pp. 69-70. 150 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p73. 151 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. p45. 152 See Sara Beardsworth, "From Revolution to Revolt Culture". Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (eds). Revolt, affect, collectivity:The unstable boundaries of Kristeva's polis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. p47. 153 Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. p36. 154 Hélène Cixous, "Manna to the Mandelstams to the Mandelas”, extract reprinted in Sellers (ed.), op.cit. p166.

190 Five Women

1. Iris1

Iris knows that death gets under the skin. Death has its way and suddenly you smell like the clothes of old people and most people recoil from that odour, only some get turned on. Some people with a touch of the necrophiliac about them inhale the mouldy musk scent you give off like a wild animal. It makes them hungry. They want to fuck you and they want to hurt you. They piss in your mouth and on your raw heart too. You become wilder. You buck like a terrified horse. You growl like a bitch on heat. You scratch and hiss like an unspayed cat. And death crawls deeper beneath your skin and your lover gnaws it like a rat. Fed, he tosses you aside like garbage. Eaten, you flee.

Mercy

Iris knows that death gets under the skin and turns you inside out. Death has its way and suddenly your insides are on the outside, you're a deformed baby and your mother has left you in the gutter. You're hungry, so hungry, but your mouth is sewn up tight. And your tongue inside your mouth is spastic. And your arms and legs are spastic too. You're a freak, and you know you will die here, and your death is the only thing that can save you. You're the runt of the litter. Someone should have drowned you at birth. But Iris knows that mercy is pitiful cant.

194

Sex

In films I have noticed that newly bereaved women always want sex. Not just any sex, but urgent, clinical sex. There is apparently something about the fragile femme who is only consoled by fucking that excites the male gaze. As for me, I was the Ice Queen. Though I, too, hung in bars and slept in gutters, my thigh-boots stayed zipped up tight. I was intact and precise. Nothing could touch me. I was invincible, and so cold I could turn children to stone. Uptight bitch, cock-tease, frigid. I was all these and then some. Never just a sad lady. Never just a hungry baby.

But oh, how I danced in those bars. I danced like the girl who longed for red shoes and got them. I danced like Iris. Everything that was calm was mine. But the shoes would not stop dancing. They were wound up like a cobra that sees you. They could not listen. They could not stop. Terrible dancing. Like elastic pulling itself in two. Like islands during an earthquake. Like ships colliding and going down. I danced the cursed dance. I danced till dancing did me in.2

Seven times

In the end, I always got drunk like Iris. In one month alone

I died seven times in seven ways letting death give me a sign, letting death place his mark on my forehead, crossed over, crossed over.3

195

Love notes

I wrote love notes to my suffering. These love notes are scars. My wounds were not photographed. I was a victim but there was no crime. My wounds came and went like that. I dressed them in long hair and tight clothes and red lipstick. I wanted them to be noticed. My hair, my breasts, my mouth. All these achieved notice. Not my wounds. Not my woundedness. My raw, pissed-upon heart. Invisible. Un-noticed.

Like a lover obsessed, I composed the same love-note again and again. Believing I would find the right words. This time. But really, this time. I tended my love-notes. I decorated them with curlicues. I scented them with perfume. I stamped my mouth upon them. I offered up my love notes, my scars.

2. Marion4

Marion wears a pink sweater and the sweater excites teenage boys and one teenage boy in particular excites Marion. Naturally they have sex (Marion is a grieving mother). Marion is beautiful. Another thing I have noticed about grieving women in films is they are always beautiful and they are beautiful even when they cry. Marion who is beautiful even when she cries is a monochrome seductress underneath her pink sweater; she fucks like a robot. Her hallway is a shrine of black and white photographs. Her dead sons are art. Marion looks at the dead sons and asks them: If I burn within my iron tomb what is it to you?5

196 For Marion knows the dead are indifferent. They do not care for their own photographs. They do not care even for their own mothers. Armed with this knowledge, who among us can condescend to judge Marion for her choice? Many can, and many will. For mothers should not flaunt their sweaters. They should not have sex with teenage boys, exposing their small daughters to primordial scenes. Mothers should not lie catatonic on the sofa for hours afterward. Above all, especially, a mother should never leave.

The mother is unrocked. There is no cradle. Death lies in her arms like a stone baby.

That day

That day the milk ran out. The baby cried. Marion's arms ached and ached. The ache took root in her heart.

After that she had to go. Is it so hard to understand?

The stone baby speaks

As for me—since you ask—I was born a stone baby. My mother could not rock me. She had no arms. She was born that way; it was not her fault. My mother wanted to rock me more than anything. For this reason it broke her heart when I refused the cradle. But I was a stone baby. I had no need of rocking. I had no need of my crippled mother, her stumps dangling stupidly above me, her breasts dripping milk like tears.

When a stone baby grows up and leaves home its mother's grief is unleashed/it unhinges everything/the world/the stone baby too.

197

3. Julie6

Poor Julie—thirty-three, beautiful, bereft. Death will hammer home to her a distorted cliche. "Faith, love, hope. Of these, the greatest is love". Especially the love of a woman for a faithless man. Who can stand this about Julie? Suddenly I understand why my time with that boyfriend who idolised Kieslowski was doomed. What woman can possibly live up to Julie's example? He called me his "primary muse", a designation that enabled him to have sex with other women. He made me cut my hair like Julie. Urged me to learn French. Required that I phone him several times a day to ask him, "Do you love me? How long have you loved me?" Naturally at this time I ate only cigarettes and frequently appeared consumptive.

All that came to an end when he knocked up his other girlfriend. I was damned if I was going to let her live in my house. That was when I stood up to D. and said enough was enough. I quit the fags and started eating three square meals a day. I told the lot of them to piss off and leave me to compose my own masterpiece. "Baby! How can you do this to me?" he protested, clearly forgetting my name.

I could do it all right. I celebrated by shredding his thesis on Chromatic Musicality in Kieslowski's Cinematic Tripartite. One page at a time. He spread a rumour around the English department that I was a hysterical lesbian and I was happy to oblige.

198

The whole catastrophe

Actually, the worst was yet to come. I was still reading Plath, that and a book about some German bloke called Werther. Everything was about to come crashing down around my ears, a phrase I have always found pleasing. I slummed it in Enmore. Pleasingly, D. dropped out of uni and onto his father's payroll. The two of them shacked up in her parents’ granny flat on the Central Coast, awaiting the prodigal child.

A boy, it was circumcised in the Jewish tradition. They married a short time after. Signed "Julie", I sent a blue-glass chandelier, marked "fragile" and "this end up". With that, a great despair was endured, and into my living room leapt courage, a transfusion from the fire.7

4. Valerie8

Valerie has written a book about her dead daughter. She is unhappy. Her husband John is taciturn in his silence. "Do you think about her very much?", asks Valerie. "Of course I do", says John, "I just don't need to write a book about it". Valerie pauses. "Do you think I did the wrong thing?" John does not answer. Valerie makes a choking sound. "I just wanted…the whole world…to know".

John doesn't need to write a book about it, but he is compelled to visit, over and over again, the same alleyway, the site of his daughter's murder.

With whom are we to empathise in this scenario? Valerie, who spends her days listening to the private distress of others, but needs desperately

199 to render her own public? John, who brings flowers for his dead daughter, but not for his grieving wife? Must we choose between them? The film doesn't suggest so. Yet, on this recent viewing, I find myself polarised by Valerie and John, and agitated because of it.

I feel for Valerie, and yet the image of Valerie's book in the shop window, the face of Eleanor, the dead daughter, on the cover, illuminated under the night-light, not once but perhaps fifty times…the image pricks me and because it pricks me it hurts me and because it hurts me…I feel anger towards Valerie. And because I feel anger towards Valerie, I feel tenderness for John. John who does not need the world to know, who only wants his daughter to know, Eleanor, I come, and Eleanor, I bring flowers.

I want to explore this not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe and I think.9

Just be yourself

It's Saturday afternoon. I watched the film last night. I can't stop thinking about Valerie and John. Valerie, John and Eleanor. The family romance turned marital nightmare.

I don’t think Valerie did the right thing.

And here the essential question first appeared: did I recognise her?10

I recognised her, or rather, myself, needing to write a "book" about it. Myself, wanting the whole world to know. Myself, the sound of my own

200 voice, myself, on the one hand articulate, on the other, wondering how it might feel to drive myself off the road.

Just be yourself. A child, perhaps it was me, a child wrote this. Happy father's day, Dad. Just be yourself.

As if yourself was something you could put on, like a dress or a pair of trousers. I lost myself, once. Like a high-heeled shoe left in a taxi after an all-night bender.

Lost and found

I don't know if I did the right thing. I was trying to find myself. As if finding yourself was as easy as buying a new pair of shoes. I wanted the whole world to know: I had been lost! Oh, for so long had I been away. How docile and stupid I was. How naive. Many people have been lost and some are found. The world is indifferent.

Photographs

The child's face consumes the cover of Valerie's book. It seems gluttonous, obscene. It is too easy. A photograph. It lies. The photograph says, here is a story about Eleanor. It is not a story about Eleanor. Since it does not really exist, I don't know what the book is about. Valerie says, "this wasn't supposed to happen, but it did". Presumably the book is about the in-between. Perhaps it's about the comfortless void that constitutes modern existence. I don't know what the book is about. But the book is not about Eleanor.

201 John's flowers aren't for Eleanor either. He thinks they are, but they are not.

I have few photographs. Those I have are incidental. She does not know she is being photographed. She knows but turns at the last moment and becomes a blur. Her mother held her finger over the flash. I don't know why this is. I don't know why there are so few photographs. There are supposed to be many photographs of people and events. In one's life, on one's walls. Photographs.

What does my body know of photography? 11

My body knows nothing.

Words

In the absence of photographs: words. Valerie's business is words. Valerie transacts words. Other people's. Valerie repeats the words of other people back to them. She tape-records their words. Hoards them. A word-whore.

Words made my childhood. Words grew me up and when I was grown I said to words, words, I will never leave you.

Poetry

Did I do the right thing? I did what I knew. Words were at the heart of things anyway. If I had said this, for instance; if she had said that. If she had found the words to say it. If I had known the words to ask.

202

Valerie and I are not alone. Every second person that is not John wants to see their tragedy writ large.

I dreamed I was writing this with magnetic poetry. There were too few conjunctives and strange people argued with me about the arrangement of the words.

I have noticed

I have noticed that some people respond to death and grief by compulsively reading about it. They read everything they can—the sentimental, the "inspirational", the frankly mawkish; the new age— white light and angels and all that crap; the "how to" books; Freud, Durkheim, Aries. We're trying to get at the truth, but words are a poor substitute. Like carob, when chocolate was what you craved. The truth is you will not find the truth. Only versions of truth. Like photographs.

I have noticed that I do not like photographs. I'm superstitious, like the grandmother I never met. The purpose of photographs is to console those who mourn the dead. Barthes says every photograph is terrible because the return of the dead haunts it. I say, the dead haven't even died yet, much less returned. A photograph is an admission that death will come… a catastrophe that has already occurred.12 Death will come and when death comes only this image will remain to prove you walked the earth.

I see photographs everywhere, like everyone else, nowadays; they come from the world to me, without my asking; they are only 'images'…there are moments when I detest photographs.13

203

Eleanor

Eleanor was always going to be murdered; it's obvious from the photograph on Valerie's book. That pageboy hair, those big brown eyes; how did they not see it coming? Poor Eleanor. Was it the photo the papers ran? My worst anxiety all through adolescence: which disgusting school photograph would my mother choose if a policeman had to ask her, M’am, do you have a recent picture we can use?

Had she lived to be a teenager, Eleanor would have been mortified by her mother's selection. If they really thought about it, everyone would know this. If they really thought about it, they would not participate in Eleanor's humiliation by buying the book. But they don't think of Eleanor.

Language

In the absence of photographs, words. Language is an aperture, a "little hole" through which one looks, limits, frames and perspectivizes.14 I take for myself images made of words. Unlike the photograph, in which nothing can be refused or transformed…15 language moves.

Joan Didion remarks on the spareness of grief literature, beyond "a body of sub-literature, how-to guides for dealing with the condition, some 'practical', some 'inspirational', most of either useless. (Don't drink too much, don’t spend the insurance money redecorating the living room,

204 join a support group)".16 The dearth arises because grief cannot be directly apprehended. It cannot be photographed. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach towards the ineffable.17 The how-to guides have nothing to say about the ineffable, that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object.18

Neither has Valerie anything to say about Eleanor who is not a photograph (I imagine).

I have tried to not pretend to say anything about M., of whom I possess few photographs and fewer facticities. I cannot reproduce my sense of her for you. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the "ordinary". In it, for you, no wound.19

In the how-to guides, no wound. Paradoxically, a premature attempt at suture.

5. Rebecca

As for me, I have begun to discover grey hairs and cellulite and am wholly unperturbed (though the biological clock is a definite issue). Fortunately, no one has died on me for some time. They say the thirties are the new twenties and this is pleasing considering that the best years of my life were thus far the worst.

There are many things I still do not know about M., including, was the abomination known as devon a contributing factor to her decision to become a vegetarian also? As time passes it is the mundane stuff of her

205 life that interests me. If a suicide note was to miraculously appear tomorrow, it would not shed light where I would wish it to fall.

Mourning dove

A decade of death has generated some interesting sidebars. In addition to reading, baking and needlepoint I can now add the mourning dove to my mental list of "interests and hobbies". At times I actually regret studying literature rather than ornithology. The mourning dove is abundant not only in North America but also in library catalogues everywhere. I like to recite my list of "cool facts" about the mourning dove inside my head when the anxiety produced by thinking about death threatens to overwhelm me. I like to imagine I am actually writing a dissertation about the mourning dove at such moments. I also like to experiment with the words "mourning dove" on my tongue. "Gournmin vode!" "Evod romningu!" "Oved mingourn!". "Ocoo-OOH, Ooo-Ooo-OooO!".

I can tell you the mourning dove is a medium-sized bird with a small head and a long, pointed tail. I know it weighs between 86 -170 grams and has a wingspan of 37-45 centimetres. But though I have read and reread the scientific literature on the mourning dove, nowhere can I find an answer to the question: does the mourning dove actually mourn?

Aloha

"Aloha" can mean hello or goodbye. I do not remember bidding M. hello but I wish I could forget saying goodbye. (My regret at having no trinket to accompany her return to the earth; the sudden terrible image of

206 worms gnawing; Eleanor pulling me back from the grave after a respectable moment had elapsed).

The etymological root of "goodbye" is the expression "God be with you". M. believed in Fenders played by girls, the restorative power of ice cream, and the presence of vulvic imagery in the poems of Emily Dickinson. I do not know if she believed in God.

No byes/no aloha Gone with/a rock promoter.20

Dinner party

Over seared asparagus he asks if you would mind me writing about you like this. He is a paediatric intern who is allergic to shellfish and cheese. Do I like him less than the thin-lipped GP who glared at me suspiciously before scratching permission for three days' bereavement leave on his medical pad? How to decide? So many experts, so much contempt to divide between them.

Eight people died by suicide in Australian hospitals in 2005, I say, proving not incompetence or under-funding by government, rather, the resourcefulness of those who are determined to die. The paediatric intern asks me to pass the butter.

TV Show

Last night I watched a television show. In it a small girl died. It was too real. I have never seen grief acted so real. It was horrible. It was not

207 entertaining. I needed a drink after that. I needed to sit and cry. Mourning something that wasn't even real, only it was real, because it happens, even though it isn't meant to happen, and it could happen, you never know when it's going to happen.

Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.21

You sit down to watch television and life changes.

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.22

Finally

Finally, nothing much. No birds, women or poetry. No photographs.

I saw clearly that I was concerned…with the impulses of an overready subjectivity, inadequate as soon as articulated…23 I saw clearly there was no right thing. I stood apart, untroubled, knowing that it can happen that I am observed without knowing it…24

1 Carine Adler (dir), Under the Skin (film). Dendy Films, 1997. 2 After Anne Sexton, "The Red Shoes". The Complete Poems. 3 Anne Sexton, "The Death Baby". The Complete Poems. 4 Tod Williams (dir), The Door in the Floor (film). Focus Features, 2004. 5 Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies. London: Virago, 1995. p112. 6 Krzysztof Kieslowski (dir), Three Colours: Blue (film). New Vision Film, 1993. 7 After Anne Sexton, "Courage". The Complete Poems. 8 Ray Lawrence (dir), Lantana (film). Palace, 2001. 9 After Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000. p.21. 10 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p.65. 11 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p9.

208

12 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p96. 13 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p16. 14 After Barthes, Camera Lucida. pp.10-11. 15 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p91. 16 Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. London: Fourth Estate, 2005. p44. 17 Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture in Literature 1993. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. p21. 18 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p15. 19 After Barthes, Camera Lucida. p73. 20 The Breeders, "No Aloha", Last Splash. 21 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. p.3. 22 Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking. p3. 23 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p.18. 24 Barthes, Camera Lucida. p10.

209 Part 4: "The reverse of love's intention":1 mourning after suicide

______

…we are, as it were, marked for life, and that mark is insuperable, irrecoverable. It becomes the condition by which life is risked, by which the questions of whether one can move, and with whom, and in what way, are framed and incited by the irreversibility of loss itself.2

The act of suicide…can never be viewed with indifference.3

In this final Part, I turn my attention to mourning in the context of bereavement by suicide. Two main factors underlie this turn. Firstly, although I have experienced a variety of bereavements, it is my bereavement by suicide that has most directly prompted the reflections that are distilled in this thesis. That I have been interested in developing a theory about the productivity of mourning, and that I identify my most significant4 experience of mourning as one occasioned by a suicide, is indicative of a certain epistemological link, one I wish to consciously question. For the reason I set out in the Introduction— that is, the desirability of opening up for inspection the relationship between "author-ity" and "knowledge"—I consider this questioning to be both an intellectually and ethically important task. Secondly, I am motivated by a desire to explicitly recuperate suicide bereavement, to consider its phenomenology in a way that does not focus only on the deleterious aspect. I am interested in thinking about the experience of suicide bereavement in a way that recognises the particular vulnerability it confers on those affected, but more significantly, its potential productivity. I want to suggest that to be

210 bereaved by suicide is ultimately to be thrown into a state of radical estrangement and that while this posits suicide bereaved5 as subjects "at risk", it also potentially makes them creative, risk-taking subjects. In this way I hope to contribute to a more complex conceptualisation of the suicide bereaved's "special scar".6

I.

A traumatic event

Bereavement by suicide is a traumatic event. Like other traumatic events, its effects are "ubiquitous and labile".7 E.K Rynearson has described traumatic-death survivor reactions as being organised around three key motifs: violence, volition and victimisation.8 In my interpretation of this tripartite, violence is perpetrated, the subject's volition is neutered, and on both counts she is victimised. The trauma of suicide bereavement is thematically unique in that its violence largely consists of the effective (if unintentional) rejection of the bereaved subject by the beloved; suicide has been described as "the ultimate fuck-you". Put another way, suicide explodes the romance of the self-other dialectic. By choosing (or by appearing to choose) to take mortal leave of me, the beloved who suicides commits a fundamental betrayal. Suddenly, my knowledge of the other—as benevolent, as someone who held me in regard—appears illusory. This causes me to be estranged from the other. Further, if I do not, now, know the other, I must concede that I no longer know myself, since how I knew myself was inextricably bound with my knowledge of the other. I am plunged into an estrangement of a different kind, that of self-alienation. In this way, it can be said that suicide bereavement involves the sensation of living through one's own death—the cessation of one's understanding of self and self-in-world insofar as that understanding has been defined by the relinquished relationship.9

211 This sensation renders the subject profoundly unmoored. In the context of this claim, it is interesting to consider the language that suicide bereaved use to describe their experience. Moira Farr, whose lover suicided, likens hers to a "cataclysm", writing that "[t]he day he died, it was as though the tectonic plates of my entire existence shifted".10 Kathleen Finneran describes how after the suicide of her brother, "I was the darkest, most diminished of souls, a messenger of agony, coming to announce the end of the world as I knew it…".11 Antonella Gambotto describes how the shock of her brother's suicide "was [like] a decapitation. My own private World Trade Center Attack. With one telephone call, the landscape of my life was forever altered. I didn't have to stand on my head. The world turned upside-down instead." 12 Each individual quoted seems to testify to the existence of what Robyn Ferrell has called "the psychical equivalent of earthquake and flood".13 I suggest that this equivalence leads the suicide bereaved into deeply abject territory, illuminating another common theme arising in the language used by suicide bereaved. Gambotto describes feeling "obliterated, or so it seemed; all that could be seen of me was my corona and plumes of ejecta".14 Louise Woodstock, whose mother suicided, recalls how she "reeked with the pain of [her mother's] suicide. It was spilling out of every pore, and everyone sensing it on me would recoil."15 In my own journal, I recorded dreams following my bereavement in which rotting corpses, bodily fluids and a terrifying lack of distinction between the living and the dead permeated my unconscious. In one such dream, a faceless woman bearing an enormous hypodermic needle perforated my body. Unmoved by this content, I commented in my journal the following morning: "it's too late. I've already leaked out of myself anyway". Such metaphorical references to corporeal tenuity underscore the abjectification that characterises the experience of suicide bereavement.

To experience one's existence in this deeply abject way is to open the door to being stigmatised by others. Suicide bereaved often describe sensing that others regard their abjection as contagious. The projection of this fear

212 engenders a further estrangement for the suicide bereaved—this time, from the world around them. "Banished to the peripheries of existence",16 writes Antonella Gambotto, "we all feel freakish".17 In this way, suicide bereaved are rendered margin-dwellers. This liminality poses risk. One possibility is that the individual bereaved by suicide will settle down permanently in her state of exile, interminably contemplating the other's betrayal and its catastrophic consequence for her self. At the same time, she assumes the mantle of guilt. Obsessed by the question of reparation, the suicide bereaved performs her exile as an act of fidelity to the beloved, a memorial to what (or, more properly, who) has been lost. Her grief emerges affectively, without sublimation. To an extent, this scenario can be seen as the "default" response to suicide bereavement (or indeed, to any trauma). Trauma induces a form of victimisation in which it is tempting to divest oneself of responsibility18 for undertaking the "exquisitely difficult tasks"19 it demands.

Chief among these, I suggest, is the necessity of "mourning the death of the self"20 and then (re)constituting it with an attentiveness to its fundamental impermanence as a construct. It is perhaps far more intuitive to boundlessly suffer the awful lack wrought by one's terrible loss. For, the potentially paralysing impact of bereavement by suicide cannot be underestimated. Jann Fielden reports that, in her research, "survivors talked about being so disabled…in the initial period after their loved one's death that they only managed to just survive or exist day to day".21 Such disability would seem to leave over little energy for anything approaching existential interrogation. And yet people do engage in this interrogation, I suggest, in ways that enable them to become risk-taking subjects. To do so requires the self-reflexive, somewhat ironic occupation of the liminal. In order to explain this further, it is necessary to first consider in more detail the cultural reception of suicide and how it uniquely positions the bereaved subject.

The cultural reception of suicide

213

Suicide may (or may not) be painless, as a button-pin I once spotted testified, but it is certainly not comfortably countenanced in quotidian terms. Although suicide may no longer be overtly regarded by most secular Westerners as a crime against the state or an abomination against God, it continues to be met with profound unease.22 In order to understand the specificity of suicide bereavement, we need to consider the source of this unease. Collectively, we are both fascinated and fearful of the phenomenon of suicide, and this ambivalence renders us incapable of directly apprehending it. Instead, suicide irrupts as various abstract and perverse nuances that together have the effect of culturally over-determining it, saturating it with meaning. Suicide, for instance, is a definitive "social problem". It is also, variously, tragic, preventable, desperate, cowardly, transcendent, selfish, premature, irrational, romantic, fated and so on. Finally, as Antonella Gambotto points out, suicide is a terrific marketing concept:

[t]he combination of plain soda water with any number of different sodas was [once] known as a Suicide. It was thus possible to order a Coke/Lemonade Suicide, a Pepsi/Sprite Suicide, or a Suicide with Everything. Suicide is also a game of spades […] Chocolate Suicide Cakes are baked at 350 degrees […] Siegfried Sassoon wrote Suicide in the Trenches, and Javert's Suicide is sung in the stage production of Les Miserables. Ozzy Osbourne released Suicide Solution on vinyl, and Suicidal Tendencies was a band. The Virgin Suicides is a movie directed by Sofia Coppola and a novel written by Jeffrey Eugenides.23

(At the time of compiling her list, Gambotto was apparently unaware of the television advertisement in which an allergen threatens to kill itself, citing the fact that it feels its existence has been rendered worthless by the introduction into the marketplace of a new brand of anti-histamine.)24

214

These banal utterances fail to conceal the apostrophic essence of suicide. Consider how suicide is articulated in all of the above ways, and contrast this with the fact that, overwhelmingly, we do not know what to say to someone whose loved one has just suicided. Note how rare it is for obituaries or funeral sermons to refer to the cause of death of suicides. Suicides do not die "peacefully" or "after a courageous battle". In many families, they die of farm accidents or brain aneurisms rather than self-inflicted gunshot wounds or prescription-drug overdoses. In celebrity circles, suicides even die of autoerotic asphyxiation or in conspiracy-laden circumstances rather than at their own hands.25 Suicide, it seems, is essentially defined by its "normlessness".26 To put it another way, it is received as something profoundly inordinate, that is, as something which disrupts the carefully contrived mise- en-scene of our collectively apperceived existence. Mary Fraser makes the point that "the way people respond to an act such as suicide is based on collective values which in turn rest upon the social structure".27 Along these lines, Robert Kastenbaum has argued that suicide is feared and resented because it transfers power from society to the individual. Kastenbaum suggests that "it is not the death that disturbs. It is the affront, the threat, the act of assertion, the act of defiance, the act of self-empowerment."28 I disagree with this analysis, largely because I believe that suicide effects precisely the opposite—a transfer of power from the individual to the society (I will return to this assertion in a moment). However, like Kastenbaum, I think the activity of suicide signifies something threatening; in my view, this consists of the failure to achieve conclusion in spite of embodying the ultimate attempt to do so.

In this way, I suggest, suicide embodies a paradox. Whilst inexorably performing the "urge for conclusion"29 that subtends the symbolic, it also invites interminable speculation and interpretation. Earlier, I argued that contemporary culture is organised around the normative discourse of identity. I critiqued this discourse as being heavily invested in the perpetuation of a

215 particular narrative approach to subjectivity, one that produces a scenery (or "meaning") that does not admit gaps or uncertainties of any kind. Read as an act of volition, suicide seems to perform the ultimate attempt at having "the last word". The performance can be interpreted as constituting the ultimate disavowal of "unfinished business", the most crude excoriation of ambivalence. In this way, it appears to endorse the "ethic of control"30 that produces and is produced by the normative discourse of identity. I am not suggesting that the individual suicidal subject is intentionally impelled towards such an affirmation; most suicides, it seems reasonable to assume, are merely desperate to terminate their unbearable suffering. Yet despite its irreducible intimacy, suicide does not "belong", in the event, to the individual who commits it. Arguably, no death does, but no death renders itself more seemingly democratic than suicide. Suicide is a veritable free-for-all, inviting commentary by the proverbial everyman.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the scene of the celebrity suicide. Reflecting on the extraordinary way in which society feels free to enact conclusive pronouncements about the motives, and (il)legitimacy thereof, of individuals who commit suicide, Pat Holt recalls an article in The Times, in which the author self-righteously compares the "dignity" of Virgina Woolf's suicide with the "senseless and unnecessary, even selfish" nature of Sylvia Plath's.31 Yet it is not only at such rarefied scenes that on-lookers hover, opining like pompous amateur detectives. The common, everyday suicide also inspires their crude sleuthing. Invariably, the pronouncements that result are too simple: she did it because her husband had an extramarital affair; he did it because he couldn't get a job and his father beat him as a child; she had a chemical imbalance; he couldn't live without his wife and kids. Somehow, this failure to get at "the truth" is collectively acknowledged, and, I suggest, resented. Suicide escapes all attempts to pacify its inherent chaos, even as it invites them. It fails to achieve its objective and simultaneously renders that objective dubious, even absurd. I suggest that this goes a long way towards explaining why suicide

216 generates such collective unease. This unease produces certain effects for subjects who are bereaved by suicide, something that is commonly overlooked.

Suicide bereavement and the "enticement to narrate"

Constance Barlow and Helen Morrison have noted that, for the most part, an intense cultural focus on the suicidal subject and on suicide prevention has occluded the experiences of suicide bereaved.32 To the extent that suicide bereaved are socially perceived, research has indicated that they tend to be viewed comparatively—as less likeable, more blame-worthy and more psychologically disturbed than non-suicidally bereaved individuals.33 Some researchers and clinicians have found that suicide bereaved are indeed more likely to present with problematic antecedent symptomatology34 and to develop "pathological" or "complicated" grief responses.35 Suicide bereaved are thought, for instance, to "show higher levels of feelings of guilt, blame and responsibility for the death" and "experience heightened feelings of rejection or abandonment by the loved one, along with anger at the deceased".36 The point is that, overwhelmingly, negative meaning has been conferred on suicide bereaved, leading, among other things, to experiences of disenfranchised grief. It is only comparatively recently that attempts to investigate the meaningfulness of suicide bereavement in ways that are not confined to this impoverished (and impoverishing) context have emerged. One of the most important contributions to this work is Louise Woodstock's essay "Hide and Seek: The Paradox of Documenting a Suicide". In it, Woodstock tells of the struggle to mourn her mother, who died by suicide. She figures this struggle in terms that remark on the "consumerism of loss" that pervades Western culture. Woodstock suggests that suicide bereaved experience their bereavement in a

217 way that simultaneously subjects them to this consumerism and places them outside it. It is this idea that I now wish to take up and explore.

Referring to what she calls the "enticement to narrate",37 Woodstock suggests that we are encouraged to "consume" our losses by telling stories about them in ways that conform to certain cultural requirements, an idea I took up in Part 3. The assumption that subtends it is located in the early Freudian view that to be bereaved is to suffer a wound to the ego that must be sutured without delay if the subject is to return to "normal" functioning. The contemporary equivalence of this view is that bereavement fundamentally compromises identity. The instrument of reparation, as it were, is seen to be symbolic representation. Thus, the enticement to narrate is based on the belief that narration is a poultice, a means to recovery; the subject "is healed by transforming her traumatic experience into a coherent narrative".38 This belief "implies that traumatic experience cannot be 'buried' in the…forgotten past, but returns to haunt the [subject] until the story is told and the ghost laid to rest. The narrativisation of trauma is [thus] equated with a form of burial."39 Woodstock explains how "the almost absolute social belief in the therapeutic and liberatory benefits of personal narrative generates a social expectation that [she] speak".40 The cultural requirements of narration to which Woodstock draws attention are essentially those that we traditionally associate with "a good story". A "good story" has a beginning, middle and an end. It relates a selection of incidents or events in a way that suggests a rational relationship between them. It creates tension, but resolves it in the form of a denouement. A "good story" implies an extradiegetic narrator who ensures that its elements "hang" together. Finally, a "good story" is one that induces cartharsis.

Attempts to "fix" the meaning of a suicide with recourse to the sorts of conventional logical constructions I mimicked earlier (the "s/he did it because…" statements) are essentially attempts to prepare the event for story telling. Invariably, however, what they demonstrate is that suicide cannot be

218 absorbed into an account of subjectivity. Rather, suicide overwhelms any such account, such that everything else comes to be filtered through its lens. No other death so determines how a life is retrospectively interpreted. A person who dies of suicide is perennially a person who suicided rather than, for instance, a writer, a mother, a nurse, an aunt or a doctor who happened to die. This is because suicide attracts such intense speculation. The speculation— which is driven by anxiety about the potentially irrational nature of the death—is oppressive to the bereaved because it frames their relation to the lost other in a way that is pre-determined and extraordinarily constrictive. The frame is retrospective—eliding what went before the suicide—and works to deny the bereaved subject the opportunity to inflect her relationship with the deceased with other kinds of significance. There are two things in particular to note about this. In the first place, attempts to fix the meaning of the suicide come seemingly from everywhere and can cause the bereaved subject to feel disenfranchised of her own, deeply personal loss. She is relegated to being just another spectator, as it were. At the same time, she is singled out for interrogation on the premise that she may hold special knowledge that could settle, once and for all, the meaning of the suicide. This strange confluence of alienation and fixation is, as Louise Woodstock suggests, one of the most un- nerving aspects of bereavement by suicide.

The crucial point to be made, however, is that suicide bereaved are unable to rise to the occasion, so to speak, of producing a "good story". As I have already suggested, this is precisely because suicide frustrates attempts to pacify its inherent chaos, that is, to prepare it for story telling. The reasons why suicide troubles the convention of the "good story" are quite straightforward. In the first place, suicide upsets the diegetic triumvirate of beginning, middle and end by over-emphasising one component to the exclusion of others: the end. Yet the "end" of suicide is never satisfying. The narrator has no control over it; it may or may not "make sense" in relation to the events that led up to it. Suicide always seems too sudden, too premature; it leaves too many

219 elements "truncated, unresolved". Thus, stories about suicide are not cathartic; in Woodstock's words, they invariably "leave teller and listener alike nearing the precipice".41 In this way, suicide does not easily lend itself to the elegiac imperative of culturally sanctified mourning.

In Part 3 I described elegy in terms of three major characteristics: claiming to know the other; believing that this knowledge can be represented; and accepting that representation as compensation for the loss of the other, that is, as a means of re-establishing the integrity of the self. Elegy therefore depends on a certain kind of performative subject. Suicide does not equip those it bereaves to take up this subject position because it undermines elegy's first characteristic: the claim to know the other. It tears asunder the survivor's existing assumptions about the other and the relationship they share. Moreover, a generic "other", both familiar and unrecognisable, is installed in place of the resulting aporia. This other is defined with recourse to the prevailing cultural myths about suicide and the "type" of person who commits it.42 In this way, suicide renders unnecessary and impossible the interpretative function of the bereaved subject. If elegy can be viewed as a cannibalistic gesture, suicide, one might say, comes pre-digested. There is no doubt that this does posthumous violence to the suicidal subject. Considerably less thought has been given to the effect on those who are bereaved by suicide.

The inability of the suicide bereaved to "tell a good story" casts them— at least in their bereaved incarnation—outside what Julia Kristeva calls "the net of representation".43 They are unable to symbolically recuperate their abjection in a way that is considered culturally satisfactory. Even the discourse of self-excoriating guilt fails to please—it inevitably "goes nowhere". Following Woodstock's lead, I suggest that it is the failure of the suicide bereaved to deliver the narrative goods, so to speak, which marks them with deviance. In a circular effect, the resulting shame and stigma "generates a countervailing social pressure to remain silent".44 Silence, in turn, can be interpreted in terms

220 that at best construe wilful perversity, at worst, guilty complicity. Yet as Woodstock points out, attempting "to speak, picture or dramatize one's experience with suicide" in a way that remarks on one's narrative dilemma tends to "function simply to remind others"45 of one's deviant status. In this way, suicide bereaved are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Yet, herein lies a crucial possibility: the opportunity to generate perspective. Observing the way in which she frustrates the ever proliferating and dispersing cultural imperative to "tell a (good) story", the suicide bereaved individual may be more likely to reflect on the coercive and potentially oppressive nature of the symbolic, or, as Moira Farr evocatively describes it, " the degree to which our lives are structured as though by the design of an anal-retentive efficiency expert, called into the factory to maximise production".46

Perspective

Self help books about grieving often stress the need to eventually "regain perspective", by which their authors seem to mean relocating one's loss from the centre to the periphery of one's perception. Patently, this is not what I am referring to when I say that suicide bereavement intensifies the opportunity to generate perspective. Nor am I gesturing towards the cliche that insists tragedy foregrounds "the truly important things in life". Rather, by perspective, I am referring to what Sharon D. Welch has termed in another context "a transformative ethic—an ethic of risk".47 An ethic of risk is transversal to the "ethic of control" that subtends the normative discourse of identity, which in turn drives the "enticement to narrate". At the heart of an ethic of risk, then, is an affirmation of the specific and the partial—of particularity—against the prevailing conventions of "meaning". To have perspective is to acknowledge the fundamental limitations of meaning as a cipher for the experience of subjectivity. It is to attest to the ethical significance of "failed experience"—that is, experience which is unable to be adequately

221 cathected by discursive means.48 For, ultimately, "failed experience" testifies to the fallacy of totality, to the utter elusiveness of the other.49

Suicide bereaved become risk-taking subjects when they actively concede this, thereby performing an act of resistance within a culture that depends upon the prohibition of the processural foundations of its symbolic. To concede the fallacy of totality and the elusiveness of the other, however, is not necessarily to reject one's implication in the symbolic—transgression of which is, in any case, impossible. Rather, the concession invites the practice of "discursion"—the provisional occupation of narrative structures and the self- conscious articulation within them of personal and cultural conflicts around remembering and forgetting, disclosing and refusing to disclose, and so on. Discursion, in other words, enacts the "state of continuous revolution" to which our lives are subject.50 I concluded Part 3 by suggesting that productive mourning "gifts" the bereaved subject by enabling her to make productive use of abjection. Essentially, this is what the practice of discursion embodies.

II.

I wake; the bed is spinning. Sweat peels around my torso. I am afraid to move. Outside my window, a bird inexplicably chirps. My mouth is dry—was I drinking last night? I haven't had a hangover in years. It's a workday today. Am I actually awake? It hits me like—but the metaphor escapes me. I cover my ears, and when that doesn't work, I scream. The cat flees the room. Momentarily, the terror abates. I stumble from my bed, legs spastic, vision blurred. In the kitchen there is only a used peppermint teabag drying on the edge of the sink. I pause momentarily to reflect that I have apparently not descended into mid- week alcoholism after all. The noise starts again suddenly, provoked by the humming fridge. If I had a kitchen table I would crawl beneath it. Instead I

222 panic, call my sister. My brother-in-law answers. I say I am fine. There is a muffling on the other hand while he calls to her. Hello, I say, can you hear me? She is there; the milky breath of the baby on her hip is audible. I'm shaking now, spluttering indecipherable words. My sister says, "stop". I am unsure if this is directed at me or one of her hovering children, but it doesn't matter, it works. I adopt a normal speaking voice. I had a bad dream, I say. She prises the details from me. I tell her, she soothes me. We agree on a plan. I slice a pear and eat it. I brush my teeth. I shower and dress. I pull the door behind me. I'm halfway to the station when the noise starts up again. Bile rises in my throat. I dreamed I had to euthanase M. by drilling a hole in her head. Then I learned it was my turn.

§

Before the dream I'd spun by rote for years the same line at the pub, at dinner parties, at conference morning teas. It went like this: my interlocutor says it must be difficult writing about something so ______(insert: deep, traumatic, depressing, full on, intense, personal). I responded that it was really no different from writing about______(insert: the reproductive behaviour of fruit flies, fast neutron generation, hygrometry, the mosaic as an anti-fascist device in pre-war Italy). This was meant to be a shorthand way of implying that I was suitably postulatory and dispassionate about my subject. I'm not sure it worked, but I dislike complete strangers attempting to psychoanalyse my motives and their products. It was also—in those days, at least—more or less true. By day I talked to the mentally ill and wrote about intellectually disabled prisoners, the homeless and the victims of domestic homicide. Come night there was little energy for immersion in anything that approximates feeling.

It went on like that for ages. Then I embarked on the second-to-last- hurrah. I was so confident about "the suicide piece" that I was certain I'd flick it off in a matter of weeks. It came easily at first; I congratulated myself on my

223 efficiency. Then the symptoms started creeping up on me like a bad sunburn: inconsequential, merely a touch of it—then a minor irritation—and finally full- blown paralysis. I was burning up but shivering. I couldn't move but I was desperate to run. I didn't know what was happening to me — my hair was falling out, my eyes wept involuntarily at all hours of day and night, strange lumps formed randomly beneath my skin. I was nauseous all the time. My teeth hurt. At work I was always falling up the stairs, laughing at the wrong moment in meetings, snapping at the irritatingly guileless intern. Every day the skin on the inside of my elbows started to itch mercilessly by lunchtime.

There were blood tests and all manner of prodding and poking when I finally confessed all to my doctor. She was perplexed by the results and thought maybe the problem was hormonal. It wasn't that. It wasn't lupus, thyroid, allergies, cancer, anaemia or diabetes. My doctor asked if I was under more stress than usual. Stress? I replied, more stridently than necessary. Stress is being a refugee in offshore detention. Your seven-day-old baby diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Having paranoid schizophrenia and being locked in your prison cell 23 hours a day. My doctor said that I seemed angry. I knew what she was trying to get at—that my symptoms were psychosomatic. I was waiting for the inevitable referral to the psychologist when she asked if I was keeping up my yoga and suggested I take a week off work; she'd write me a certificate. She was so sympathetic I wanted to slap her. A vegetarian for 15 years, that night I devoured a quarter chicken. I was in some sort of dissociated state as I ripped at the white flesh and smeared mouthfuls with stuffing. Afterwards I was sick.

§

I was trawling the web one day for references to Kathleen Finneran, whose book The Tender Land I had recently finished reading. It stunned me, and I was hungry for information about its creator. Mostly I wanted to know what she looks like (why is that?). I stumbled across the following item.

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Bookgroup guide for Kathleen Finneran's The Tender Land

1. It is commonly understood that there are five stages of grieving: denial, shock and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; and, finally, acceptance. Does Kathleen go through all of these stages in the course of The Tender Land?

I'm picturing the bookgroup members on a modular sofa. The host gets things going with question 1. The members flip through their plastic- protected copies of this morbid memoir (Anne's selection—the others had hesitated). Like spotty adolescents cramming for an exam, they have carefully underlined relevant passages for quotation. Kathleen (thinks Helen) seems to be all over the shop. As evidence, she produces a paragraph from Chapter 2, and another from Chapter 9 that illustrates her "backsliding". Janette thinks that Kathleen has never even got past stage 1—the book does end, after all, with the strange assertion that "we are all, everyone of us, alive". Heather begs to differ—that same last paragraph includes a reference to the moon being new—this symbol is surely indicative of hope and redemption, strongly suggesting that Kathleen has "integrated" her tragedy.

I imagine myself, ghost-like, hovering above the room. I am not hungry for the cheese and crackers, nor thirsty for the wine. I care not whether Kathleen has passed the grief-test with flying colours. Only that twenty years ago a fifteen- year-old boy died, and the end of the world descended on his sister in a second, like a hail storm in the midst of summer.

2. What is the effect of having the details of Sean's death doled out sparingly throughout the book? Would the details of his suicide seem more or less shocking if they were revealed the first time his death was mentioned?

225

Pity the poor reader, whose voyeuristic fantasies are not satisfied right off the mark. Pity Kathleen's choice to not reduce the death of her brother to the first five minutes of an episode of Law and Order. Shame on her decision to withhold the details of that death from her readers, as if they were sweeties to be had only after all the vegetables are eaten. Better to let them feast before breakfast like gluttonous children, then complain loudly of stomach ache.

3. Is it possible, do you think, that something trivial could cause someone to commit suicide? Do you think the reasons for suicide that Sean offers in his letter are plausible? Evidently, it is possible that someone could actually pose such stupid questions. It's hard to decide whether to hate or pity that person. The arrogance and righteousness implicit in the second question tips me over to the side of hate. A strong word, hate. Banned in the household of some friends-with-children I know. Loaded words (trivial, plausible). Discharged like a gun, stupidly misfired.

4. Do you feel that, by the end of the book, Kathleen has been able to let go of Sean? Why or why not?

Oh, how we'd like to say yes. To watch Kathleen on Oprah waxing lyrically about how cathartic the book was to write, how gruelling, yet how worthwhile, to have revisited those demons from her past. How this book is her "tribute" to Sean, without whom (etc.), the silver lining of that dark cloud, that tragic event: suicide. What evidence of human resilience this is—what endurance through the dark night of the soul. Or: why is she still going on about this thing 20 years after it happened? Was there something "un-natural" about her relationship with her brother? Isn't it unhealthy to be so focused on the past? Shouldn't she—let's face it—move on and get a life?

226 Then I found myself yelling at the computer monitor. Why was I suddenly filled with inchoate rage? §

I was sufficiently disturbed by my response to the book group incident to begin to interrogate the possible reasons for it. The book group concept—so bourgeois and contrived—has always pissed me off. But I knew that wasn't it. It's difficult for me to convey the opaqueness that confronted me as I tried to work it out for myself. It seems so obvious when the sequence of events are reconstructed on the page. In the end enlightenment dawned ironically. It must be difficult writing about something like that, said the new boyfriend of my friend S. I was instantaneously overcome by a profound ennui. Yes, I slurred, although I was completely sober and it was midday. I then hurried them politely from my house and retreated to my bed for several hours. After that I began to consciously reflect on the fact that it had been 10 years since M. died. This temporal detail struck me as at once significant and insignificant. Significant, because ours is an anniversary obsessed culture particularly fond of the decadal. It is difficult to extricate oneself from this way of thinking.

On the other hand, the fact that such a precise period of time had passed seemed to me to signify little of intrinsic value. It did not alter, for instance, the extent to which that particular event unmoored me, or how from time-to-time—recent events being a case in point—I was newly shocked to find myself adrift. Five years had seemed harder, I recalled, sadder and more incomprehensible. It was painful to concede that after all this time, I was struggling once again. It was tempting to blame the mentally ill people with whom I came into contact at work, the pathos of the subject matter informing the reports I was called upon to write, the unseasonable weather, the state of global politics. There is little doubt in my mind that they played their part. But it was attempting to write about suicide bereavement that undid me. The

227 realisation made me curse my weakness and stupidity, to blush even in private with humiliation.

§

I've rarely felt so figuratively constipated as when trying to write about "the reverse of love's intention". (Why that quotation to describe it? Because I imagine love's intention to be, among other things, kindness, regard, intimacy and loyalty, and because I know suicide to seem a vengeful slap in the face of all of these). Despite the symbolic embolus that afflicted me as I tried to explicate my theory about suicide bereavement, I was constantly running to the bathroom after the first few paragraphs, the contents of my stomach threatening to spew from one end or the other. While my earlier symptoms abated, I was now beset by mouth ulcers and once, a huge, pustulant boil appeared on the back of my right thigh and had to be lanced during the night in the emergency department. I developed a chronic eye infection and literally could not keep my eyes open for more than a few hours at a time. Sometimes I keyed away blindly, which was not as disastrous as it might sound, owing to my self-taught ability to touch type. In this state, it was, to say the least, odd to be writing about the abjectification of the suicide bereaved.

Often, I wonder what I would be writing about if this thing—suicide— had not happened. I might have said happened to me, except that it didn't. Which is the weird thing about traumatic deaths. They happen, not to you, but somehow they end up in you. It's as if you inherit an extra bodily organ, albeit one that is in the next moment ripped from you. Its absence takes up phantom residence inside you. An x-ray will not find it, because it is unreal. Despite this, you feel it pulsing, sense the way the other organs have re-adjusted themselves to accommodate it. After a long time you can actually forget you have it. (Right at this moment an SMS arrives to tell me that J. had her baby on Friday night. It strikes me that what I'm describing is a pregnancy of sorts,

228 only one that never culminates. I am crying now but whether because of this thought or the safe arrival of Bella, I can't say.) I became convinced that writing about suicide bereavement was aggravating my imaginary-but-real organ. This was the cause of my myriad symptoms, and the reason they could not be attributed to any disease or dysfunction. I knew enough not to say this to anyone, since at best it would lead them to consider me weird, at worst, psychotic. Around this time I was also struck by the seeming absurdity of the task I had set myself. How could I write about suicide bereavement as an instance of "failed experience" when a failed experience is precisely one that cannot be discursively contained? I had thought that I'd been writing about suicide for years, whereas it now shocked me to discover that in fact I had been writing despite it. Suicide was the hulking great elephant in the room— bizarrely invisible until now.

Emboldened, I dashed off an irreverent poem about the elephant in a writing workshop I signed up to attend. People laughed; I was pleased. The instructor also laughed before noting the high incidence of suicide amongst postgraduate students. This observation marked a turning point for my writing and me. Writing about suicide was excruciating, I realised, not only because of the "failed experience" of bereavement by it, but also because I was not admitting—literally—my knowledge of what it feels like to imagine committing it. I had gestured obliquely in that direction elsewhere, in my more "personal" writing, but I had not explicitly addressed it in the context of having also been bereaved by suicide. After this insight I didn't write for months. Then there came a day when I felt that all the blood had been drained from my body. To say I was enervated doesn't begin to describe it. I'd been dreaming about M. every night for a week, something that had not happened for years. In the mornings I could never remember the content of my dreams, only her hovering presence. The next night I had the dream about the drill. This time, I could not forget. §

229

I can't remember the first time the idea occurred to me. Only that afterwards it came at the most improbable of moments, like brushing my teeth or waiting at a pedestrian crossing. Standing on a platform at Town Hall often caused me to imagine hurling myself headlong before a train. That aside, I never really contemplated how to do it. By 19 the thought was perched in my brain most days. The first psychiatrist, on Macquarie St, spent four sessions informing me how her other patients—chronic schizophrenics and manic- depressives in the main—were much worse off. I could tell she did not take me seriously; in her eyes I was merely an angst-ridden adolescent flirting with the romance of despair. From her I learned that there is a hierarchy of mental illness. Depression is by far the least glamorous, pathological affliction—you have to go away and grow up, is all. By this time I was starting to experience panic attacks as well. I consulted a new psychiatrist (my initiative, I was to learn, was part of the reason I found it difficult to get help. The truly ill, and thus the truly compelling patients, are completely lacking in such insight, it would seem). That I attended my first appointment wearing a t-shirt bearing a rude slogan probably did not endear me to this new expert in whom I put my faith. Nonetheless, her assessment that I was harbouring anal hostility towards my mother, as evidenced by my choice of garment, was particularly unhelpful. I could go on cataloguing my attempts to get "professional" help for myself, suffice to say I received none. On first meeting, M. and I recognised in each other ourselves. We talked about suicide often—not doing it, but being plagued by the idea of it. (After her death I learned that she had lied by omission, for unlike me, she had already attempted to kill herself by that time). The thought that there was nothing we could do to obtain relief save waiting to grow out of it was unbearable to us. Each day was an agony, and the effort of concealing it from our families, our teachers and society in general was exhausting. For we were obsessed with compartmentalising our lives, and went to great lengths to cordon off our despair and our attempts to mitigate it. This obsession bonded

230 us as much as the depression we shared in common. While mocking those we called "averages", we ached to be normal. I believe now that I knew, subconsciously, she was about to die. Either that or my own depression took a coincidentally dramatic plunge for the worse, for in the week before it happened, I recall lying for days in my shaded room, undisturbed by hunger or thirst or the need to relieve myself. On the penultimate day, before she died and before I knew, I dragged myself from bed and went shopping for a doll. When I arrived home I copied a line from a Margaret Atwood poem onto a tiny square of paper and put it in the doll's pocket. The line read: "A doll is a witness who cannot die. With a doll you are never alone."

After M. died I thought constantly of death. For a year I hovered in a sepulchral universe, periodically interrupted by the brief incursion of mania. During these moments I suspected that madness was soon to devour me. At the end of that year I was properly diagnosed, and complied with the prescribed regime, for the first time. I sometimes still thought about suicide, and I sometimes retreated for a day or more to my bed, but I was no longer obsessed with the inevitability of dying, or exhausted by the knowledge and the guilt that I would have to decide when. I was emotionally unstable and grief-stricken, but I was no longer clinically depressed. Only then did I begin to mourn in earnest. Later, I became unstuck once again and my behaviour reckless. By then I was enrolled as a postgraduate student and the stakes seemed inexplicably higher. Mercifully I clawed my way out of the black hole. Shortly after I moved to a different city and reinvented myself in the suburbs. I had grown, not up, but away from my despair, and was left to wonder whether if only she'd waited, M. would have done so too.

I cannot say for certain that my intimate acquaintance with the contemplation of suicide made my bereavement by M.'s death more difficult. I do know that it engendered an identification that complicated the trajectory of my mourning. For instance, while I felt victimised by M.'s suicide, I had

231 imaginatively occupied the role of "perpetrator" on many occasions previously, and thus it was difficult for me to cast us in these simplistic agonistic roles and to conform with the performative requirements they demanded. For a long while I would not allow myself to display anger or hurt, reasoning that to do so would be to present myself untruthfully as an innocent, someone who had never contemplated inflicting such pain on others. I also never struggled with the question of "why" M. did what she did, a fact that confounded some of the other suicide bereaved people I later met. However this did not feel like a blessing. In fact it was terrifying, blurring the line between M. and myself dangerously. Thus I was tortured by dreams in which we were no longer separate beings but rather one deathly apparition. My guilt was intensified. It was possible, I believed, that I had not only failed to prevent M.'s death, but had actively encouraged or colluded in it by sharing with her my own suicidal impulses.

The most problematic way in which my complex identification with M. affected my mourning is also the most difficult to consciously admit to myself and to others. Mixed up with the excruciating pain of loss was also the sense, in the initial wake of M.'s suicide, that I had been robbed. I believed, in short, that M. had stolen from me the option to do what she had done. For I knew, and could not stand to think it, that if I now killed myself it would invariably be interpreted as a copycat act, or as the result of a moment of grief-induced insanity. Thus, as perverse as it may seem, I initially mourned the loss of my safety net—the knowledge that there was always that option, always a way out—as much as I mourned my dead friend. In hindsight, that I cared how my death would be interpreted proves that I remained tethered, however precariously, to (my) life. At the time, however, it seemed only to back me into the darkest, tiniest and most airless corner I had known. When eventually I was sufficiently less depressed to reflect with some detachment on the feeling of having been robbed of the option to kill myself, the shame and guilt were overwhelming. They flung me to the other extreme, being an almost

232 evangelical belief that it was my responsibility to "redeem" M.'s death by proving my own commitment to life. For a time I banged endlessly on about resilience and survival and how M. had given me the gift of my life. My born- again sermonising must have been extraordinarily irritating to those unfortunate enough the bear the brunt.

I once suffered from a despair so violent that each day at five, I stared out at the night's encroachment fearing it would overwhelm all that I understood. Powerful feelings rupture composure. A world of night: those were dark years. This darkness dissipated when I honoured my anger. Others prefer to die. Extinction can be less confronting than self-sufficiency.51 I don't know what stopped me from crossing that line into extinction. And I don't want to wonder about it anymore. I didn't cross it. I chose life over my identification with you. There, the thing that's been stuck in my throat all these years. That I am not like you and don't want to be like you. We're not the doomed twins we believed ourselves to be. This isn't Sliding Doors unfolding, each of us the same person who took a fatefully different path. I don't want to write about it anymore. It is not necessary that I do so.

III

Mostly, totalism closes down the imagination. It closes down symbolization and in a sense, creates an as-if situation, as if we weren't symbolizers but simply seekers of absolute truth, which, once found, ends our search.52

I have suggested that suicide does not lend itself to the cultural requirement of the "good story", and as such, does not equip those it bereaves to take up the performative subject position on which elegy—the main means by which loss and its impact on the "integrity" of the self are pacified— depends. One potential outcome of this scenario is that the suicide bereaved

233 becomes identified with the lack it suggests, experiencing her exile in terms that induce permanent paralysis. To position oneself in this way is to position oneself as a subject-at-risk. Alternatively, the suicide bereaved may recognise that suicide bereavement is an experiential state that resists totalism, and choose to endorse that resistance by aligning oneself with subjective practices that, as Vincent Crapanzano has put it, "speak awkwardly of one's own otherness in [the] world".53 To do so collectively is to enlarge our notion of ourselves as more than "simply seekers of [an] absolute truth", and to embody an ethic of risk. That ethic is, by its very nature, confronting. It involves coming up repeatedly against the discomforting notion that human experience is not something that can be organised—except at great cost to the psychic self—into "decipherable and reliable categories".54 It is to come face to face with "the constitutional alienation of the subject",55 but more than that, it is to self-consciously occupy that alienation. The primary method open to the expression of an ethic of risk is the practice I referred to earlier as discursion. Discursion challenges "our inclination to isolate, identify and limit the burden of meaning given to an event",56 that is, our inclination to push towards normalising "the singularities and idiosyncrasies of human experience".57 It re- positions the subject as an imaginative entity, a playful actor rather than a mere labourer in the service of identity and its maintenance. Fundamentally, the practice of discursion is about the affirmation of invention over argument,58 a way of being continuously open to the other.

In The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, Antonella Gambotto bemoans "career mourners",59 those individuals who cultivate an attachment to their bereaved status and who can be recognised by their compulsive performance of truisms—you'll never get over it, no-one ever gets over it—and so on. These are the bereaved who adopt a traumatic subjectivity, a state of being in which everything remains fixed at the point of the trauma and an identity is erected upon it via the construction of a deterministic narrative. Since her identity is dependent on it, the integrity of this narrative must be protected at all costs by

234 the traumatic subject. She cannot risk discursion. It is the traumatised rather than the traumatic subject for whom embodying an ethic of risk is feasible. The traumatised subject is more readily able to tolerate her woundedness—she suffers rather than defensively absorbs it into the structure of the self. More than as simply a threat to the integrity of the self, the wound is approached by the traumatised subject as an opportunity for casting questions about the self and its implication in the symbolic. While suicide bereaved may occupy either a traumatic or traumatised subjectivity, or a subjectivity at any point along the continuum between them, the nature of their bereavement lays particular claim, perhaps, to the embodiment of an ethic of risk. If "the dead are eloquent in recommending how the world of the living must change",60 suicide bereaved are especially placed, I suggest, to adopt their recommendation, and to go on recursively adopting it.

1 "Love's intention and the reverse of love's intention slowly mark my life". Sunday Reed, letter to Gray Smith, quoted by Janine Burke (ed.), Dear Sun: The letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed. Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1995. p.1. 2 Judith Butler, "Afterword", David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning. California: University of California Press, 2003. P472. 3 G.M Carstairs, quoted by Alison Wertheimer, A Special Scar: The Experiences of People Bereaved by Suicide. London: Routledge, 1991. p1. 4 "Significant" in the sense of having provoked the most intense reflection—emotional, spiritual, philosophical—on my part. 5 I purposely use the term "suicide bereaved" in preference to the more ubiquitous (and, in my view, problematic) "suicide survivor". 6 From the title of Wertheimer's book. 7 Susie Orbach, Towards Emotional Literacy. London: Virago, 1999. p3. 8 Quoted by C.A. Barlow and H. Morrison, "Survivors of suicide: emerging counselling strategies". Journal of Psychological Nursing, 40, 1 (2002). pp. 28-39. p3. 9 Relinquished, or perceived to be relinquished, by the beloved who has suicided. 10 Moira Farr, After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor's Tale. Toronto: HarperCollins Perennial Canada, 1999. p6. 11 Kathleen Finneran, The Tender Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. p20. 12 Antonella Gambotto, "Interview with Laura McCreddie". www.brokenanklebooks.com/BooksNFEclipseCritics.htm. Accessed 19 October 2005. 13 Ferrell, op.cit. p53. 14 Antonella Gambotto, The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide. Broken Ankle Books, 2003. p.73. 15 Louise Woodstock, "Hide and Seek: The Paradox of Documenting a Suicide". Text and Performance Quarterly, October 2001, 21 (4). pp.247-260. p258. 16 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p56. 17 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p150. 18 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p166. 19 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p149. 20 Jeffrey Kauffman, "Dissociative functions in the normal mourning process". Omega, 1993-94, 28 (1). pp.31-38. p37.

235

21 Jann Fielden, "Grief as a transformative experience: Weaving through different lifeworlds after a loved one has completed suicide". International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, March 2003, 12 (1). pp 74-85. p76. 22 For discussion on this point, see Judith M. Stillion and Bethany D. Stillion, "Attitudes Toward Suicide: Past, Present and Future". Omega, 1998-99, 38 (2). pp.77-97. 23 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. pp.66-67. 24 Cited by Farr, op.cit. p42. 25 A reference to the 1997 death of the Australian rock singer Michael Hutchence. 26 In "The legacy of suicide: the impact of suicide on families" (in Charmaz, op.cit), Mary Fraser notes that the impact of suicide is characterised by its "normlessness" and "irrevocability" (p59). In all of the interviews Fraser conducted for her paper, subjects felt that suicide was definitely a "different" kind of grief (p62). 27 Fraser, op.cit. p67. 28 Robert Kastenbaum, "The Impact of Suicide on Society", B.L Mishara (ed.), The Impact of Suicide. Springer, 1995. p178. 29 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p52. 30 Sharon D. Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. p1. 31 Pat Holt, "Remembering Carolyn Heilbrun: Feminist Scholarship and Suicide". www.frugalfun.com/carolyn-heilbrun.html. Accessed 12 August 2005. 32 Barlow and Morrison, op.cit. 33 L.G Calhoun and B.G Allen, "Social reactions to the survivors of a suicide in the family: A review of the literature". Omega, 1991, 23 (2). pp. 95-97. 34 S. Ellenbogen and F. Gratton, "Do they suffer more? Reflections on research comparing suicide survivors to other survivors". Suicide and Life-threatening Behavior, 2001, 31 (1). pp. 83- 90. 35 See Audra Kneiper, "The Suicide Survivor's Grief and Recovery". Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Winter 1999, 29 (4). pp.353-364. p355. 36 John R. Jordan, "Is suicide bereavement different? A reassessment of the literature". Suicide and Life-threatening Behavior, Spring 2001, 31 (1). pp. 91-102. p92. 37 Woodstock, op.cit. p254. 38 Kathryn Robson, "Curative Fictions: The 'Narrative Cure' in Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir". Cultural Values, January 2001, 5 (1). pp.115- 130. p117. 39 Robson, op.cit. p123. 40 Woodstock, op.cit. p248. 41 Woodstock, op.cit. p249. 42 In her essay on the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun, Pat Holt writes, "of course when a person commits suicide, it's easy to forget such things as a sense or humour or a life of principle." op.cit. 43 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. p173. 44 Woodstock, op.cit. p248. 45 Woodstock, op.cit. p258. 46 Farr, op.cit. p98. 47 Welch, op.cit. 48 Ernst van Alphen elucidates the concept of failed experience in his essay, "Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, memory and trauma", Mieke Bal (ed.), Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 2004. 49 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p200. 50 Adam Phillips, Going Sane. London: Penguin Books, 2006. p.144. 51 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p.20. 52 Robert Jay Clifton, "Protean Impulses: A conversation with Robert Jay Clifton", Anthony Molino and Christine Ware (eds.), Where id was: Challenging normalization in psychoanalysis, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. p131.

236

53 Vincent Crapanzano, "Moments of the Self in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: A Conversation with Vincent Crapanzano, Molino and Ware (ed.), op.cit. p.125. 54 Anthony Molino and Christine Ware, "Introduction", Molino and Ware (eds.), op.cit. pp.5-6. 55 Patricia Gherovici, "Between Meaning and Madness: The altered state of Hispanics in the USA", Molino and Ware (eds.), op.cit. p.155. 56 Hejinian, op.cit. p.620. 57 Molino and Ware, op.cit. pp.5-6. 58 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p.7. 59 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p.167. 60 Gambotto, The Eclipse of Suicide: A Memoir. p195.

237 Anniversary

I am writing this ten years on and remembering the hours we traversed the city on buses and trains, our library books in bags made of jute banging against our narrow, childless hips. How our passion for one another was sexless and severe. What we had in common was the distance we travelled to become learned and our "troubled" teenage years. Our weekly visits to middle-aged counsellors, afterwards comparing notes on their uselessness and dowdy attire. But I gave in and swallowed Frau Mensch's magic pills.

This was the first betrayal on my part. That winter I spent hours researching my term paper (I was 20 and newly medicated. Naturally my subject was the poetry of Anne Sexton). I gave up cinnamon doughnuts and substituted cigarettes and chewing gum. This was the second betrayal, though I did not know it at the time.

Summer came and with it, a new space emerged between us. The pills had made me manic and I flitted about campus like a demented insect. I cut my hair and began to wear lipstick, upgraded my brand of cigarette. I watched you recede further into the distance, never sure if it was a trick, an ocular side effect that Frau Mensch had forgot to mention. I began compulsively to keep track of your movements. In response, you began to avoid the places we had frequented before. My panic escalated. I began to phone daily, each time the line ringing out, exhausted. Finally, the tome on the poet was complete; the semester finished. To celebrate I flushed my pills and went to the bar.

I saw you leaving as I arrived. Your stride was purposeful, your once glossy hair now oddly dull. I ran after you, calling you by name. You

241 stopped and we exchanged words I can no longer recall. You looked somewhere above the region of my head and slightly to the left; I noticed that the skin around your lips was cracked and sore. Your bus was due, you would be late. Turning, your hair flicked against my chin. I watched you grow smaller, heard the band at the bar begin. I never saw you again, except in my dreams.

§

I am in her room. I have to sort through her things. I am overwhelmed by how much there is—books, silver, clothes, scarves, journals, photographs. The glass of water she used to swallow the pills is on the windowsill. Her mother walks in and I say, "look—there's the death receptacle"—the feeling is of oddness and sadness. I think to myself that there is too much of you to sort through.

(After all, as Freud discovered, dreams exist in the first place because people don't want to know what they know.)1

§

I am writing this ten years after the event. I cannot recall the sound of your voice anymore. I do not ask for comforts because of this. I do not pretend. I remember you. It was a long time ago.

Piece by piece the fragments are returned; the body, the work, the love, the life. And which is true? That is, which is truer? Memory. My licensed inventions. Not all of the fragments return.2

242 I am writing this ten years after the event. In this city, people disappear. It is so temporary, life. People vanish every day. I notice but I turn away. Coffee today with L. He speaks of his dead mother and of his father, still alive and too anxious to pacify the new wife. Are we the few who cannot forgive death? Or ourselves, the unforgiven…

It happened and there were consequences. Most are not documented any place you would recognise. I have spoken of my body and of my mind. Things happen every day and lives are altered irrevocably. Ordinary lives. Such depth resides within them. I try to tell the truth but I am limited in my capacity. I descend; I try to tell the truth. How can I come close to the meaning of my days?3 I am tiring of trying. It was a long time ago.

It is ten years past and suddenly I am preoccupied with the inevitability of J.'s dying, my fear that her children will forget to call. Thank God for newspaper obituaries, which bring news of the big deaths: Derrida, Sontag, the late president of Uzbekistan. The summer air hums with the reverberation of disaster. Tsunami. Death is no longer personal.

It is ten years later. I have remembered that for months before the event I suffered brief but frightening periods of dissociation that caused me to feel chronically disoriented and alienated by my surroundings. The world I inhabited was a strange and untrustworthy place. Once, I dreamed I was an apple; a worm insinuated its way inside me and when I awoke, life announced itself not viable.

If this was a premonition, I was too stupid to know it. Strange now to recall those years of terror, our poverty, the vast quantities of alcohol consumed. As if our lives were a bad first novel. Why were we so fucked

243 up? Am I inventing my memories? Was it really as it seemed? Weren't they supposed to be the best years of our lives? I am sad for what we endured, and for what could not be salvaged.

I am writing this ten years after the event. I am thinking of becoming a mother. The Chinese symbol for "crisis" is the combination of the symbols for both "danger" and "opportunity". On my thirtieth birthday, I had my tattoo modified to represent it. It hurt and I bore it.

Incidentally, your sister has phoned to say that our summer trip must be postponed due to the demands of the seed collecting. It is hard to imagine what you would make of the seed-collector and the spinster and their summer plans, altered.

Last night I dreamed my womb was harvested.

My child will know of you only what I tell it.

1 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p66. 2 Winterson, op.cit. p136. 3 Winterson, op.cit. p138.

244 Truth

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. –Francis Bacon1

Version 1

She had half a stuffed eggplant for lunch. In the afternoon, she folded two baskets of washing at the request of her mother. At around five the phone rang, but it was for her sister. After her sister hung up they watched TV together. After that they had dinner (lasagne and a salad); she, her mother, her father, her two younger sisters. One of the sisters called her a fat-arse; her mother said to the sister: "don't be revolting".

After that she got out of washing the dishes, saying she had an essay to write. Instead, she went to her room. After a while she returned to the kitchen and made a cup of peppermint tea. The phone rang, but it was for her mother. Her father said: "don't you have work to do". She said: "leave me alone". She went back to her room.

Version 2

She had half a stuffed eggplant for lunch. In the afternoon, she folded two baskets of washing at the request of her mother. At around five the telephone rang, but it was for her sister (the boyfriend). After her sister hung up they watched a repeat of The Wonder Years together. After that they had dinner (lasagne and a salad); she, her mother, her father, her two younger sisters. She hated the way her father had to drown everything in tomato sauce. One of her sisters called her a fat-arse when

245 she asked for the Parmesan cheese to be passed. Her mother said to the sister: "don't be revolting". Her sister was a shit.

After that she got out of washing the dishes—just to spite her—saying she had an essay to write. Instead she went to her room, lay on her bed and listened to a Kristen Hersh CD. She felt bored and vaguely anxious. After a while she returned to the kitchen and made a cup of peppermint tea. The phone rang; it was for her mother. (He was never going to call; she had to accept that). Her father said: "don't you have work to do". She fantasised poisoning him (something in the tomato sauce). She said: "leave me alone".

She went back to her room and took down Franny and Zooey from the bookcase. She hadn't read it since high school. After nine pages she got up and tidied her underwear drawer. She retrieved the pills from in between her Berlei sports bra and her navy Bonds underpants. Everything she owned was so earnest, she thought. She checked which underpants she was wearing before taking the teacup into the bathroom and filling it with water. She went back to her bedroom and put on a Breeders CD; Kim Deal was such a babe.

She laid the cup on her dresser and put on her pyjamas. Then she drank some water; then she swallowed the pills, then she drank some more. After that she got into bed. She thought she heard the phone ring, but no one knocked on her door.

Version 3

246

She had half a stuffed eggplant for lunch. In the afternoon she folded two baskets of washing at the request of her mother. It was a good distraction. She thought about how satisfying domestic tasks could be, how soothing the ritual and the repetition. At around five the phone rang, but it was for her sister. She was relieved about that. After her sister hung up they watched a repeat of The Wonder Years together.

After that they had dinner (lasagne and a salad); she, her mother, her father, her two younger sisters. It could have been the stuffed eggplant again for all she cared. One of her sisters called her a fat-arse; her mother said to the sister: "don’t be revolting". She couldn't be bothered responding.

After that she got out of washing the dishes, saying she had an essay to write. Instead she went to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and cried. Then she bit a chunk of flesh from the side of her mouth, which made her stop. She thought she should call someone, but didn't know what she might say. After a while she returned to the kitchen and made a cup of peppermint tea. The phone rang, but it was for her mother. Her father said: "don't you have work to do". She said: "leave me alone". She went back to her room and started to cry again.

She took off her watch and brushed her hair, then put on her pyjamas. She took the teacup into the bathroom and filled it with water. She sat on the edge of the bath and untied the handkerchief. After counting to ten she swallowed the pills cleanly. She wondered whether she would vomit, then returned to her room. She got into her bed and wondered whether she had taken enough, and if so, who would find her. She hoped they wouldn't play Celine Dion at the funeral.

247

§

iii.

The true story lies among the other stories,

a mess of colours, like jumbled clothing thrown off or away,

like hearts on marble, like syllables, like butchers' discards.

The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue

after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever

ask for the true story.2

This night I lie in bed, turning the first two lines of Margaret Atwood's poem over and over again by rote. Until now I had no idea I had memorised it. I don't know when this happened, or why. Like a psalm remembered from childhood, I don't think about the meaning behind the words. Their repetition calms me. An hour ago I watched a mother and father talking on the television about their young, dead son: a suicide. It was a true story, not theatre. Even if you didn't know this, if you had not

248 noted it in the television guide, you could tell by placing your finger on the screen and tracing the downturned mouth of the young man's mother, the furrowed brow of his father. You can't fake the ruinous effects that grief like that bestows upon the body.

Finally, I fall asleep and dream that someone mails me an envelope full of crime-scene photographs. I am excited because I suspect they relate to M.’s death. Somehow I am aware that the photographs must be correctly sequenced—like frames in a cartoon—in order to make sense. The photographs contain strange objects: eggplants, tomato sauce, a laundry basket. I arrange them every way I can think of, but nothing works. This failure causes me immense frustration and distress. I wake, surprised by my unconscious. It has been a long time since my dreamscape has fed off anxiety of this sort, which once was familiar. An old, recurring dream of several years ago comes to mind:

I receive a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. It is composed of pieces of a photograph of M. I am unable to put it together and accuse God of withholding the crucial piece.

That was in the days when I still believed that some new piece of information would miraculously come to light and make sense of everything. In this most recent dream I have clearly abandoned this conviction, though not the compulsion to "close the case", as it were. For years I was haunted by this lack of finality, by not being in possession of all the "facts". The urge to conclusion drove me; I told myself I must get at the "truth" at any cost. How, I reasoned, could I possibly lay M. to rest without it?

249 To lay the dead to rest has long been configured as the chief task of mourning. Failure to do so is seen to constitute evidence of pathology. The true story is the philosopher's stone, the Holy Grail, the answer to our mourning prayers.

§

One day some comments on my piece "Anniversary" arrive in the mail. A. writes: "I am a bit puzzled by the status of the 'truth' (and your investments in it) but I guess this is an aspect of the syndrome of (post)mourning". I can't immediately work out what it is about this statement that arrests me. I confess that my solution to the hermeneutic dyslexia that frequently troubles me, has for years consisted in re-arranging statements into poems, or more precisely, word-groupings that look like poems. Like all children of my generation, I was taught when learning to read to "sound out" difficult words by breaking them up into their syllabic parts. Re- arranging statements into poems is my grown-up version of this practice. I approach my business as spontaneously as possible. Where I find myself placing stress in a "poem" is a clue that assists me to work out what is significant about the original statement. My "poems" act as investigative devices.

I am a bit puzzled by the status of the 'truth' (and your investments in it)

But I guess this is an aspect

250 of the syndrome of (post)mourning.

From the arrangement of this particular poem it's apparent to me that what I find significant about A.'s comment is the reference within it to my "investments" in the "truth", as well as the nomination of the category "(post)mourning". To begin with, I turn to the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who says that "the idea of truth makes us virtuous, shows us which side to be on; it makes it possible for us to blame, to forgive and to punish".3 What Phillips seems to be saying, I decide, is that the "truth" is an instrument of moral reckoning, something we utilise to inure our selves against the threat of ethological uncertainty. To invoke the "truth" is to render the validity of our motives unquestionable. It establishes our standpoint and enables us to position others accordingly. In this way, the "truth" affirms our notion of ourselves as ontologically secure beings. But the "truth" is important for another, less obviously narcissistic reason. Within a hegemonic culture, it is what ensures our socialisation as compliant, self-regulating subjects. As Michel Foucault argues:

there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.4

251

The corollary of the "truth", of course, is the lie. My young nephew has not yet learned to lie. Like all small children, he does not understand that his mental products are inaccessible to those around him. Therefore, the possibility of deception does not occur to him. My nephew inhabits the "truth" in a way that his parents and sisters do not. If the developmental psychologists are to be believed, this state of affairs will persist for only a few more years. One morning he will awake, having crossed over to the other side some time during the night. Life as he knows it will never be the same again. Like a snakeskin shed, the truth will be there for the taking, a brilliant mantle and a terrible bane.

§

Thus what remains is straightaway divided into two parts: story and truth. The one and the other have the same origin and are related to the same thing: the same presence which has retreated. Its retreat is thus manifested as the line that separates the two, the story and the truth.5

The "truth", as Foucault says, operates discursively, or more prosaically, in the form of stories. Stories are ways of organising information and controlling how that information is disseminated. Memories are stories of a kind. I speak here not of memorial fragments—those spectral flutterings that pass too quickly to be brought into proper consciousness—but rather about the emotionally-inflected scenes we recollect and structure with recourse to narrative conventions. Whilst primarily a private, internal activity, such memories may also be brought into utterance for the (ostensible) benefit of others. Memories, I suggest,

252 exert unique salience during three life experiences in particular: migration, old age, and mourning.

What is especially striking about the preoccupation with memory in mourning is the almost fanatical impulse that drives it. When bereavement induces mourning, the ontological security of the subject is threatened. As such, the claim to "truth" is urgently (re)exerted. Memory is the cipher through which this claim operates. While the subject may believe that her memories are conjured in service of the lost other, the truth is that memory is primarily a self-serving function. It achieves two important things. Firstly, it brings order to the libidinal chaos that ensues in mourning. Secondly, and most significantly, it places and separates the lost other in a way that re-establishes the bereaved subject's (fantasy of) control over it.

Memories are not, as commonly imagined, ineluctable, though they commonly appear that way. Rather, like other kinds of stories, they are preferred constructions. Even (perhaps, especially) traumatic memories are selected in this way. It is true that the subject may be unable, at least consciously, to control the temporal irruption of (her) memories. Yet, that she invents them is certain. To say this is not to argue that memories are "made up" in the sense that they contain wilful lies. Rather, it is to emphasise their mediated status; their function as "points of departure"6 upon which one's conception of the "truth" will come to be based.

"Anniversary" is a piece of writing that has its impetus in memory. It is not unusual for memories to surface near or on the anniversary of a painful event. In "Anniversary", I recall the last time I saw M., and the period of time that led up to it. Clearly, however, my memory of the

253 incident that took place at the bar is overlayed by my knowledge of what came to pass later, that is—M.'s death—as is my description of the events that preceded the last time I saw her. My memory of these events is constructed in a way that implicates me as superficial, self-absorbed and emotionally unstable and as thereby incapable of realising the gravity of circumstances unfolding around me. This construction only makes sense with the (spurious) benefit of hindsight. Thus the memories I write about in "Anniversary" cannot be said to represent the "truth", if the "truth" is understood to constitute a "presence which has retreated".

§

Margaret Atwood's poem makes several observations about "truth":

1. Truth is a story 2. Truth contains lies 3. Truth can be elegant and refined (hearts on marble) or ugly and course (butchers' discards) 4. Truth is fickle (like jumbled clothing/thrown off or away) 5. Truth can be malevolent and can wound (vicious) 6. Truth is asingular (multiple) 7. Truth is desired (Why do you/need it?).

I recall these observations to myself while scanning the web for the reactions of viewers to the television program featuring the parents of the young man who suicided. There are several posts by persons who are angry that the real reason for the young man's death was given what they perceive to be inadequate coverage by the program. The real reason changes depending on the post. I understand this need for certainty, for

254 (the) truth. It soothes us in times of crisis, obviating the quest for meaning. We must be suspicious, however, of truth-claims justified in the name of honouring the lost other. The dead have no use for the truth. They know that it does not arrest the passing of time or the decaying of their bones. The dead know that (the) truth is but fool's gold.

§

"Anniversary" was written shortly after the tenth anniversary of M.'s death. In it, I explicitly invoke (the) "truth" once only:

I try to tell the truth but I am limited in my capacity. I descend; I try to tell the truth. How can I come close to the meaning of my days? I am tiring of trying. It was a long time ago.

This statement appears to say much about my relationship to the "truth". In the first place, it situates "truth" as something communicable, thereby giving it transparent status. Further, the statement suggests that I consider communicating the "truth" as being an important undertaking. The statement also appears to link the activity of "telling the truth" with the outcome of effectively conveying the "meaning" of my experience. Finally, it gives the impression that I have indeed tried to tell the "truth", but that my efforts to do so, and to thereby convey the meaning of my experience, have failed. Notably, I offer mitigating factors: my "capacity" is "limited" (suggesting reduced moral culpability); I am "tired" (having exerted such effort); it was "a long time ago" (the passage of time makes it difficult to now capture "the truth" of past events).

On the face of it, the statement coheres with the conventions of confessional discourse. Confessional discourse operates, from a

255 Foucauldian-informed perspective, as a procedure or technique that facilitates the construction of compliant subjects: "I do confession in order to find out the truth about myself…and in order to modify my personality in the manner required by hegemonic discourse". The "truth", here, is not to be misinterpreted as a personal, liberating entity. Rather, the "truth" inscribes power, and is the condition of my status as a subject: "Finding out the truth about myself is actually the precise moment of the production of the truth of myself".7 Thus, the statement can be read as an attempt to affirm my ontological propriety.

A question that remains is: who do I perceive my confessor to be? That is, before whom do I seek to prostrate myself in the name of myself? On one level it might appear that I position the reader as my confessor. Since I do not explicitly address the reader, however, it is possible that I imagine my confessor to be extra-discursively located. On the other hand, perhaps the confessor resides within me as an aspect of my self in conflictual dialogue with an-other. In fact, the confessor is all these entities and none. The confessor is an amorphous presence whose power to inveigle resides in absence.

§

In "Anniversary", what is not transparent in my statement about trying to tell the truth is whether I have deliberately sought to position myself in a confessional discourse, and if so, why. Further, it is not clear in what terms I view my apparent acquiescence with its conventions. At the heart, then, of my apparently puzzling preoccupation with (the) "truth" in "Anniversary", lies an important question about the nature of my investment in the discourse I produce (and allow myself to be produced by).

256

In the acontextual manner in which I have reproduced the statement here, it is not possible to determine whether I, being the writer, actually believe or disbelieve that there is such a thing as the "truth" and that striving to tell it is an important virtue. It is necessary to consider the broader discursive context in which the statement is constructed to hazard a guess one way or the other.

The most obvious clue is also the most oft repeated. On five separate occasions in "Anniversary" I iterate the words "I am writing this". This is a device that draws attention, again and again, to the contrived status of the meta-text. Also, I refer twice to memories as things that can be invented. In this way, I draw a question mark over the veracity of my own recollections.

The truth is that I have never sought to tell the truth about anything in my writing. Indeed, I believe it is impossible to write the truth. The truth is always elsewhere than the text, some place to which you can never return. The truth, when it happens, does not announce itself as such. The truth is simply what happens—what happened—and can never be apprehended. I do not claim that the truth did not happen. Only that it cannot ever happen again. In the early days of mourning, it seems a hard God that will not permit the truth to be told. Nowadays I do not care much for the truth.

Despite this, everyone claims to know it. The truth is:

that I was also mourning my self, which, experienced in relationship with M., also died a violent death, according to my therapist.

257

that I have always been obsessively secretive about the intimate details that constitute my life, according to my sister.

that I was a demanding baby who was soothed only by having the newspaper read to me, according to my mother.

that managing one's money is a discipline better learned sooner than later, according to my father.

that pragmatism is what it's all about, according to my boss.

that I am a complicated person, according to my friend (who jokes).

that her mother and I are "rather similar but not quite the same", according to my niece.

that I am better suited to living alone, according to my lover.

Though the idea of "truth" and the claims that derive from it have been thoroughly deconstructed in the realm of postmodern theory, this deconstruction has not necessarily carried over into the realm of the quotidian. Another way to put this is that truth-claims continue to operate within the sphere of "every-day life", influencing and interpellating subjects. It is not enough to say that truth-claims as a category are spurious and that therefore, particular claims need not be

258 engaged with. In "real" social life, which is constituted discursively, subjects must constantly negotiate all manner of truth-claims.

It is because I know, viscerally, that the bereaved subject possesses enormous power to make truth-claims about the deceased and her relationship with the deceased—particularly through memory—that I seek to draw attention to the constructed nature of my representations. I do this partly by expressing an anxious preoccupation with the idea of (the) "truth".

Since suicide has the effect of obfuscating whatever "truths" one thought one knew, this is not an activity that I find difficult.

§

What one can say of the absenting presence is always one of the two things: its story, or its history (histoire). Of course, it could even be its true story. But because the presence has fled, it is no longer certain that any story about it can be absolutely true: for, no presence will be able to attest to it.8

I find, on balance, that I both agree and disagree with A.'s comment. To begin, there is value in the term "(post)mourning". It is commonly supposed that following the experience of mourning there comes "recovery", galloping onto the scene like the proverbial knight in shining armour. This formulation is too simple to account for the altered subjectivity engendered by mourning. The term "(post)mourning" conveys a state beyond the acute crisis of mourning without implying that the subject is unaltered by the crisis, or has transcended it. To be in (post)mourning would mean to remain engaged with and by one's

259 experience of loss in a way that continues to generate creative (rather than defensive) approaches to being in the world.

I affirm A.'s supposition that the "truth" and (post)mourning exist in some relationship. I would say that this relationship involves an anxious preoccupation on the part of the (post)mourning subject, rather than an investment in, the "truth". To say that one has an "investment" in something is to imply that one expects or seeks to obtain some profit or special benefit from it. In other words, it is a positivistic activity. By contrast, the (post)mourning subject's preoccupation with the "truth" is a deconstructivist activity. It avowedly draws attention to the status of "truth" as a category of subjection, that is, as an instrument of power. To mourn productively ultimately involves coming to terms with the precarious nature of one's memories about the lost other and the tenuous subjectivity they seek to uphold. This involves an acknowledgment of the "truth" as transitive, and can therefore be an intensely anxiety-producing experience. However, what is at first an abject occupation is ultimately transformed into a more creative and ethically sustainable way of relating to the self and other(s).

The main point on which I depart from A. concerns her designation of (post)mourning as a syndrome. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines "syndrome" as "a concurrence of several symptoms in a disease". To be fair, the term "syndrome" is also frequently used, albeit incorrectly, as a synonym for "phenomenon". However, regardless of the intent underlying the term's use, it inescapably connotes the broader language of pathology. I would like to suggest that the desire to conceive of (post)mourning as a "syndrome" is symptomatic of a cultural obsession with normalisation, that is, with the values of conformity and adaptation

260 against which pathology is defined.9 The delimiting manner in which mourning itself has been commonly rendered—that is, as a deleterious phenomenon from which one can only hope to “recover”—can be attributed to this obsession.

Characterising a preoccupation with (the) "truth" as typical of the "syndrome" of (post)mourning has the effect, in turn, of rendering such preoccupation "symptomatic". Symptoms tend to be configured as either passively experienced or hysterically wrought manifestations of pathology. The problem with characterising as symptomatic a preoccupation with (the) "truth" is that is risks obscuring other interpretations of that preoccupation, most pertinently, one that would locate in the preoccupation an ethical impetus.

Finally, I turn to the issue of A.'s "puzzlement" by my engagement with the "truth" in "Anniversary". To be "puzzled" by something, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is to be perplexed by it. To be "perplexed", in turn, is to be "involved in doubt and anxiety about a matter on account of its intricate character". Since, as we have seen, neither the "truth" nor the subject's relationship to it is a simple matter, I suggest that A.'s puzzlement is not merely understandable, but also requisite (a convenience I am far from certain she would permit).

It is time to put my jigsaw puzzle dream to bed. The true story lies among the other stories.

Why do you need it?

1 Francis Bacon, "Of Truth". Essays [1601], www.westegg.com/bacon/truth.html. Accessed 3 May 2006. 2 Atwood, "True Stories".

261

3 Phillips, Terrors and Experts. p9. 4 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. London: Harvester Press, 1980. p93; my emphasis. 5 Jean-Luc Nancy, "Between story and truth". Trans. Franson Manjali The Little Magazine, Vol.11 Iss.4. www.littlemag.com/jul-aug01/nancy.html. Accessed 12 May 2006. 6 David Wills, "RE: Mourning". Tekhnema, Spring 1998, 4. www.tekhnema.free.fr/4Wills.htm. Accessed March 9 2006. 7 H.L.T. Heikkinen, R. Huttunen and L. Kakkori, "'And this story is true…': On the problem of narrative truth". Paper presented at the European Conference on Education Research, University of Edinburgh, September 20-23, 2000. www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00002351.htm. Accessed 3 May 2006. 8 Nancy, op.cit. 9 Molino and Ware, op.cit. p.2.

262 Conclusion ______

It was to write about loss without writing about despair—without the refuge of optimism, the confidence of nihilism, or the omniscience of the tragic view—that had become the challenge.1

Meanwhile, life and death go on, whether or not one has ever heard of thanatology, the death system, postmodernity and deconstruction.2

I embarked on this thesis about a year and a half after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales—an event that stunned millions and, in the process, captivated the attention of numerous cultural theorists. In her contribution to the collection Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning, Zoe Sofoulis argues that the aftermath of Diana's death revealed:

a world quite other to that which has been described by many cultural analysts of the postmodern…a world that does not demonstrate a post-everything waning of affect or loss of the ability to 'commune', a world in which cynicism and irony have not triumphed.3

Yet, Ruth Barcan argues in the same collection that the extent to which the extraordinary scenes that unfolded in the wake of the event represented "anything more than a temporary break with the rhythms and spaces of consumer capitalism" is questionable.4 Indeed, Anne Bickford and Siobhan

263 Lavelle suggest in their contribution to Planet Diana that the spectacular response to Diana's death indicated, if anything, the extent to which "death, bereavement, grief and mourning have moved from a central position in the life of the society to the very edge of community consciousness".5 In the same collection, Catharine Lumby takes a somewhat different approach, suggesting "the fact that millions of people responded to Diana's passing as if a close personal friend had died is a strong indication that the media and its cast of characters have passed seamlessly out of the virtual and into the real".6 Although I was not captivated by the critical implications of the event or its significance in the way that the contributors to Planet Diana clearly were, it did not escape my attention. What impressed upon me at the time of Diana's death and the funereal palaver that followed it was a vivid sense of resentment.

Reading Anneli Rufus' book The Farewell Chronicles: How We Really Respond to Death7 years later, I viscerally recalled this resentment. "Imagine", Rufus challenges her reader, "a perfectly egalitarian utopia, in which the top story in the morning paper was headlined 143,932 People Died Yesterday Worldwide: All Were of Equal Importance. Would you even bother reading that article?"8 When it took place, the death of Diana served only to bring into sharp relief my own feelings of disenfranchised grief and the extent to which my bereavement some twenty months earlier went seemingly unnoticed by the world around me. This caused me to feel great bitterness, as friends and acquaintances who could not bring themselves to witness my mourning were all too eager to indulge before me in disbelieving sobs about the death of "the people's princess". To say the least, the proximity of this over-determined historical event created an interesting backdrop against which to begin thinking and writing about mourning.

Of the accounts I have referred to above, it is Barcan's that gives the best sense of where I am coming from in my own work. Barcan situates Diana's death, or rather, the mediated event it precipitated, as anomalous—a mere

264 "break with the rhythms and spaces of consumer capitalism". I read this analysis as a commentary on the incompatibility of consumer capitalism and the affective drama of mourning. What I have tried to do in this thesis is investigate the basis for this incompatibility. In short, I have argued that contemporary culture attempts to foreclose on mourning because mourning represents a threat to the normative discourse of identity. That discourse structures the experience of subjectivity in ways that reinforce the ideological underpinning of consumer capitalism. I have suggested that discursive pressure is exerted on bereaved subjects to apprehend mourning in hostile terms, that is, as a threat to be neutralised. As a result, conformity is induced, and mourning is denuded of both plenitude and specificity. In response to this scenario, I have proposed that productive mourning is mourning that makes use of the abjection that bereavement entails by apprehending it as an opportunity to enter into non-hostile communion with alterity. Productive mourning thereby resists normalisation, subverting the dominant structuring of subjectivity and invigorating the inner life of the subject.

Developing a theory of productive mourning has required challenging the pervasive ideology that bereavement is an exclusively negative life experience for which mourning is the unpleasant price of recovery. It has required a reframing of the Freudian influenced view that specifies bereavement in deleterious terms as a wound to the ego, and recovery from the wound as critical to the self's well being. That view constructs mourning in utilitarian terms as the trajectory by which the self re-establishes its propriety. On this reading, mourning is significant only when it fails, that is, when it is seen to become pathological. By construing bereavement in these terms, Freud laid the groundwork—whether inadvertently or not—for the cultural hostility to mourning that has predominated throughout the last century. If at any stage I doubted the influence of this ideology, a random conversation with an acquaintance about the subject of my thesis would invariably serve as a corrective. On hearing of my broad topic, most people responded with the

265 assumption that my interest must lie in the pathological aspect of mourning. Implicit to this assumption appears to be the latent view that bereavement is "a toxic life event".9 For the psychotherapist and social commentator Stephanie Dowrick, this view is symptomatic of an entirely predictable bias; "as a society", she argues, "we are far more comfortable talking about pathology…[it] has a kind of hip, contemporary feel to it."10

Tana Dineen attributes this habituation to the modern rise of the "Psychology Industry", a pervasive cultural force that "involves looking for and emphasizing the negative, pointing to wounds, scars, weaknesses and lasting effects"11 in order to maximise its client base. According to Dineen, bereavement has been well and truly sequestered by the Psychology Industry. While I do not necessarily agree with some of the conclusions Dineen arrives at, I have clearly been making a somewhat related claim throughout this thesis. In Part 2, I referred briefly to the genre of "self help", one of the more ominous manifestations of the "Psychology Industry". A particularly notable aspect of the genre's typical approach to the experience of loss is its framing of bereavement in morally beneficial terms. References to grief making people "stronger", "wiser" and "better people" etc. signpost this framing. Ian Craib has written eloquently about its effect, arguing that it represents "an attempt to organize the process of mourning and perhaps even of dying itself, in such a way that the real pain and loss is denied, that they can even be seen as 'good things'".12

Far from encompassing an effort to redress the cultural hostility to mourning, this invidious trend merely contributes to the proliferation of truth- claims exerted in the service of amplifying and reinforcing the discourse of identity that I critiqued in Part 2. In contrast, I have sought to re-cast bereavement in ethical terms, declining to approach it in a way that inscribes the self as either a diminished victim or moral beneficiary. To elucidate this distinction, it is useful to consider Adam Phillips’ rhetorical claim that "the

266 issue of trauma can be stated quite simply: is a life interrupted by events, or are the interruptions the life?"13 On the former interpretation, Phillips argues the self is constructed as having "a preferred life story" that is either nurtured or thwarted by events. In this way, the self is vulnerable to sabotage; traumatic events are viewed as dismaying. On the latter interpretation, he suggests that events are viewed as "an opportunity"—indeed, the only opportunity—"to make the self", and traumatic events are approached as but one variety of clay for modelling a "life story" on the run.

While this dialectic conceivably has much to offer the psychotherapist (and psychoanalysis is Phillips' chief domain) it does not allow for a third interpretation of potential utility to cultural theorists. What if traumatic events were perceived not merely as either destructive (victim) or constructive (beneficiary) of the self, but rather, as vessels for questioning the very notion of what being a "self" involves? It is this question I have attempted to engage by locating bereavement—a traumatic event—as a precursor for the experience of productive mourning; a practice of ethical enquiry by the self, of the self. I have suggested that the plenitude of mourning is found in its capacity to decentre the subject, to disrupt or unsettle her perspective, and that the subject who mourns productively does so by actively engaging this process. Dynamically manifested in the inner world, productive mourning is private and eccentric, resisting conformity with "classifications based on surface criteria and the development of schemata", that is, with officially prescribed "programmes for mourning".14 In this way, I have suggested, the productive mourner occupies a dissident subjectivity. By introducing this concept I have sought to politicise mourning, or rather, to reveal its inherent political aspect, thus contributing to the body of important work15 that challenges the dominant psychological approach to mourning as merely a manifestation of individual psychodrama.

§

267

In Thinking Fragments, Jane Flax is critical of intellectual projects that locate "freedom, ethics and 'selfhood'"16 in the individual's creative activity, on the basis that they "presuppose a socially isolated and individualistic view of the self".17 For Flax, desirable intellectual projects are those that "point towards locating the self and its experiences in concrete social relations, not only in fictive or purely textual conventions".18 In bringing this thesis to a close, I have seriously considered Flax's claim. Certainly my work can be interpreted as locating ethics, if not "freedom" and "selfhood" (I have explicitly critiqued the latter and indirectly the former as part of my examination of the normative discourse of identity) in the creative activity of the individual. I have suggested that productive mourning is ethical mourning, and that it is determined substantially by the bereaved subject's representational choices in respect of the deceased and her own relation to the lost other. In this regard, it is true that I foreground the interior life of the subject; mourning is fundamentally experienced, as Freud's flawed yet dexterous account demonstrates, as an intrapsychic phenomenon. Yet psyches inhabit subjects, and subjects inhabit social contexts. By foregrounding narrative as the site of creative activity that is significant in mourning, I acknowledge mourning's implication (and indeed, the subject's) in the social. Narrative is a profoundly social construct, even when it is entertained internally, since it presupposes— even as it often resists—the existence of an other. Narrative is not merely a textual convention, it is the primary means of symbolisation by which we locate others and ourselves and experience social and cultural relations.

Having said this I think it is useful to consider, with regard to Flax's point, some areas that require further work but which have been outside the scope of this thesis. In this respect, I am aware that within this thesis there is no attempt to move outside of a limited cultural context: the one in which I am constituted as an intellectual, affective and historical subject. When I speak of "culture", then, I am speaking only from the perspective of my own sense of

268 situatedness as a subject. I am curious as to how those differently situated might regard the efficacy of the theory I have unfolded. I am also conscious of not having considered in depth the question of what may enable some subjects but not others to experience (a) productive mourning. In Part 2, I suggested that availability of "transitional space" for containment of the subject's affective and cognitive projections is a requirement. What dictates this availability? Winnicott, who proposed the concept of transitional space, argues that a secure relationship with the child's primary caregiver is responsible for creating transitional space (one of the roles of psychotherapy is to replicate this relation). In my view, a confluence of social, political and intrapsychic factors is invariably responsible, but a consideration of the nature of these factors and their interplay lies beyond my research. Such an analysis would constitute a useful, future project. While not wishing to pre-empt the findings of any such project, it is likely they would be preoccupied, among other things, with the conditions that enable some individuals to tolerate the destabilisation of their subjectivity, and conversely, the conditions that prohibit others from doing so. One probable finding is that subjects must be adequately socially and politically enfranchised prior to their bereavement in order to be able to withstand the subjective upheaval that productive mourning requires.

Further enquiry into this aspect would yield interesting material in respect of the therapeutic application and efficacy of my theory of productive mourning. The question of whether therapeutic intervention should occur in bereavement is a contested one. In their article, "Does Grief Counseling Work?",19 Jordan and Neimeyer question the clinical assumption that grief counselling is desirable and effective. They suggest:

there is now sufficient evidence to conclude that generic interventions, targeted towards the general population of the bereaved, are likely to be unnecessary and largely unproductive. Instead, interventions that are tailored to the problems of

269 mourners in high-risk categories (eg. bereaved mothers, suicide survivors etc.), or showing unremitting or increasing levels of distress after a reasonable period of time are likely to be more beneficial.20

Jordan and Neimeyer conclude that there is a need for greater attention to therapeutic interventions treating individuals in high-risk categories, who are more likely to develop "complicated grief". This is an area of some interest to me given my particular investment in the topic of suicide bereavement. Jordan and Neimeyer claim there is convincing evidence to suggest that it is the nature of the therapeutic relationship in grief counselling that is "probably the most important 'active ingredient' in the treatment process".21 If this assumption is correct, it might be valuable to consider how the therapeutic relationship might function to facilitate an experience of productive mourning by creating an environment of symbolic containment for the risk-taking it entails.22

Having remarked on both a limitation and a possible application of my thesis, I wish also to highlight one of its more subtle yet salient contributions. In The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss, John Archer comments on the comparative dearth of research addressing grief following the death of a friend.23 Archer notes that what research does exist, suggests that such grief is typically disenfranchised, since "friends are accorded fewer rights as mourners".24 This is illustrative of "narrow…definitions of significant and worthy relationships [that] grant certain bereaved entitled grief and priority status".25 Yet, at least in relation to sudden death, there is research to indicate that it is the nature of the attachment rather than bereaved status that determines the intensity of grief following bereavement.26 In Alice Hoffman's coming-of-age novel, Local Girls, the protagonist Gretel reflects on her relationship with her best friend Jill: "One house separates our houses but we act as if it doesn't exist. We met before we

270 were born and we'll probably still know each other after we die".27 This utterance captures the flavour of near-primordial symbiosis that seems often to permeate friendships between young women. It is acknowledged that adolescence and the immediate period post-adolescence is a time of profound identity formation, and it may be that for many young women, a passionate, same-sex friendship is critically implicated in that work.

It is important to consider, then, the effect of the sudden, traumatic rupturing of such a relationship. While "research on bereavement in adolescents has had a short history and there is little empirical literature available regarding the effects of loss, especially with regard to the loss of friends and peers",28 this theme that has been explored with great acuity in several novels, among them Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy,29 Night Swimming by Emma Neale30 and 2 Girls by Perihan Magden.31 These works of fiction chart with exquisite precision the complex emotions that accompany the phantasised fusion with, and traumatic separation from, the same-sex object of devotion.

Significantly, the protagonists in each of the novels endure profound distress when their friendship is suddenly ruptured. The enforced separation from the other is experienced as a form of self-death, a deeply narcissistic wound. The injury has a profound, (dis)orienting effect upon their developing sense of self, and is perceived as unequivocally altering the trajectory of their lives. In Night Swimming, for instance, Marie's best friend Jenny disappears forever at the conclusion of their last year of high school. On the other side of the world, fifteen years on, Marie is thrust into the past when she thinks she sees Jenny on a train. "How unformed I was", Marie recalls, "before I met Jenny. How she altered me".32 Marie revisits her first meeting with Jenny, and how they soon became allies, "tied together by confidences, admissions, secrets and promises":33

271 I knew her like a lover. Better than a lover: for…we formed ourselves together, tried to make ourselves in another image: the image of what we wanted to be…We were a double-barrelled entity: JennyandMarie.34

After Jenny's disappearance, although her body is never found, the evidence suggests she has drowned herself. Bereft, Marie moves to the other side of the world, imagining that she is making a "cut" from her past and from her grief for Jenny. Years on, following her sighting of someone who may or may not be Jenny, Marie realises that she has never stopped grieving for her friend. The grief, she reflects, "is like water that has slowly seeped into soul: invisible, yet still running the concealed root network, the subterranean life".35 Marie realises, for the first time consciously, that she perceives her life as consisting of two distinct parts: before Jenny disappeared, and after.

Like Marie, one of the narratives by which I "know" myself is that before I met M., my character was largely unformed. M. was "my catalyst",36 and her death brutally interrupted my becoming. For a long time, I felt that I had died with her. Actually, my psychic and affective life had temporarily stalled, in shock. If I thought I knew myself only in relation to M., as part of a "double-barrelled entity", where did her death leave me? It was like being thrust into a time, a space, prior to language. It was a period of profound undifferentiation. M. died at a time when I was only beginning to "make" an adult self (on the eve of my 21st birthday, that moment in Western culture which symbolises one's supposed graduation into adulthood) and when the self that I was engaged in "making" was so utterly invested in my passionate identification with her. As a result of her suicide, the meaning of that identification was called into painful and confronting question, and I was left to decide how to negotiate it. Given the many rich literary depictions of friendship between young women, and indeed, of grief when such friendships end through death or some other traumatic event, the paucity of critical

272 examinations of bereavement turning on such relationships is particularly notable. While in this thesis I do not perform such an examination in any explicit sense, my work functions, among other things, as a testimony to the crisis of loss in the context of friendship between young women. In this regard it makes a contribution to a still nascent field.

§

While choosing to incorporate aspects of my subjective history into the thesis, I have been wary of falling into the trap of "fetishizing the authority of 'personal experience' understood in terms of 'the purely narrative, autobiographical I, or the I that expresses only affect'".37 This desire to avoid essentialising "the personal" is one of the primary reasons I write fictocritically rather than solely in the form of say, autobiography or memoir. According to Raymond Federman, "a writer should have the courage of his own narcissism".38 I seek to make this requirement overt to avoid giving the impression that I am liberating an "authentic form of subjectivity";39 an "I" that "[appears] to drop all pretence and speak frankly, honestly, and candidly".40 In short, my view is that "personal" writing "is not and cannot be an innocent, naive form of expression, [rather] it is a strategic one that mobilises particular 'experiences' and 'events' into narratives—or anti-narratives—with a view to particular effects."41 By incorporating aspects of my subjective history, I am not attempting to "authenticate" the text, but rather, to provide a site of alternate, ethical entry into and engagement with its material, both for myself as writer and for my readers.

The periodic adoption of the "personal voice", for want of a better term, achieves this by fragmenting and unsettling the flow42 of the narrative conventions associated with scholarly discourse. The text that is produced exceeds the limitations of "the thesis". It "begins" and "ends" elsewhere, although these terms are themselves contestable. In other words, the text does

273 not offer itself as in any sense a complete narrative. The subjective history it engages is clearly ongoing and replete with certain emphases and omissions. I am unable to accede to Terry Threadgold's claim that feminist textual theories and practices must "stress the scientific and ethical importance of never being satisfied with half the story or with the silences in stories", at least not in relation to "stories" that people construct/tell about their own lives.43 Such a claim runs counter to the argument I have made about narrative preoccupation in mourning, but, more importantly, it also flies in the face of my own writing practice, which is explicitly invested in resisting the notion that experience can be mimetically rendered by discursive means, and which approaches "story" as a constructed rather than an immanent thing.

I wish to emphasise that what I have unfolded in this thesis is a possible approach to thinking about the kind of life that loss makes possible.44 For the most part, bereavement and its products tend to be regarded as impoverishing rather than generative. It seems we struggle to affirm in public discourse the plenitude and creativity that can accompany loss, even as we may recognise it in the context of our own lives. In proposing a theory of productive mourning I have sought to redress this. In effect, I have hypothesised what Adam Phillips would call a "secular maintenance myth"—a version of events capable of sustaining our interest in the project of living despite the destruction and suffering that life entails. There is a risk that this version of events may be interpreted in a way that idealises mourning as "a pure and sacred" site, as Judith Butler puts it, 45 something that Phillips has himself warned against. I have tried to make clear the extent to which I reject this interpretation. As Jane Flax argues, "why would a radical critic of Western culture privilege anything [in particular] as the metaphor, exemplar or constitutor of human experience?"46

In the end, this thesis is an attempt to work critically with the effect of my own mourning experience, which has involved an intimate acquaintance

274 with what the poet Emily Dickinson called "Internal difference/Where the Meanings, are".47 An awareness and occupation of this difference has become, to adapt the language of Butler's aphorism,48 the condition by which I "risk" my life. By dying, and in dying as she did, M. forced me to radically question my self in a way that she did not, and could not, when she was alive. Her death was somehow too real; it sufficiently alienated me from her and in turn, from myself, in such a way as to enable me to undertake this work of (re)interpretation. Where originally I conceived of M.'s death as a violation of my identity, I now experience it as a kind of ever-present "interference",49 "a form of displacement and resistance… a space of relation and relocation, a place from which I [can] think and speak and write, a home on the border".50 For me, this is the essence of productive mourning. As Kathleen Finneran has said, "what we get instead of answers, if we're blessed, we get these little beautiful creations that we make from our pain and that can satisfy us on some level. But, it's not over."51

1 Phillips, Darwin's Worms. p127. 2 Robert Kastenbaum, "Reconstructing Death in Postmodern Society". Omega, 1993, 27 (1). pp.75-89. p77. 3 Zoe Sofoulis, "Icon, Referent, Trajectory, World". Re:Public (Ien Ang et al. eds.), op.cit. p18. 4 Ruth Barcan, "Space for the Feminine". Re:Public (Ien Ang et al. eds.), op.cit. p42. 5 Anne Bickford and Siobhan Lavelle, "Places to Mourn Diana". Re:Public (Ien Ang et al. eds.), op.cit. p62. 6 Catharine Lumby, "Vanishing Point". Re:Public (Ien Ang et al. eds.), op.cit. p109. 7 New York: Marlowe & Company, 2005 8 Rufus, op.cit.p223. 9 Bartrop et al., op.cit. 10 Dowrick, op.cit. pp.310-11. 11 Dineen, op.cit. p50. 12 Ian Craib, Experiencing Identity. London: Sage, 1998. p.157. 13 Adam Phillips, Side Effects, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006. p84. 14 Craib, p.164. 15 Contributors to this body of work include Jacques Derrida, Dominick LaCapra, Alessia Riccardi and Gail Holst-Warhaft. 16 Flax, op.cit. p209. 17 Flax, op.cit. p217. 18 Flax, op.cit. p232. 19 John Jordan and Robert A. Neimeyer, "Does Grief Counselling Work?"Death Studies, 2003, 27 (9). pp.765-786. 20 Jordan and Neimeyer, op.cit. p778. 21 Jordan and Neimeyer, op.cit. p780.

275

22 For an analysis of the facilitating role of the therapist, see Frank Summers, "What I Do With What You Give Me: Therapeutic Action as the Creation of Meaning". Psychoanalytic Psychology, Fall 2001, 18 (4). pp.635-655. 23 John Archer, The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss. London: Routledge, 1999. pp.219-222. 24 Archer, op.cit. p219. 25 Charmaz, op.cit. p235. 26 See M.D Reed and J.Y. Greenwald, "Survivor-victim status, attachment, and sudden death bereavement". Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior, Winter 1991, 21 (4). pp.385-401. 27 Hoffman, op.cit. pp.3-4. 28 Center for the Advancement of Health, "Report on Bereavement and Grief Research". Death Studies, 2004, 28. pp.491-575. p537. See also D. Balk and C. Corr, "Bereavement during adolescence: A review of research", M. Stroebe et al. (eds.), Handbook of Bereavement: Consequences, coping and care. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2001. 29 Trans. Tim Parks. New York: New Directions, 1991. 30 Milsons Point: Anchor, 1999. 31 Trans. Brendan Freely. London: Serpent's Tail, 2005. 32 Neale, op.cit. p.21. 33 Neale, op.cit. p.42. 34 Neale, op.cit. p.17-18. 35 Neale, op.cit.p.192. 36 Neale, op.cit.p.75. 37 Luce Irigaray, quoted by Elizabeth Hirsch and Gary A. Olsen, "'Je-Luce Irigaray': a meeting with Luce Irigaray". Hypatia, Spring 1995, 10 (2). pp.93-115. p94. 38 Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany: SUNY Press, 1993. p88. 39 Candace Lang, "Autocritique", Veeser (ed.), op.cit. p50. 40 Lang, op.cit. p40. 41 Lang, op.cit. p50 42 Elspeth Probyn, "True Voices and Real People: The 'problem' of the autobiographical in cultural studies", Valda Blundell, John Shepard and Ian Taylor (eds.), Relocating Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1993. p115. 43 Terry Threadgold, Feminist Poetics: Poesies, Performance, Histories. London: Routledge, 1997. p133. 44 Phillips, Darwin's Worms. p63. 45 Judith Butler, "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification". Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1995, 5 (2). pp.189-193. 46 Flax, op.cit. p228. 47 Dickinson, Poem 258. op.cit. 48 Quoted as an epigraph to Part 4. 49 "If we long to call absolute alterity 'space', we must acknowledge that we are, by being human, violators of the purity of space. Therefore we must try to reduce violation into interference", Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Lives". Veeser (ed.), op.cit. p219. 50 Marianne Hirsch, "Pictures of a Displaced Girlhood". Veeser (ed.), op.cit. p138. 51 Kathleen Finneran, quoted at www.thehonoluluadvertiser.com/article/2003/Sep/07/il/il05a.html. Accessed 21 September 2005.

276 Postscript

June something or other, enough years past. I no longer believe in monuments, memorials, that in the beginning was the word.1 In the beginning was actually never somewhere that existed. Nothing is indelible, synchronic; not even ink upon the page. What exists is only an incessant displacement towards an embodied time2 which can be returned to never. I write in the knowledge of these endless deconstructions and reconstructions of the scene (of your leaving). What I'm after is something they call interdiscursivity, I call emotional texture.3 Transformation over petrification.4 Writing literally as a way out of being scared to death,5 writing against anything that seeks to obliterate what frightens me, therefore you. In this, my thirty-first year, I continue to dream of you. Sometimes, you are there in photographs that do not exist; evidence that slips mercilessly between my fingers when I awake. Your death altered my life irrevocably. I don't need anyone else to understand that. I know the meaning of your life is not the manner of your death. You are dead and not forgotten by the people who loved you. This is enough. You are dead and it is your right to rest in peace. It is ten years on; I have decided to become a mother. In childbirth I will think of you. Dearest Bell. Take my hand, what do you read there? The chronicle of a long life and all the forgotten loss. Rhythm of words passed from life to life.6 This will be my last letter for now. I kiss you and the world knows it is time.

1 See Julia Kristeva's discussions on the opposition of poetic language to "monumental" discourses of cultural conservatism, especially in Revolution in Poetic Language and New Maladies of the Soul. (Trans Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) 2 "an incessant displacement [towards an] embodied time": Julia Kristeva, "Logics of the Sacred and Revolt", Lechte and Zournazi (eds.), op.cit. p28. 3 "emotional texture": Blau du Plessis, "For the Etruscans". p275.

279

4 See Juliana de Nooy's "How to Keep Your Head...", Lechte and Zournazi (eds.), op.cit. "Petrification or transformation" (p56). 5 See Kristeva's Powers of Horror: "...metaphorising in order to keep from being frightened to death". p38. 6 Winterson, op.cit. pp.143-144.

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