Variations on the Ethics of Mourning in Modern Literature in French

Preface

With mourning we shall never be done, despite being enjoined constantly to ‘work through it’, and rise above the melancholy that threatens to engulf us in the ordeal of losing our loved ones. It is, each and every time, a singular experience, and a private one (in the sense also of privation, of being deprived of the addressee to whom one should like to go on talking); it is a shared experience, too – mourning disrupts the order of time by inserting into what we took for its steady passage a fissure or a chasm.

Mourning is an intensely personal experience, one that entails a suffering which seems to petrify words and even physical and emotional reactions, and this is why it has everything to do with literature. We are cut off from our companion, from the person who was our interlocutor (in mind or in reality) and to whom we were going to say this, or to confide the other; we are plunged into a kind of linguistic stupor, where the words are too banal, used to fill the modern emptiness, the social rituals that surround and ease this rite of passage. The Covid pandemic we are undergoing even as I write, by turning all these recent deaths into a series of statistics, and by limiting the numbers allowed to attend funerals, is a cruel reminder of this deprivation, and of how mourning as a shared, meaningful ritual has been palpably emptied out.

To put this more exactly, let me take as my principal inspiration the volume Deuil et littérature, (Mourning and Literature), which came out in the collection Modernités in 2005: the experience of mourning is intimately linked to the new, modern definition of what was meant by ‘literature’, that is, a personal expression, a way of holding on to a world the chasm of time swallows before our eyes. The unceasing task being to hold on to what unceasingly vanishes.

The collection of papers gathered here by Carole Bourne-Taylor and Sara-Louise Cooper sets us in a new direction, by varying points of view and renewing the works under consideration. To discuss books of mourning requires that the critic, in his or her turn, strike the right tone, between pity and analysis, between empathy and distance, between a keen feeling for what is lost and a responsiveness to the power of evocation, of calling someone back. The work of re-reading here reminds us of the decorum ←xii | xiii→required of the other, the ethical dimension that envelops works of literature, and the patient attention it takes, to give to the unending time of mourning a rhythm and a speech.

Death is the ultimate alterity and the ultimate referent, inescapable in its reality and its unreality, its concreteness and its abstraction; the telos and the process, the finale and the basso continuo; unknowable yet intractable, evidential yet enigmatic: that which imparts intensity to life. The Covid-19 pandemic is the latest tragedy, on an epic scale, that has brought this paradox into sharp focus, an emotional mix exacerbated by a fraught political climate. Death has suddenly become an omnipresent and imminent possibility for each of us. Faced with the evidence of disaster, we have come to think of ourselves as both witnesses and survivors. Embedded within the pandemic is the death of George Floyd,¹ the personal tragedy a symptom of the monstrosity of endemic collective violence and a matter of global concern. This against the background of humanitarian conflicts, including the ongoing migrant crisis with its bodies washed away unmourned.² The pandemic may have prompted a new ‘visibility’ of death in the sense of its ubiquity, but the singularity of each death is eclipsed by the magnitude of the collective toll. A sense of loss that is certainly growing at an alarming rate, prompted by ‘the three contemporary deaths’: ‘atomic; terrorist; climactic’,³ forever accompanied by the Shoah’s lingering trauma of annihilation.

Loss, too, is carried along by a paradox: it is acute, yet diffuse; intimately felt, yet universally applicable; specific, yet all-encompassing. The particularity of loss exists against the background of its genericity.⁴ What we are, what we do, what we love, is doomed to loss.⁵ Loss is not only directed to what was, but also, and perhaps more poignantly, to what might have been or might never be. Longing overflows nostalgia, a feeling all the more overwhelming as it is undefinable. Imagination roams freely over the infinite hinterland of lack which trails off into a plethora of persistent phantasms, its pain being as interminable as death is sudden; an absence so intense that it may, paradoxically, take on the ‘thereness of a presence’.⁶