Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism

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Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism

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Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism Tammy Clewell

© Tammy Clewell 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23194–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from Library of Congress 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Rethinking Loss; Remapping the Novel

1

Part I Inceptions 1 Woolf and the Great War Female grief becomes feminist grievance in Jacob’s Room Mourning art in To the Lighthouse

25 27 39

2

56 58

Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction Bereavement and commodity culture in As I Lay Dying Historicizing trauma, traumatizing history, and Requiem for a Nun

74

Part II Legacies 3

Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited Gothic ruins and English remains in A Handful of Dust Consolation and heritage in Brideshead Revisited

93 96 112

4

The Sexual Politics of Mourning Grief, the closet, and Donoghue’s Hood Desire and the lost object in Winterson’s Written on the Body

129 131 145

Notes

158

Index

181

v


Acknowledgments I could not have written this book without the many teachers, colleagues, and friends who provided assistance and encouragement along the way. First, I wish to thank R. M. Berry for his guidance of my dissertation, which was the basis for Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism. His classes in modernist literature were inspirational and his integrity as a person and scholar has offered me a model of academic professionalism. Brian Baer, Claire Culleton, Barry Faulk, Greg Forter, S. E. Gontarski, W. T. Lhamon, Patricia Rae, Linda Saladin-Adams, and Philip Tew offered valuable insights and criticisms at various stages of this project. I would also like to express my appreciation to Paula Kennedy, my editor, for her support and kindness, and to Steven Hall and Peter Andrews. Three anonymous readers at Palgrave Macmillan offered insightful criticism and I am grateful for their assistance. My colleagues at Kent State University have been remarkably supportive, particularly Mark Bracher, Ron Corthell, and Ray Craig. I recognize as well Vera Camden and Susanna Fein for their encouragement of my work. My deepest gratitude goes to Kevin Floyd and Florence Dore, colleagues who have enlivened my thinking and enriched my life. I thank Florence, especially, for her persistent encouragement and exceptionally perceptive criticism of the introduction. Only she knows how essential her support has been in seeing me through the ending. A section of the Introduction appeared, in much different form, as “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, no. 1 (2004): 43–67. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 1 (2004): 197–223. I am grateful to The Division of Research and Graduate Studies at Kent State University for a 2003 Research Appointment, which enabled me to complete a portion of the book. David Farnan lived with the writing of most of this book for a good long time. I thank him, among other things, for the rooms of my own in New York, Tallahassee, Kent, and Cleveland where the reading, thinking, and writing got done. I dedicate this book to him. vii

viii

Acknowledgments

I am fortunate to have a family whose support has sustained me during the writing of this book. My gratitude goes to Helga Jones, my mother, for having stopped a while back asking about the book’s progress and to Robert Clewell, my father, for never neglecting to inquire when the book might be finished. In addition to my parents, Doug, Ruth, Donna, and Julie have brought love, laughter, and joy to my life. Finally, I thank David Bennett for providing the sense of a beginning.

Introduction: Rethinking Loss; Remapping the Novel

Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. (Sigmund Freud, Letter to Binswanger) It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx) In the opening decades of the twentieth century, novelists on both sides of the Atlantic found themselves at a loss. While earlier writers had surely broken from past traditions, they faced a new kind of problem. Heirs to a cultural past they refused to inherit or decisively mourn, writers as disparate as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner thus construed history itself as in some sense impossible. These novelists recognized the need to mourn a range of cataclysmic social events, including the slaughter of war, modernization of culture, and the disappearance of God and tradition. They also understood, however, the impossibility of this mourning, finding its terms utterly outmoded. While they felt compelled to write about modernity’s losses, these writers participated in the critique of Victorian 1

2


mourning practices widely reported in the mainstream press.1 They ridiculed the social rituals of nineteenth- century grief as dubious expressions of sentimentality, ostentatious displays of wealth, and sources of financial anxiety and workingclass hardship. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism demonstrates that the dissolution of the very customs of bereavement reflected a fundamentally new way of thinking about loss, one that generated, crucially, the unique aestheticism of the modernist novel. Modernist aesthetics, as I show, engages an innovative conception of mourning; it not only reflects a shift in emphasis from the communal to the psychic dimensions of grief, but also spurns consolation and the conventional aim of closure. In so doing, the aesthetic practices of this experimental fiction established a politically progressive politics of mourning for the culture of modernity. The modernist novel, as we shall also see, defined the terms of a new mourning practice for later writers, terms whose democratizing aims would be challenged and rejected in the late-modernist fiction of Evelyn Waugh but ultimately reanimated and extended in the postmodern novels of Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson, novels that succeed, like their modernist precursors, in representing the open- ended aspects of loss to promote new forms of identity and social change. Inaugurated in the modernist fiction of Woolf and Faulkner, the conception of mourning as an interminable rather than finishable labor resulted from a steadfast rejection of all symbolic forms of consolation: religious, philosophical, and cultural sources of meaning that promised to neutralize bereaved sadness and bring mourning to an end. We have tended to think, however, that while the modernist novel shores up the instabilities of inherited meaning, it also constitutes a renewal of consolation for the modern age. Leo Bersani, for one, has claimed that modernist writers represent the formal unity of their own fictional inventions as a source of consolation for loss, the only consolation, in fact, they perceive to be available in a world where epistemological certainty and social stability have disappeared.2 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism challenges the view of the modernist novel as an aesthetic form of consolation, and thus intervenes, as I discuss below, in recent scholarly debates about modernism, consolation, and the cultural politics of mourning. In what follows, I argue the idea of formal unity that has come to define modernist aesthetics, a unity that has been used to impugn

Introduction

3

modernism as an autonomous, nostalgic, and elitist literary practice, actually collapses around an internal resistance to consolation. This collapse, as my study shows, does not yield a conservative fixation on the past but a politically progressive revision of what it means to mourn, a revision I term “ongoing mourning” and articulate as sustained rather than severed attachments to loss. Moreover, because we have understood postmodern fiction as dismantling the purely aesthetic tendency of modernism, I identify an abiding structural continuity, while also attending to divergences, in the relationship between the modernist and postmodernist narration of loss. Ibhab Hassan, Andreas Huyssen, and Patricia Waugh, to cite the most influential critics on the question of postmodernism’s challenge to modernist aesthetics, contend that, while postmodern literature sustains modernism’s skepticism toward transcendence, it abandons the redemptive properties and elitist tendencies of modernist form by submitting its own fictional constructs to the operations of critical scrutiny, self-reflexivity, and indeterminancy.3 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, in contrast, argues that a significant strand of postmodern fiction is constituted by a misread aspect of modernism; postmodern writers jettison the same sort of transcendent consolation in literary form that their modernist forebears did. In a manner similar to Woolf and Faulkner, postmodern writers including Emma Donoghue and Jeanette Winterson represent the ongoing mourning of loss by adamantly refusing consolation, which has taken a variety of forms in the twentieth century: the conception of death as the great social leveler, the religious doctrine of the soul’s immortality, the idea of nature as a cycle of decline and rebirth, and, perhaps most significantly, the notion of literature as an aestheticization of loss. Similar to their modernist precursors, in fact, postmodern writers exhibit hostility toward consolation and its therapeutic imperative to finish the work of mourning. Postmodernist writers reanimate modernism’s refusal of consolation—including the anesthetizing potential of the aesthetic—by demonstrating how consolatory paradigms express a bourgeois ideology: one that both reinforces a capitalist status quo and facilitates the forgetting of lost others and lost histories by insisting on closure. They show, as did the modernists before them, how the resistance to completed mourning makes loss available for what David Eng and David Kazanjian describe as alternative meanings of the past and alternative identifications in the

4


present.4 The postmodern writers in my study discover in their modernist forebears a more vital relationship to loss, as well as a politics and ethics of mourning, in the refusal of consolation and the obligation not to heal but to sustain bereaved memory for the work of establishing new constellations for identity and culture. Bersani’s account of modernism is indebted, of course, to JeanFrançois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. Since the publication of this seminal work, we have tended to evaluate modernism as an aestheticization of loss, a literary practice whose nostalgia tethers it to the very discourses, traditions, and beliefs that it describes as lost. In distinguishing the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, Lyotard argued that the former betrays its own representation of psychic, linguistic, and social fragmentation by imposing a unified and pleasing form on the ruptures of modern life. He claimed that both modernists and postmodernists create texts that give expression to “the unpresentable,” by which he means the undefinable gaps and unpredictable openings of future social possibilities once the totalizing master narratives of emancipation, including the Enlightenment story of the triumph of rationality and the Marxist account of workingclass liberation, have been dismantled as fictional constructs rather than objective truths about the world.5 But if both modernism and postmodernism present the unpresentable, if they similarly erode the legitimacy of discourse, what distinguishes the two, according to Lyotard, is an aesthetic of nostalgia belonging exclusively to modernist literature. As he argued in an often- cited and influential passage, modernist aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. (81) Far from a literature of cultural opposition, modernism, on this score, reveals a nostalgic inability to abandon epistemological foundations and transcendental securities fully. Postmodernism, by contrast, invalidates “the nostalgia for the unattainable” insofar as it “denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for

Introduction

5

the unattainable” (81). The postmodern novel, according to Lyotard, destabilizes all discourse, including its own fictional constructs, so that it can “invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented,” invent, that is, radically new social possibilities for the future (81). Lyotard conceives of the postmodern not as a historical successor to modernism but a rewriting of it from within, and while Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism also seeks to blur the lines of demarcation that have too rigidly separated the two, I argue that Lyotard’s theory both depends on yet misconstrues the question of mourning.6 Modernist aesthetics, he claims, constitutes a melancholy discourse; it fails to mourn the metanarratives of emancipation successfully. Lyotard locates this failed mourning in the formal consistency of modernist aesthetics, which he regards as a replacement for lost truth, transcendence, and certainty, a replacement, in his view, that links modernism to a regressive status quo. Postmodernism, conversely, successfully mourns the loss of metanarrative by dislocating its own aestheticizing impulses from within; the auto-referentiality of the postmodern text, Lyotard maintains, is not melancholic in the sense of pointing backwards but affirmative insofar as it gestures, more radically than in modernism, toward future possibilities that emerge when that last bastion of metanarrative pretense—the pleasurable consistency of literary form—has been delegitimated. And yet, in making postmodernism and what he calls its “stronger sense of the unpresentable” dependent on the successful mourning of metanarrative, Lyotard’s theory forecloses the possibility of understanding sustained attachments to loss as anything other than a retrograde move: a socially conservative gesture.7 We might note as well that he conceives of the unpresentable in postmodernism as a radical liberation of the aesthetic from history and the institutional practices that would otherwise circumscribe it. Such a conception, it is important to understand, bars postmodern literature from the representation of any discernable social aspiration or definable vision for culture.8 If Lyotard’s theory fails to grasp the significance of modernism’s deliberate challenge to the consolatory closure of mourning, it also appears incapable of accounting for the recent strain of postmodern fiction my book analyzes, a strain that not only addresses quintessentially modernist questions of narrative, memory, and duration, but also employs a thoroughly auto-referential mode of

6


writing without invalidating the novel’s capacity to promote affirmative social content. In these novels, as we shall see, experiences of loss are shown to be resistant to the kind of working through and completed mourning that Lyotard holds up as the hallmark of postmodernism. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, as my readings clarify, argues the so- called failure to mourn in modernism, a failure that has been construed by certain theorists of postmodernism as a reflection of its conservatism, actually promoted gender, racial, and class diversity in the opening decades of the century, as well as provided postmodern writers with the terms for a contemporary leftist critique and socially progressive literary practice. How, we need to ask, do the modernist novels of Woolf and Faulkner establish the impossibility of a position beyond mourning and thus free us from a politically nostalgic aestheticism? How does Waugh’s late-modernist work, which promulgates a renewal of consolation for the loss of history’s hegemonies, provide us with an indispensable counterexample that clarifies how completed mourning creates a fixed and stable narrative of the past, a narrative that is closed to alternative meanings and supports old-style bourgeois hierarchies? How, finally, does the renewal of ongoing mourning in a strain of postmodern fiction reflect a structural continuity between modernism and postmodernism that has not yet been appreciated, as well as shift our understanding of postmodernist aesthetics from the purely auto-referential and toward the political? In responding to these questions, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism pursues two paths of inquiry. “Inceptions,” Part I of the book, argues that Woolf and Faulkner reinvent mourning by rejecting consolation and advocating sustained rather than severed attachments to loss; this reinvention, moreover, is embedded in the aesthetic forms, as well as thematic content, of their modernist novels. In this part, I show how Woolf’s representation of loss articulates itself around the question of gender, Faulkner’s around class and race. Far from creating a satisfying aesthetic, both writers, as my chapters discuss, render the lost object in terms of what Woolf called “invisible presences.”9 This oxymoronic coupling gives expression to a duality in the modernist conception of loss, a conception that apprehends both the absolute disappearance of the object and the enduring personal traces and social legacies that loss manages to leave behind. I address how the apparent consistency of modernist form collapses around an excess

Introduction

7

attributed to the lost object, an excess that resists consolation and cannot be expressed or contained within the novel’s formal structure. My chapters establish how Woolf and Faulkner represent the persistent attachment to the lost object not as a debilitating form of melancholia, but as a creative and productive engagement with the past that has important social consequences for the future. These writers reveal how new significations of gender, class, and race emerge in the ongoing mourning of loss and critical encounter with history. “Legacies,” the book’s second part, examines two distinct cultural moments—late modernism and postmodernism—to make the argument that a refusal of consolatory closure in the later part of the twentieth century establishes a politics and ethics of mourning that promotes cultural diversity. The section begins with the latemodernist novels of Waugh and interprets these texts as a counterexample of the productive possibilities of modernist mourning. In opposing the modernist reinvention of mourning, Waugh’s novels, I argue, culminate in a renewal of consolation, particularly a religious form of consolation, to staunch the disintegration of tradition, thwart the decline of upper- class privilege, and reject the democratizing forces that emerged in the aftermath of the Great War. His work raises issues of individual and collective loss in relation to the declining tradition of the country house, a tradition, as my chapter discusses, that is based upon rigid class hierarchies at home and imperial authority abroad. In advocating a renewal of religious faith that might console for the loss of the country house tradition and bring the work of mourning this loss to an end, Waugh’s novels make abundantly clear how consolation and completed mourning serve a bourgeois social order, one that unmistakably aligns itself with history’s old privileges. Waugh’s return to a concept of consolatory mourning does not simply serve as a counterexample to the productive possibilities of modernist narrations of loss. Rather, his work clarifies a certain risk entailed in any cultural politics grounded in an experience of bereavement. Loss always leaves behind a realm of remains; these remains, when animated by a politics of mourning, are made available for ever-new textual interpretations and the work of social change. As David Eng and David Kazanjian have pointed out, “This attention to remains generates a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking,

8


social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary.”10 “Might be” is the key phrase in their formulation, for the reactive and reactionary trajectory of Waugh’s fiction clarifies that loss may just as easily serve conservative social aims. We would do well, then, to take seriously the risk involved in any politics of mourning, a risk that is particularly pertinent in the case of Waugh, where the consolatory animus of his fiction makes it difficult to disentangle his critique of the excesses of the commercialization of culture from his ongoing identification with the nation’s most privileged class. We need to understood how Waugh’s nostalgia operates, how this nostalgia for the country house supports a tradition that Raymond Williams has associated with the coerced labor of the working classes and Edward Said with the financial exploitation of colonized nations.11 Only then might Waugh’s blatantly seductive form of critical nostalgia—and the conservative politics of consolatory mourning it generates—be fully appreciated and reworked differently. “Legacies” concludes with an examination of the postmodern novels of Donoghue and Winterson, texts that renew the modernist refusal of closure in the context of contemporary concerns about sexuality. Like the modernist writers who precede them, these lesbian writers defy consolation and represent ongoing mourning to advance a new kind of sexual politics; their novels address the restrictive ways in which lesbian identity has been socially constructed, as well as critique stereotypical designations that have come to distinguish homosexual and heterosexual concerns. Taken as a whole, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism departs from the assumption that modernist aesthetics cannot be discounted as a nostalgic discourse or elitist practice, and that the conservative nostalgia frequently ascribed to modernism is properly located in latemodernist fiction, though even here, as I show, this nostalgia takes a surprisingly more complex and seductive form than we have as yet understood. Neither can postmodern aesthetics, my study contends, be reduced to a purely auto-referential function that would foreclose the representation of an affirmative vision for culture. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism demonstrates, instead, how the aestheticism of the modernist and postmodernist novel has generated a practice of ongoing mourning that erupts with all the progressive aspirations of the cultural politics of subjectivity in the twentieth century.

Introduction

9

Scholars have recently reopened the question of mourning in literary modernism, and because work in this field has not produced anything close to a critical consensus, one thing is clear: disagreement abounds. Critics including Dominick LaCapra and Alessia Ricciardi argue that modernist literature constitutes a successful working through of loss, though they disagree about its significance. LaCapra, on the one hand, pitches the modernist completion of mourning over and against what he sees as poststructuralism’s fetishizing of an absence that cannot be mourned.12 Ricciardi, on the other, regards modernism’s “ ‘cool’ or ironic sense of alienation from the past” as a dismissal of the important, albeit difficult, “emotional and ethical burden” of mourning.13 Other critics, such as Jahan Ramazani, Seth Moglan, and Patricia Rae, view modernism as a repudiation of the concept of finishable mourning, but diverge in their assessment of this repudiation. Ramazani, whose work has been foundational in the field of modernist mourning as well as a source of inspiration for Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, identifies the rejection of consolation in modern poetry as an expression of a progressive social critique; he argues that “anticompensatory literary responses to intimate death, whatever their political affiliations, do potentially valuable and resistant work in the social sphere.”14 Moglan, conversely, defines two strands of American modernism—“melancholic modernism” and the “modernism of mourning”—and claims that melancholic modernists, those writers who emphasized the impossibility of finishable mourning, put forward fundamentally conservative visions of culture; they resigned themselves to the loss of literature’s potential to promote significant social change. Melancholic modernists, as Moglan argues, presented “the crisis of modernity as an inexorable and mysterious trauma” and thereby “expressed the anguish of modernity but evaded troubling political questions.”15 Rae’s 2007 collection Modernism and Mourning includes in a single volume this interpretative variance, with some scholars arguing that modernism’s failure to mourn indicates political progressivism, others social conservatism. This variance prompts Rae, in her “Introduction,” to suggest that we “assess the political significance of rejecting, or failing to do, the work of mourning on a case-bycase basis, with a view to the nature of the thing being stubbornly missed and lamented.”16

10 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism

Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism does not offer itself, then, as the definitive word on modernist mourning, and how could it, given that the very term modernism, at least since the emergence of the “new modernist studies” in the early 1990s, has been redefined not as a singularity but plurality of writing strategies that encompass various social, even global, agendas? Nor does the book intend to provide an exhaustive literary history of twentieth- century mourning. What I do bring to critical debates about modernist mourning, however, is an account of how the aestheticism of high modernism—an aestheticism celebrated in the New Criticism as an escape from the political and critiqued by later theorists as a nostalgic, institutionalized, and elitist practice—generated a conception of ongoing mourning that challenged the contemporaneous status quo and provided a vital resource for postmodern writers interested in combating the sexual prejudice, the waning of affect, and ahistoricism characteristic of postmodern culture.17 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism not only claims that ongoing mourning reveals a structural continuity between the modernist and postmodernist novel; it also argues that the ability of mourning to forge new constellations for psychic and social life has best been served over the course of the twentieth century by the adamant refusal of consolation, as well as the resolve to confront loss without the expectation of closure or the imposition of fixed meanings. I depart from the assumption that at this early stage in the twenty-first century we have accepted the protracted temporalities of individual mourning and derived inspiration from contemporary memorials devoid of consolation, evidenced best, perhaps, by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence,” the winning design for the future National September 11 Memorial. If sustained mourning on the personal level has made us aware of our continued indebtedness to lost others and lost ideals, as difficult as the acknowledgment of this indebtedness can sometimes be, the countermemorial movement, to use James E. Young’s term for anti- consolatory memorializing practices, has emphasized our irrefutable obligation to remember the human costs of public tragedies as we seek to redress the social conditions that produced them.18 Readers of Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism will discover in the pages that follow, then, an account of the role that modernist and postmodernist novels have played in forging an anti- consolatory

Introduction

11

practice of ongoing mourning that is at once thoroughly political and deeply ethical. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism aligns itself with a body of modernist scholarship that Rita Felski has identified as “political formalism,” a methodological approach that draws on psychoanalysis and poststructuralism to discern the social meanings embedded in the aesthetic structures of a text.19 Over and against theories of the novel informed by the work of Michel Foucault, theories that have tended to reduce the aesthetic play of novelistic discourse to insidious forms of social governance and normative instantiation, my study offers a series of engaged readings intended to demonstrate how the aestheticism of modernist and postmodernist novels, particularly the gaps, ellipses, and silences condensed in its forms, frames the idea of the radical otherness of the lost other and the lost past in ways that facilitate social critique and invite us to imagine possibilities for productive change. The modernist and postmodernist novelists in my study consistently position their works against what they articulate as dominant assumptions about grief and mainstream practices of mourning. In so doing, they articulate the intersection between aesthetics and politics, producing novels that resist the doling out of consolation to promote gender, racial, class, and sexual diversity in the twentieth- century culture of the West. *** At roughly the same time modernist writers began to reject the idea of severing attachments to loss, Freud came to theorize mourning, as evidenced in my first epigraph, as a mental labor resistant to consolation and closure.20 This theory cannot be found, however, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” his best-known work on the subject of grieving.21 In this seminal 1917 essay, in fact, Freud removed mourning from the funerary customs that began to disintegrate by the close of the nineteenth century, but he also reformulated the consolation these Victorian rituals had once furnished as an internal and psychic phenomenon. In contrast to melancholia, construed as a pathological clinging to the object, Freud defined mourning, whether for a person or abstract ideal, as an emotional labor through which “the detachment of the libido is accomplished.”22 The work of mourning, as he described, entails a kind of hyper-remembering, a period of obsessive recollection during which the mourner magically

12


resuscitates the existence of the lost object in the space of the psyche. By replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence, the mourner establishes a mental space to perform the emotionally difficult and protracted labor of severing attachments to loss. But mourners do not simply detach libido from the lost object. According to Freud, they reinvest the freed libido in a new object, thereby accepting consolation in the form of a substitute for what has been lost and bringing the work of mourning to a decisive and “spontaneous end.” Governed by a logic of consolatory substitution, Freud’s early account of mourning should be understood, then, not as a confrontation with the disappearance of a unique object but a process geared toward restoring a certain economy of the subject, a subject that has been fortified against any lasting disturbance or psychic transformation caused by the object’s departure.23 His theory not only belongs to a longstanding epistemological and cultural tradition in which the subject acquires legitimacy at the expense of the object’s uniqueness and difference. It also reflects, as Martin Jay has addressed, one of the utopian goals of the modernist period: the injunction to “make it new” and leave the past completely behind.24 In The Ego and the Id (1923), however, a culminating moment in his psychoanalysis of loss, Freud removes his mourning theory from the strictures of consolatory closure.25 What Freud does, more specifically, is to revise the account of identification he put forth in “Mourning and Melancholia”; identification had been defined as an internalization of the lost object that resulted in a melancholic fixation on the lost object. Now, however, Freud concedes that he got it wrong; he depathologizes identification, defining this internalizing strategy as “the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects,” as well as fundamental to the primary formation and subsequent development of the ego.26 By defining the ego “as a precipitate of abandoned object- cathexes,” that is, a kind of embodied history of lost attachments, Freud significantly revises our understanding of what it means to mourn to loss (29). Mourning no longer entails detaching from the object and installing a consoling substitute, as it had in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Mourning, as The Ego and the Id lays out, depends on creating a figure for the lost object and taking this figure into the structure of one’s own identity in ways that constitute, decenter, and transform the psyche. Freud’s revised mourning theory jettisons the logic of consolatory substitution. By

Introduction

13

emphasizing the dynamics of internalization and the fundamental irreplaceability of the lost object, it also redefines mourning as an interminable labor, a process of sustaining and continuously refiguring our attachments to loss. Indeed, as Judith Butler has pointed out, Freud’s late mourning theory insists on the impossibility of completed mourning; it demonstrates that any final severance of the trace of the lost other in the self would necessarily dissolve the ego.27 “Inceptions,” the book’s first part, takes Freud’s account of anticonsolatory and ongoing mourning as a starting point to examine modernist narrations of loss. My readings of Woolf and Faulkner draw on psychoanalytic paradigms to articulate how modernist representations of mourning employ interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and first-person narration, literary techniques that locate the work of grief in the domain of the psyche, instead of socially shared rituals. This is in no way to imply, however, that the modernist novel propounds a notion of mourning as a purely private labor, a notion of privatized grief understood as taking place in the hidden recesses of a consciousness that is distanced from social concerns. Rather, these writers situate their representations of internal grief dynamics in the context of institutional practices and cultural pressures. In this regard, their novels reveal that mourning did not disappear from the sphere of the social in the opening decades of the century, as historians have argued. Philippe Ariès, for one, has claimed that technological development, secularization, and the hospitalization of dying resulted in the removal of death and disappearance of mourning from all forms of early twentieth-century social exchange.28 Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism, in contrast, demonstrates that mourning did not vanish from cultural life with the decline of Victorian funerary practices but reemerged in social discourse, particularly the discourse of the novel. Woolf and Faulkner, as my chapters detail, did more than represent mourning as a psychic phenomenon at a time when nineteenth-century communal rituals were disintegrating; they recognized, more fundamentally, that their novels might step in and provide a kind of shared mourning practice—a literary mourning practice—for a culture bereft of viable expressions of grief. Both writers, in fact, regarded modernist fiction as uniquely equipped to engage vexed experiences of individual and cultural loss. Woolf went so far as to claim that the term “elegy” might capture the preoccupations of her writing more accurately than the generic designation “novel”

14


and Faulkner, in one of the most often-cited lines in his fiction— “Between grief and nothing I will take grief”—highlighted the persistence of bereaved memory as a motivating impulse of his fiction.29 Their modernist novels filled a void in the culture of modernity, as my study addresses, by creating a social space and shared language for grief, a literary mourning discourse that negotiates, significantly, the intersection between the exigencies of public life and the seemingly private zones of bereaved consciousness. Since the opening decades of the twentieth century, it has become increasingly more urgent to consider how mourning might establish shared forms of cultural memory and foster the aims of social justice. In the work of Jacques Derrida, particularly in Specters of Marx, a study of the “spectral” status of Marxism in a post-communist world, mourning has emerged as a way to address contemporary forms of oppression, violence, and marginalization within global capitalism and the consumerism of postmodern culture.30 Unlike Lyotard, who regards postmodernism’s successful mourning of the metanarratives of emancipation as a positive move beyond the strangleholds of history, Derrida views sustained remembrance and the ongoing mourning of loss as a condition for politically progressive forms of social life. In a fashion similar to his notion of sustained mourning on the personal level, he offers an account of cultural loss that hinges on a notion of spectrality, which he defines as something that one does not know ... not out of ignorance, but because this non- object, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge.31 By situating loss within a complex economy of knowing and notknowing, Derrida pitches our capacity to be haunted by the past against the flattening of history, complacencies of the present, and detached ironies of postmodernity.32 History is not understood, then, as a recollection of singular events governed by a one- directional temporality, a conception, as Derrida argues, that has prompted historians including Francis Fukuyama to argue that the emergence of liberal democracy and capitalism around the globe marks the triumphant end of the long historical struggle for social progress and justice. Rather, as Derrida contends, history issues from a belated construction where bereaved memory and the spectral traces of past suffering

Introduction

15

have the potential to disrupt any pretense to an homogenous social totality and disclose ongoing forms of social injustice. By endorsing the impossibility of fully working through cultural loss, Derrida appeals to us, as my second epigraph suggests, to imagine how ongoing mourning might reanimate the promise of emancipation that postmodernity is said to have buried and decisively mourned.33 “Legacies,” the book’s second part, takes its conceptual bearings from Derrida’s work to address how postmodern novels represent new possibilities for collective mourning in a culture where consumerism and mass media have increasingly come to mediate the grieving of loss. In stark contrast to the rejection of the emancipatory potential of ongoing mourning that I detail in Waugh’s late-modernist fiction, the postmodern novels of Donoghue and Winterson employ auto-referential modes of writing that do not simply highlight their own embeddedness in commodity culture; these texts also suggest how the marketplace has regulated the cultural emergence of the postmodern lesbian subject, a marketplace that caters to mainstream and countercultural consumers not simply by fostering but also by delimiting the possibilities for sexual identity. In seeking to contest the homogenization of homosexual and heterosexual identities, these writers refuse to subsume the political project of emancipation to the parameters of cultural consumption. Donoghue, on the one hand, forges a personal mode of bereaved memory at odds with a lesbian commodity aesthetic and Winterson, on the other, challenges our ability to distinguish the loss of homosexual and heterosexual love by addressing how consumer culture has reduced both to the metonymies of desire. The postmodern narration of loss, as formulated by these writers, reinvigorates mourning for the contemporary period by renewing the modernist rejection of consolation and closure. But these postmodern novels, as Chapter 4 discusses, also move beyond the modernist emphasis on the psychic, interior, and individual aspects of grief. Both texts seek to foster a shared cultural memory of loss within consumer pop culture, one that is responsive to the notion of sexual identity as culturally constructed as well as to individual difference. *** The chapters that follow have been designed to unfold on several levels. Most obviously, they follow a historical chronology that begins

16


in the 1920s with Woolf and ends in the 1990s with Winterson. Within this historical sweep, a literary history emerges: this book moves from an examination of modernist, late modernist, and postmodernist fiction. But Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism is by no means intended as an exhaustive history of Western mourning and memorializing practices in the twentieth century. Rather, this book offers a focused study of the narrative preoccupations and aesthetic forms of some of the most experimental fiction of the century, a study that takes its cue from psychoanalytic and poststructural theories of loss and mourning, self and other, language and culture. More encompassing than even the theoretical underpinnings that inform this project, however, is the unifying argument that resounds in each of its chapters: a progressive politics of mourning, a politics that advances new social constellations for grief expression, new forms of modern subjectivity, and new collective forms of social life, has best been served by an adamant refusal of consolation by which the memory of loss is kept open for new significations. In an effort to provide evidence for this argument, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism not only addresses the relationship between consolation refused and the progressive social visions of Woolf, Faulkner, Donoghue, and Winterson; my book also seeks to instruct by negative example, discussing how the renewal of consolation in Waugh’s writing works in tandem with its fundamentally conservative cultural goals. In contradistinction to his late-modernist fiction, the modernist and postmodernist novels I examine in what follows consistently redefine the objects to be grieved and redefine the bereaved subjects who perform the grieving; these myriad encounters with loss stage and restage mourning to advance the emancipatory aspirations and progressive aims of the politics of twentieth-century culture. My first chapter, on Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, argues that the Great War galvanized Woolf’s effort to represent the psychic dynamics of grief and rethink the construction of cultural memory for the modern age. Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third published novel but first thoroughly modernist text, provides a starting point to illustrate how a radical experiment in novelistic form establishes a new representation of mourning. The novel’s refusal to console for the wartime death of its protagonist, as I discuss, arises in stark contrast to the consolatory animus that drove widespread public efforts to memorialize soldiers killed on the battlefield; at the very same

Introduction

17

time, the text critiques the erosion of social gains women made during the war years when surviving combatants returned home after the war. This resistance to consolation, a resistance I also address in relation to book reviews Woolf published on war-related subjects, seeks to transform private female grief into public feminist grievance, demonstrating how Woolf’s postwar mourning practice works in relation to her feminist vision of modernity. The chapter draws on the work of Derrida, as well as of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, to discuss how the absence left after Jacob Flanders’s battlefield death demands to be interpreted, even as it resists the imposition of meanings. In the very process of narrating loss, Woolf’s novel frames the idea of the radical otherness of the lost other as both an ethical response to wartime death and an appeal for gender reform in the years following the Armistice. My reading of To the Lighthouse moves on to a consideration of Woolf’s attempt to redefine maternal mourning in the light of the war years. In contrast to a body of scholarship that has interpreted her feminist challenge to the patriarchal war machine largely in isolation from the formal complexities of her writing, I consider Woolf’s politics as inseparable from her aesthetic practice. The section begins by tracing her novel’s rejection of Victorian mourning, a rejection that was motivated by the gendering of loss in the nineteenth century. In this context I discuss The Mausoleum Book, an elegiac narrative written by Woolf’s father on the occasion of his wife’s death, a text that Woolf critiqued in her nonfiction and challenged in To the Lighthouse as overtly consolatory and idealistic. Woolf distances mourning from the imperative of consolation in the famous “Time Passes” section of the novel, as well as in Lily Briscoe’s effort to create an elegiac tribute to the lost mother figure. In arguing for the need to evaluate Woolf’s work not as an exception to but exemplar of a modernist aesthetic practice, I discuss how the painting, like the novel itself, articulates ceaseless mourning and the ongoing reinterpretation of loss as a vital component of the work of culture. Chapter 2, on As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, situates Faulkner’s narration of loss within the context of the modernization of American life, attending to the ways an increasingly commercialized culture denies the fact of death and the relevance of the historical past. As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s story of a family’s journey to bury the lost mother, might be read as a record of lost intimacy, a nostalgic


longing for a time prior to hospitalization of dying and the rise of the modern funeral industry. However, as I argue, Faulkner’s black comedy, his “burlesque of all bereavement,” satirizes the depiction of a sick woman dying comfortably in her home and her family’s journey to bury her. In tracing the disintegration of a collapsing funerary tradition, the novel demonstrates how mourning reemerges in the context of commodity culture; it critiques, specifically, the family’s attempt to fill the absence created by Addie’s death with an array of mass-produced consumer goods. Faulkner’s text, I claim, dismantles the logic by which a commodity might substitute and compensate for a lack. The novel discovers, significantly, an anti- consolatory mourning practice not in any character who affects a distance from commercial culture but in those who accept their embeddedness within it, locating within the spaces and fault lines of modernity a performance of mourning that refuses to circulate within an economy of profit and material gain. Requiem for a Nun, the focus of the chapter’s second section, constitutes Faulkner’s effort to remove the construction of personal and cultural memory from the established victors of Southern society and history. I argue the experimental form of the text—part drama, part narrative—employs the fractured temporality characteristic of trauma. In drawing on Cathy Caruth’s influential theory of trauma and in reading the text as articulating a set of concerns that more recent trauma theorists have only begun to address, I show how the text’s traumatic structure manages to uncover a spectral history, a collective mode of memory devoted to the unrecorded suffering of women, blacks, and American Indians. Faulkner’s work calls into question the distinction between the private and public, the individual and social; it juxtaposes the story of the traumatic repetitions that continue to unsettle Temple Drake eight years after her gruesome rape with an account of her Southern hometown and the history of racial exclusions and ethnic violence incurred during its founding nearly a century earlier. Faulkner’s text advances a mode of mourning individual and cultural loss that I contrast to the work of Dominick LaCapra and Gillian Rose, critics who both have recently advocated a return to the concept of successful or finishable mourning. If Faulkner’s text conveys a healthy skepticism about the very institutions in which trauma gets a hearing, it also represents mourning as a labor I call “ongoing convalescence,”

Introduction

19

a form of anti- consolatory and sustained grieving that seeks to promote new social constellations so that the replaying of traumatic effects and injurious histories might be shorn of their deadly consequences. The desire to escape the democratizing trajectories of modernist mourning is the focus in Chapter 3, where I attend to Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s late-modernist fiction develops an aesthetics of decay that is bent on transforming a critical form of nostalgia for the past into a socially regressive politics of mourning. Waugh’s work provides a counterexample to the progressive tendencies of the modernist refusal of consolation and closure; his fiction clarifies, crucially, that experiences of grief may spawn conservative agendas as easily as they might promote emancipatory aspirations and radical social change. In A Handful of Dust, Waugh mourns the collapsing tradition of the British country house and the declining authority of the nation’s imperial power. I draw on a number of literary critics of empire, including Ian Baucom and Simon Gikandi, to suggest that while the notorious irony of the text leaves unscathed neither those who support tradition nor characters who endorse the modern, Waugh’s text still yields an unambiguous form of mourning for a particular version of the national past. The novel’s mourning, I argue, fosters a sense of English identity that is aligned with upper- class privilege by representing this national form of belonging, curiously, as already lost. While continuing to investigate the complexity of Waugh’s nostalgic imagination, a nostalgia that does not seek to restore what has been lost as much as clear a conservative path for the future, the chapter’s analysis of Brideshead Revisited attends to the novel’s efforts to end mourning and bury the cultural legacies of two world wars by advocating a religious form of consolation. Waugh’s text shores up a host of losses experienced by Charles Ryder, the first-person narrator. Like the modernist narrations of loss I examine, Waugh’s novel critiques the logic of bereaved substitution, the logic by which Ryder replaces one loss in a series of losses with a new object. Unlike the work of Woolf and Faulkner, however, this critique follows an itinerary that looks backward instead of forward. Waugh’s text dismantles a metonymic chain of bereaved substitutions in order to show that all such substitutions are nothing other than a substitute for God. As Ryder comes to accept what he regards as the unfailing and infallible

20


love of the divine, the novel’s sacralization of loss offers itself as a resolution to the mourning of a centuries- old tradition of English cultural life; it is intended to provide stable meaning in a world characterized by “the advance of Hooper,” Waugh’s metaphor for the rise of what he sees as the dulled sensibilities of the middle classes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the way Waugh’s novel represents the country house in a prescient language, one that managed to ensure a place for these architectural “white elephants” in an emergent narrative of national heritage. The final chapter examines the renewal of the main strictures of modernist mourning in Donoghue’s Hood and Winterson’s Written on the Body. Like the modernist narration of loss, these postmodern novels, written in the first-person, emphasize the interior and psychic aspects of mourning, while they demonstrate how the most seemingly private forms of grief have relevance for fostering collective forms of social life. These novels renew modernist mourning for the contemporary period by eroticizing loss and endowing the performance of grief with new meanings about sexual identity. I draw on Judith Butler’s analysis of “gay melancholia” to address how the novels of Donoghue and Winterson promote shared mourning rituals, but my chapter discusses as well how these texts represent communal identifications and grief practices as creating a restrictive set of essentializing expectations about the constitution of lesbian subjectivity. Hood, perhaps the least-known novel in my study, offers a fascinating account of how the representation of lesbian grief counters the single most popular understanding of mourning in contemporary culture, the “Five Stages of Grief,” at the same time as it also contests countercultural grief rituals established out of lesbian exclusion. In waging these assaults, the novel produces a complex assessment of the socially mandated silence of the closet and the alternative restrictions that follow from coming out and submitting to the policing eye of both heterosexual and homosexual cultural expectations. In framing my discussion of these complexities with the work of Michael Moon and Wendy Brown, I demonstrate how Donoghue navigates the exigencies of the private and public to represent new possibilities for the performance of lesbian mourning, subjectivity, and collective identifications. Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism concludes with Written on the Body, a speculative novel that asks us to imagine sexual identity

Introduction

21

without the need to distinguish between either homosexuality or heterosexuality; this imagination, I assert, provides an occasion to address the devaluation of mourning in the work of Jacques Lacan. Freud’s account of mourning, as we have seen, involves the loss of an actual object located in a particular time and place; Lacan’s revision of Freud, however, transforms this historically specific loss into a constitutive lack, a transcendent principle in the formation of the subject that reduces mourning to the metonymies of desire. I read Winterson’s novel as connecting these two discourses; the text tells the story of a deliberately unnamed and ungendered narrator who responds to the fatal disease of a married female lover by leaving her to the better care that “I” believes her husband can provide. In so doing, the text charts a path through which loss comes to be understood as lack, and the narrator, who writes an extended prose elegy to the absent beloved, marshals all the defenses of a narcissistic subject whose own desire for the other is sustained by nothing other than the lack of the object. I employ Georgio Agamben’s discussion of Renaissance melancholia to elucidate the narrator’s mourning for an unattainable object that was actually never lost in the first place. Even as the novel exploits the possibilities for social change that follow from staging the loss of the object, it also dismantles the endless substitutions of desire. Winterson’s postmodern narration of loss performs a work of grief that challenges the assigning of lesbian concerns to the margins of culture and testifies to the continued importance of ongoing mourning as vital to our shared forms of social life.


Part I Inceptions


1 Woolf and the Great War

That is one of the aspects of death which is left out when people talk of the message sorrow: they never mention its unbecoming side: its legacy of bitterness, bad temper, ill adjustment. (Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”) The elegiac dimension of Woolf’s writing was already identified in the first book-length study of her work, when Winifred Holtby called To the Lighthouse a “ghost story” aimed at burying the phantom of the dead mother.1 But numerous critics did not take up the challenge of reading Woolf’s work as a narrative form of mourning until the posthumous publication of her diary, letters, and memoirs, which began in the 1970s. Based on these autobiographical writings, early evaluations reflected a remarkably uniform view; they defined Woolf’s life and writing as an unfortunate case of pathological grief.2 Just as biographers attributed Woolf’s recurring mental breakdowns and suicide to her failure to mourn the loss of her mother, half-sister, and brother, literary critics argued that Woolf’s experience of unresolved grief marred her fictional achievements. Mark Spilka, in the only monograph to date focused exclusively on mourning in Woolf’s work, suggested that her “lifelong inability to love ... seems to have been peculiarly intertwined with her lifelong inability to grieve”; he argued her novels reveal “an emotional vacancy beneath their surface brilliance.”3 Even Elaine Showalter, one of the most widely recognized feminist literary critics, claimed to have found the “real” Woolf not in her fiction but in the story of 25


her disordered bereavement. In Showalter’s estimation, Woolf’s concern with “a female tradition” proved to be “stifling to her development” and “a betrayal of her literary genius,” because “by the end of her life she had gone back full circle, back to the melancholy, guiltridden, suicidal women ... whom she had studied and pitied.”4 This project of reading Woolf’s fiction as a case history of neurotic grief has now come to an end. Through a process of critical reevaluation that began in the 1980s, biographers and literary critics have convincingly demonstrated that Woolf’s challenge to conventional mourning constitutes a positive achievement.5 Woolf does defy the orthodox assumption, still reigning in some circles today, that healthy mourning comes to a decisive end when the bereaved have detached emotional bonds from the lost object and accepted some form of consolation for the loss. But far from the pathology it was once taken to be, this defiance allows Woolf to redefine mourning as an ongoing experience, an endless process that enables the living to separate from the dead but without completely severing attachments. What has been less widely appreciated, however, and will thus constitute the focus in what follows, is the way Woolf’s rearticulation of mourning as an anti- consolatory and endless activity was stimulated by the cataclysmic traumas of the Great War of 1914–18. Vincent Sherry, among other critics, has made us acutely aware of the profound impact the war had on the development of Woolf’s modernist style; what is central to her modernism, I would argue, is an innovative model of mourning that steadfastly refused to “work through” the legacy of wartime loss.6 Indeed, some of the most disconsolate images in her fiction—the empty pair of shoes that Betty Flanders holds up after her son’s battlefield death in Jacob’s Room and the summer home ravished by the passing of time and the devastation of the war in To the Lighthouse—testify to Woolf’s effort to rearticulate mourning in light of the war years. Mourning emerges in these novels, I shall show, as a personal and social labor based on sustained rather than severed attachments to loss. With Woolf’s conception of ongoing mourning in mind, I intend in this chapter to explore how her novels resist consolation, as well as show how this resistence emerges as a specifically gendered assault on conventional mourning. Consolatory beliefs during and immediately following the Great War assumed a variety of symbolic forms; those of particular interest to Woolf include religious immortality,

Woolf and the Great War

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individual heroism, soldierly self-sacrifice for the national cause, and the redemptive power of art. In Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, Woolf does not simply reject these forms of consolation as dubious ideologies that evade the social causes that led to the war; her work demonstrates, more specifically, how consolatory beliefs threatened to perpetuate in the years following 1918 the kind of prewar values that placed male combatants on the battlefield and devalued women’s social roles during the period.7 The female narrator in Jacob’s Room and the female artist in To the Lighthouse, as I discuss in what follows, struggle to wrest mourning from the sphere of social regulation, from the public rituals and communally shared values that sought to declare the legacy of the war healed, finished, and resolved. Woolf’s female characters articulate, then, a decidedly feminist refusal to accept consolation and finish the work of mourning as the only adequate response to death and wartime destruction.

Female grief becomes feminist grievance in Jacob’s Room Jacob’s Room, Woolf’s third novel, has frequently been read as a modernist critique of wartime idealism, the belief in God, king, and country that led the generation of 1914 to its tragic end. Less attention has been paid, however, to the fact that writing about the war prompted Woolf to break with the conventions of realism that characterize her first two novels. Consider the way Jacob’s Room emerges as Woolf’s first thoroughly modernist novel by raising the death of its eponymous protagonist to the level of a complex formal principle. Admittedly, the narrative’s modernist structure is easily overlooked, especially for first-time readers who seem to follow a realist account of Jacob’s maturation from youth to manhood. It is not until the novel’s close, when Betty Flanders displays her son’s shoes, that we learn definitively that he enlisted and was killed in battle. However, the novel’s opening scene already presents Jacob as an absent figure, a boy on the beach whose missing presence forces the painter Charles Steele to complete his landscape with a mournful dab of black paint. Framed between these two images of loss, Woolf’s modernist text thus assumes an elegiac form. In fact, the proleptic structure of the narrative, its repeated anticipation of Jacob’s wartime death in the telling of his life’s story, as well as the way Jacob’s surname alludes

28


to John McCrae’s well-known war poem “In Flanders Fields,” serves as a constant reminder that “the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers” (168). In elegizing Jacob as a missing presence from the start, Woolf refuses to allow even the novel that commemorates her protagonist’s life to compensate for his death. The shock of his death, for reasons that will become clear, must be experienced without tempering or cure. Why did Woolf believe that writing about the war needed to foster a new awareness of death, one that stressed its absolute finality? Why did she insist on engaging the reader in an experience of wrenching and unalloyed grief? Why, finally, did she employ a modernist aesthetic, one that emphasizes the internal workings of her narrator’s consciousness, to articulate a new mode of mourning? Woolf’s novel responds to these questions by demonstrating how the inherited mourning rituals no longer adequately mediated the complexities of loss; conventional death ceremonies offered forms of consolation that Woolf rejected on intellectual and social grounds. Jacob’s Room appeared at a time when public mourning rituals had already shed much of their Victorian extravagance, but its pages offer a virtual catalog of traditional death observances: tombstones, burial customs, epitaphs, requiems, elegies, and monuments. This cataloging enables Woolf’s narrator to parody those vestiges of belief that continued to allow the shared customs of mourning to offer consolation. The narrator, a decidedly skeptical consciousness, includes the religious rebirth of the dead in God and the secular tendency to shroud the dead in bogus praise among the consolatory paradigms of an outworn tradition. The former fails to register death’s finality by promising the immortality of the soul; the latter, in turn, serves to legitimate social values that do not honestly portray the dead, a point the narrator makes when remarking that the tombstone for Betty Flanders’s husband falsely describes him as a “Merchant of this city” in order to set an “example for the boys” (16). In her critique of graveyard pieties, Woolf undoubtedly recognizes the validity that mourning has for analyzing culture; she focuses special attention on the way that death rituals operate in the maintenance of class divisions.8 Woolf’s narrator observes Mrs. Lidgett, a workingclass woman whose very name suggests her singular wish to “get” a proper “lid” for her coffin. In her brief appearance in the novel, Mrs. Lidgett, “[t]ired with scrubbing the steps of the


29

Prudential Society’s office,” repeatedly visits St. Paul’s Cathedral, burial place of royalty and statesmen (65). She frequently admires an ornate tomb where a duke has been buried, and “never fails to greet the little angels opposite, as she passes out, wishing the like on her own tomb” (65–6). Mrs. Lidgett’s longing for a grave replete with the kind of expensive marble statuary typical of the upper-class burial does not escape the narrator’s biting sarcasm. And for good reason, since the Victorian working classes sought in death a level of affluence they had not enjoyed in life. As David Cannadine has pointed out, over one-quarter of the £24 million deposited in banks by the working class in 1843 represented savings for funerals.9 As a corollary to the lavish funeral, the elaborate accouterments of Victorian mourning included everything from formal garments, jewelry, blackbordered stationery, special tea sets, and even somberly decorated ear trumpets for the hearing impaired. The expense entailed in adopting the conventions of grief prompted many late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century commentators to argue that social protocols served as sources of financial anxiety and commercial exploitation, rather than ritual supports for the dying and their loved ones.10 In a cultural climate where death practices cannot be severed from financial concerns, Woolf’s narrator identifies St. Paul’s “ghosts of white marble” as part of the symbolic machinery supporting conventional social “order” and “discipline” (65).11 The Lidgett scene insists that death, when viewed as a consoling promise of deferred reward, reflects a conservative ideology that perpetuates material hardship in this life by offering compensation in the next. In promoting a new consciousness of death, Jacob’s Room does more than criticize the tenacious persistence of consolatory mourning rituals; the novel responds critically to what Philippe Ariès has addressed as the dying of death and decline of mourning in the twentieth century. In The Hour of Our Death, a widely influential study, Ariès argues that the rise of technology and the secularization of society caused death to lose its traditional meaning: death ceased to be understood as a spiritual transition to final judgement and immortality. The erosion of public mourning rituals, he claims, followed this reduction of death to insignificance. The mourning of death, as Ariès contends, no longer played a meaningful role in social life when it came to be understood as a purely private, psychic, and subjective phenomenon. Like Ariès, Woolf seeks to revitalize the significance of death for the


culture of modernity, but she in no way shares either his disparaging view of the disappearance of social mourning rituals or his nostalgic longing to return to the past, the nostalgia that prompts Ariès to claim, “This life in which death was removed to a prudent distance seems less loving of things and people than the life in which death was the center.”12 Far from lamenting the decline of public ceremonies, Woolf’s novel actively seeks to distance narrator and characters alike from shared mourning conventions; the text invites a turning inward into the recesses of consciousness in order to remove death observances from social regulation and confront loss in new ways. Characters who fail in this task are singled out for special ridicule. In the same passage where her narrator chastises Mrs. Lidgett’s longing for death’s “sweet melodies,” a London merchant is rebuked for banishing all thoughts of mortality from his interior life. The old merchant finally visits St. Paul’s, but sees the cathedral as little more than “a gloomy old place” and hastens away with “no time now” (66). The pace of modern life as well as the demands of an increasingly profit- driven culture are suggested as causes for the merchant’s lack of interest in meditating among the tombs. Nevertheless, the narrator is as critical of his willful avoidance of mortality, his avoidance of any thought of his own inevitable self-loss, as of Mrs. Lidgett’s investment in inherited funerary traditions. Consequently, Woolf’s novel navigates through these opposing attitudes about death, through the Scylla of private evasion and the Charybdis of traditional communal practice, in order to articulate a new relationship to death and a new practice of mourning. Woolf’s critique of consolatory death practices, while certainly influenced by class and commercial concerns, was primarily generated by her view of the Great War, both the social causes that propelled Britain into the catastrophic violence and the failure of her society to effect any significant social change, particularly in the arena of gender reform, in the aftermath of the protracted fighting. In diagnosing the factors that led to the war, her novel clearly defines the traditions of consolation as complicitous in the production of wartime loss. The text demonstrates how the beliefs that promised to offer consolation in the wake of battlefield death were the very same beliefs that led to the war’s outbreak and legitimation. Britons were fighting, after all, to preserve a national way of life symbolized by an investment in God, King, and country; they


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turned to these same symbolic resources to find consolation in the wake of the devastation. Jacob’s Room, however, jettisons all such consolatory paradigms. Woolf’s novel, in fact, offers no faith in religious immortality, no endorsement of funerary traditions, no praise of individual sacrifice for the national cause, no celebration of male comradery, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human costs of any kind. Woolf rejected the dominant consolatory practices of the day—whether in the form of ceremony, faith, patriotism, or art—not only because they evaded the political realities of the war, including its human costs, but also because traditional forms of consolation sustained a host of prewar social values that were especially burdensome to women. Rather than console, her novel demonstrates, then, how prewar constructions of masculinity and femininity, constructions left largely unchanged after the war, prepared the way for intolerable loss. Given her interest in promoting postwar gender reform, Woolf’s narrator offers a resolutely anti-heroic account of Jacob, repeatedly criticizing the protagonist for patriarchal beliefs and relentlessly chastising him for misogynist behavior. Indeed, any effort to comprehend why Jacob provokes such intense scorn must begin with an account of the novel’s narrator. In Woolf’s later novels, the narrative perspective often merges with that of her characters, establishing what critics beginning with Erich Auerbach have defined as the completely expressive, ubiquitous, and androgynous mind narrating Woolf’s fiction.13 In Jacob’s Room, however, Woolf constructs an intrusive narrator, a narrative persona readers cannot help but confront. We definitively know, for instance, that “ten years’ seniority and a difference of sex” distinguish the narrator from Jacob (94). Woolf defines the narrator, therefore, as older and more experienced, as a female for whom the consoling beliefs in religion, patriotism, or heroism would have flown in the face of her feminist challenge to the masculine status quo. Woolf’s narrator refuses, in other words, to idealize the war dead. Such idealizations, she understood, directly or indirectly endorse prewar values, the very values that empowered men and disempowered women. By the time Woolf addressed the subject of the Great War in her 1922 novel, the wartime social gains women made in factories, hospitals, and government had all but disappeared.14 Woolf returned 16 years later, when the threat of the Second World War loomed large, to the problem of postwar gender


inequality in Three Guineas; she criticized patriarchal power for having directed women “back to their homes.”15 In refusing to lavish unadulterated praise on her protagonist, Woolf’s prosaic elegy positions us to see Jacob as her feminist narrator does, as an embodiment of patriarchal attitudes that led to a war many believed at the outset would end all wars but came to regard, by its end, as having been fought without real purpose. Early evidence of Woolf’s determination to write a critical and aggressive rather than idealistic account of the Great War can be found in the book reviews she wrote on war-related subjects during the period. In her 1917 review of E. M. Spearing’s From Cambridge to Camiers under the Red Cross, a memoir in which Spearing recounts leaving her Cambridge research post and working in France as a nurse, Woolf praises Spearing for her realistic portrayal: “she by no means shares the sentimental illusions about wounded soldiers and the effects of war on the character which she found rife in England on her return.”16 Woolf commends Spearing for describing soldiers not as self-sacrificing heroes but as “ ‘very ordinary people, with an unfortunate weakness for getting drunk, and an inability to say “No” to a pretty girl’ ” (113). While Spearing’s refusal to sentimentalize the subject of the war elicited Woolf’s praise, Edward Marsh’s The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir prompted her hostile 1918 review.17 Marsh’s collection, according to Woolf, censured Brooke’s critical views about the war and exploited his death for the purposes of national solidarity. Woolf had already addressed this false “canonization” in an essay written one year earlier, after Brooke, while serving in the Navy, died of pneumonia: “To the loss of him [Brooke] his friends have had to add the peculiar irony of his canonisation and any one who helps us to remember that volatile, irreverent, and extremely vivacious spirit before the romantic public took possession of his fame has a right to our gratitude.”18 To describe Brooke as an “irreverent” observer of the war, Woolf insists on including what Marsh omits; she offers an account of Brooke’s writing that emphasizes both its critical edge and latent signs of further development. Had Brooke lived, Woolf conjectures, he would have perfected “the modern point of view—a subtle analytic poetry, or prose perhaps, full of intellect, and full of his keen unsentimental curiosity” (281). Rather than idealizing those who fought, Woolf’s book reviews frame the question of the war as an occasion for cultural critique and an appeal for social change.


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Woolf’s conception of mourning wartime loss, it is important to understand, is inseparable from her social aspirations for the future, aspirations that her novel suggests are best served by expressions of bereaved criticism, rather than the idealized idioms of grief. In this context, the novel’s display of hostility toward a soldier killed on the battlefield reflects Woolf’s gendered vision of modernity. Jacob’s Room, more specifically, counters the traditional role of mourner as submissive and passive, a role that placed particularly stringent demands on women, who were not only obliged to carry out the restrictive sartorial codes and social isolation of grieving to a much greater extent than their male counterparts, but who were also expected to adhere to the longstanding prohibition against speaking badly of the dead.19 In an illuminating passage in “A Sketch of the Past” that serves as my epigraph, Woolf rails against this social silencing of bereaved anger. Her autobiographical essay criticizes the traditional practice of withholding hostile criticism toward the deceased, the social silencing, as she puts it, of a “legacy of bitterness” the dead may leave behind.20 Rather than endorse collective rituals that console by idealizing the dead, Woolf’s narrator retreats inward; she shifts the emphasis from the public and shared aspects of mourning to stress the psychic, internal, and subjective dimensions of grief. In this retreat from the outside to the inside, the narrator discovers a bereaved consciousness that knows no separation between the grief occasioned by Jacob’s death and the anger she feels about his status as an elite young man in a culture that accords privilege to men, while withholding it from women. Woolf’s narrator, in turn, gives voice to this anger in the form of her narrative, managing to express female grief in a way that refuses to silence feminist grievance. In so doing, the narrator seeks to render the world suitable for human habitation; she seeks to mourn the protagonist while imagining a different future not only for herself and other females, but also for males like Jacob. The aggressive attacks on her male protagonist, clearly a strategic maneuver to combat gender constructs, begin early in the text. The narrator exposes the young Jacob’s cruelty by creating sympathy for a crab he carries home from the beach and leaves to die. This criticism of thoughtless male brutality intensifies when the narrator follows Jacob to Cambridge, where he commences study in 1906. Jacob may well be an exceptional young man at odds with mainstream society, an intellectual especially sensitive to the nuances of

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Greek and Elizabethan literature. It should come as no surprise, however, that Woolf’s female narrator sees the university he attends as a bastion of paternalism, and notices that Jacob’s scholarly remarks were often “dull” and “unintelligible” (73). The library Jacob amasses also reflects his belief in male superiority, for he owned the work of only one woman, Jane Austen, and even then “in deference, perhaps, to some one else’s standard” (39). Most importantly, the narrator exposes Jacob as a flagrant misogynist. The reproach emerges in an often- cited passage where Jacob criticizes female attendance at a church service in King’s College Chapel. He remarks the absurdity of “bringing a dog into church” and draws a comparison between the canine and the feminine. In the same way “a dog destroys the service,” Jacob claims, “[s]o do these women,” who are “as ugly as sin” (33). In more subtle form, Jacob’s misogyny informs the romantic liaisons he makes after college when working as a London lawyer. The narrator sharply criticizes him for taking up with Florinda, a love interest whose willingness to have sex blinds him to her “horribly brainless” character (80). Finally, toward the novel’s end, the narrator ridicules Jacob for falling in love with Sandra Wentworth Williams, a married woman given over to the kind of romantic musings that led the generation of 1914 to willingly and even enthusiastically sacrifice life for the British cause (141). In her feminist challenge to the social and psychological traditions of consolation, Woolf also critiques a familiar elegiac theme: the cataloging and passing on of the deceased’s material possessions. Cultural traditions, as the narrator understands, continue from one generation to the next through legal, social, and discursive structures of inheritance; it is not simply the possessions of the dead that are bestowed, but also the social meanings attached to these possessions. Because the inheritance of property and wealth participates in the continuation of a cultural legacy, Woolf’s narrator contests the seamless continuity of English tradition and advances the work of gender reform by setting up the novel as a bulwark against a structure of inheritance she defines as blatantly patriarchal. Despite his rebellious temperament, Jacob has reaped the benefits of his gender and class, acquiring status in a society he appears to disdain. As the narrator sees him, Jacob appears “satisfied” and “masterly,” because “the sound of the clock conveyed to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor” (45). When she


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surveys the contents of Jacob’s room, the narrator finds, among other things, a collection of coat of arms, upper-class calling cards, books of Greek philosophy, and an essay entitled “Does History Consist in the Biographies of Great Men?” (39). These items function as metaphors for Jacob, figurative substitutes that not only seem identical to this elite young man but also remain after his death. However, Jacob’s possessions are not easily handed down, at least from the viewpoint of Woolf’s narrator, who sees his things as the lingering artifacts of male privilege. Because the narrator views Jacob’s belongings as part of a legacy created by men and for men, she blocks their transmission and contests the motif of elegiac inheritance. No longer guaranteeing an elite young man’s enduring presence among the living, the personal effects in Jacob’s room become the empty and lifeless signifiers of his absence. Nothing is passed on in Woolf’s novel, nothing except for an articulation of the gender constructs that both licensed Jacob’s sense of masculine entitlement and conspired to place him on the battlefield. While Woolf was certainly not alone, either at home or abroad, in refusing to cushion the blows of wartime loss, her novel clearly emerged at a time when a consolatory animus drove public and private displays of mourning. Such is the insight offered by Jay Winter, whose influential study evaluates mourning practices in the years following the Armistice as traditional in emphasis and consoling in effect.21 In a direct challenge to Paul Fussell’s well-known claim that the war ushered in a modernist sense of irony in Western cultural expression, Winter argues that countless literary texts, memorials, films, and art works produced in the interwar years sought to furnish consolatory meaning in the aftermath of the devastation; these commemorative practices indicate that “the Great War reinforced romantic values” rather than fostered modernist sensibilities.22 Imperial progress, patriotic honor, heaven’s reward, and heroic service thus find expression in the predominant type of consolatory art in the period. Amassing significant evidence to argue that the overwhelming majority of writers, artists, and memorial makers drew on classical, religious, and romantic traditions to commemorate wartime loss, Winter not only asserts that “traditional modes of seeing the war” were far more prevalent in the interwar period than “modern ones” (5); he also argues that while modernist art like Woolf’s conveyed the anger and disillusionment felt by soldiers and their loved


ones, only traditional artistic responses to the war “provided a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses, and perhaps to leave them behind” (5). Winter’s conclusion strikes me as less than entirely adequate because he pays virtually no attention to the dynamics of grief; he treats mourning, as Susan Kingsley Kent has pointed out, as a selfevident category that requires no definition, let alone analysis.23 Winter, in fact, uncritically adopts the conventional understanding of mourning as a work to be engaged in and finished as quickly as is humanly possible; his study also regards the prevalence of consolatory mourning art in the period as evidence of a culture that did neutralize the painful experience of the war and work through wartime loss. But there is ample reason to assume that consolatory mourning practices actually failed to console, that they did not bring mourning to an end. How else, for instance, are we to understand the widespread compulsion to memorialize the war dead that continued long after 1918 if not as a reflection of the persistence of bereaved sadness and ongoing work of mourning? In a culture where virtually everyone was related to or knew someone who was killed in the war, even an arsenal of consolatory beliefs appears to have been incapable of severing attachments to loss and relegating the mourning of the dead to the finished work of the past. Read in this context, Woolf’s resistance to consolation cannot be simply discounted as a modernist expression of melancholy and anger; her novel, we might say, offers a vanguard awareness of the need for a mourning practice devoid of consoling figuration and the very expectation of strict closure. The gender politics of postwar bereavement, as we have seen, prompts the narrator’s aggressive criticism toward Jacob; however, this feminist grievance does not exhaust Woolf’s articulation of mourning. Indeed, as I now want to suggest, a deeply ethical component inheres in the novel’s representation of grief, an ethics of mourning that derives from Woolf’s representation of the exteriority of the lost other with respect to any signifying system, including the very novel in which Jacob figures. Jacques Derrida’s account of the ethics of mourning provides an important theoretical framework to elucidate this dimension of Woolf’s work. In “By Force of Mourning,” Derrida addresses a work of mourning that “would have to fail in order to succeed,” and claims that while this failure “is always promised, it will never be assured.”24 His emphasis on the


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potential for grief work to fail emerges in response to psychoanalytic theories of loss. In the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, to cite a recent example, mourning has been used to explain the formation of subjectivity, the means by which the infant separates from the mother, acquires language, and accepts linguistic mastery as an adequate compensation for the loss.25 Derrida argues that such psychoanalytic accounts of mourning perpetuate the main assumptions of the philosophy of the subject; they reduce the lost other to an object for the mourner.26 In the conventional sense, mourning allows the lost other to be recovered in the language of the symbolic so that the subject can avoid admitting that something of the self has been lost with the other’s departure. Conversely, Derrida shows how what he calls “impossible” mourning, an ongoing relation to loss that forgoes consolation and recovery, clarifies a fundamental decentering of self. He defines the “being-in-us” of the lost other as an absolute excess, a kind of exteriority belonging to the other that resides in a space neither properly inside nor strictly outside the psyche. By locating an otherness that resists the subject’s attempt to constitute or reconsolidate a sense of strongly bounded identity, ongoing mourning succeeds in revealing “an essential anachrony in our being exposed to the other” (160). This anachronism indicates an outside that shatters any illusion of strict identity, and relates us “to the law of what does not return or come back,” that is, to the other’s singularity and to our own mortality (164). For Derrida, then, the acknowledgment of another’s death entails an acknowledgment of our own death, the mortality we embody as a condition of life. Far from a narcissistic practice, this acknowledgment names the condition for our ethical orientation in the world, the very condition, as Derrida puts it, of “hospitality, love or friendship” (160). In a similar fashion, Woolf’s novel insists on the difference between the lost other and the mourner’s memory of the lost other, showing how the bereaved narrator refuses to accept her own signifying authority as adequate compensation for Jacob’s loss. At the novel’s most self- critical point, in fact, Woolf’s narrator calls attention to the inscrutable and unknowable aspects of the one she mourns. She articulates the difference between the lost other and her memory of the lost other, the difference, that is, between Jacob and her capacity to pin down his life’s story. Far from a full and adequate account of her protagonist’s life, the story the narrator does finally tell is about

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her refusal to accept her own signifying authority as adequate compensation for Jacob’s loss. No fewer than 15 times does the narrator deflate the interpretations she herself imposes on Jacob, calling attention to the subjective and perhaps even narcissistic quality of her narrative: Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves ... (30–1) It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow- creatures is utterly unknown. (71) For many of Woolf’s contemporaries, the rendering of Jacob’s character as an impenetrable entity reflected serious flaws in the novels, indicating the narrator’s unreliability and Woolf’s own intrusive authorial theorizing. More recent critics, however, understand the narrator’s self- defeating remarks as an integral part of Woolf’s modernist break with the conventions of Edwardian realism. According to William Handley, Woolf’s rejection of omniscience preserves her protagonist’s subjecthood and opposes the “war’s treatment of human beings as objects” (111). For Alex Zwerdling, Woolf highlights the inscrutable features of Jacob to portray “the sense of someone who remains a permanently unknown quantity,” her way of pronouncing the devastating human cost of the war.27 In addition to the political relevance these critics insightfully suggest, the novel’s fundamental conflict, the conflict between telling Jacob’s life story and representing the impossibility of doing so, may be understood as engaging the ethical imperative of mourning. The narrator’s willingness to deflate and ultimately abandon her own projections and conceptualizations of Jacob functions as a powerful critique of the desire to master loss through the order of representation. Woolf’s narrator never forgets, and never allows her readers to forget, the radical heterogeneity of the character she mourns. What we know with certainty about Jacob amounts to this: he never survived the war to return to his room. To the extent that the novel is structured around a lost object that resists narration, it recalls us to irrecoverable loss; the modernist aesthetic that Woolf employs


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represents Jacob as a character who exists in excess of any narrative that presumes to tell his story.28 This ethical recognition of an other who exceeds any constituted sense in the mourner invalidates the conventional terms with which mourning has been understood. To grieve the death of a soldier, Woolf suggests, is not only to embark on a process that can never be complete; it also entails a reinterpretation of the past that does not neglect gender concerns for the future.29 At the novel’s conclusion Mrs. Flanders asks what she should do with her dead son’s shoes, a question that demands a response, even as it exceeds our capacity to answer conclusively. The narrator brings her story to an end by rallying us around the anguish of a mother’s inconsolable grief. To mourn Jacob, then, is to acknowledge the missing presence he has become. And, to sustain attachments to this loss establishes the possibility for a critical relationship to the past, to a war-torn past, as Woolf rightly recognized, that threatened to return and repeat the catastrophic violence of a war intended to end war. Even as overt references to the Great War came to occupy less and less space in the novels that follow Jacob’s Room, Woolf consistently demonstrates how the legacy of the war forever altered her view of the resources available to the elegiac writer, resources that she insists must be emptied of consolatory content to pose interpretative challenges for the present.30

Mourning art in To the Lighthouse Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse, as she claimed, to come to terms with the lingering difficulties posed by the death of her mother, Julia Stephen, who died in 1895 when Woolf was 13. In composing the manuscript, Woolf drew on her reading of her father’s The Mausoleum Book, a text that Leslie Stephen dedicated to his wife and began writing two weeks after she died.31 Stephen’s elegiac narrative, as I address below, establishes the parameters of a Victorian performance of grief and the gendering of nineteenth- century loss, both of which Woolf criticizes and revises in To the Lighthouse. Stephen’s text draws on a traditional elegiac structure, one that enables him to confront the death, idealize the deceased, create a consoling substitute for the lost object, and move beyond the loss. Woolf did not simply reject her father’s idealization of Julia as an instance of patriarchal ideology, an endorsement of the ideals of female marital virtue and


maternal self-sacrifice that precluded roles for women outside the sphere of the domestic, including Woolf’s own aspirations as a writer.32 She also recognized that the legacy of the Great War invalidated the redemptive animus of her father’s elegiac writing. The brutal experience of mechanized destruction, as her novel conveys, gave rise to a trenchant skepticism regarding any consoling or redeeming sensibility. As I discuss in what follows, To the Lighthouse responds to both her father’s elegiac practice and the inhumane slaughter of modern warfare by continuing Woolf’s decidedly feminist rejection of the conventional tropes, forms, and practices of grief in the years following 1918. The Mausoleum Book reflects the assumptions of a Victorian elegist for whom God has died. As an ardent agnostic, Stephen rejects religious consolation for loss; he does not depict his wife as transcending death in a divine afterlife. However, he does represent Julia as a marital and maternal ideal, an object of transcendent perfection that takes the place God once occupied. Such is the argument made by Alan Bell, whose “Introduction” to the Mausoleum Book opens with an insight asserted in the form of a question: “in spite of his determined agnosticism, could there perhaps have been some hankering after the consolations which the discarded religion might have offered?”.33 Indeed there was, since Stephen clearly renews the tropes of conventional religiosity in order to portray a saintly wife whom he continues to worship beyond the grave. He equates Julia’s perfection with her beauty, a splendor compared to that of “the Sistine Madonna” (31). Julia embodied “the complete reconciliation and fulfillment of all conditions of female beauty,” since “her outward form” was the “fitting symbol and embodiment” of her “inward beauty” (32, 33). Stephen advances this quasi-religious sentiment by borrowing from Wordsworth, where feminine beauty reveals “something of angelic light” (32). “To see her as she was,” writes Stephen in unmistakably religious terms, “is to me to feel all that is holy ... in human affection” (32). His elegiac writing figures Julia as a “beloved angel” who unmistakably reanimates lost heavenly transcendence. Grief frequently gives rise to a sense of regret on the mourner’s part, regret for both unfulfilled aspirations and misdeeds. At its most extreme, bereaved regret can take the form of heightened selfpunishment. Echoing Freud’s claim that mourners often reproach themselves for causing the death of a loved one,34 Stephen accuses


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himself for his wife’s passing, believing the excessive demands he placed on Julia taxed her emotional strength and produced a “weakness of heart” that hastened her death at the age of 49 (96). These demands, he acknowledges, stemmed from the fragility of his own ego. Although he saw himself as a “man of not inconsiderable literary ability,” Stephen laments the limitation of his intellectual achievements (92, 93). He attributes his “failure” to having “scattered” himself too much with “journalism and dictionary making” (93). To compensate for allegedly being consigned to the “footnotes” of “the history of English thought,” he often appealed to his wife for pity and flattery (93). If he idealized Julia, Stephen also expected her to fulfill his immense need for attention and praise. By his own admission Stephen’s assessment of his work was more a posture than an honest evaluation. As he puts it, “I used ... to profess a rather exaggerated self- depreciation in order to extort some of her delicious compliments” (93). Because Julia realized he was merely “fishing for a compliment,” Stephen lavishly praises her for never refusing the sympathy he craved (93). The Mausoleum Book demonstrates the extent to which Stephen subscribes to the nineteenth- century gendering of grief. Funerary artifacts, conduct literature, and literary texts of the period define mourning primarily as women’s work; females were viewed as emotional rather than intellectual beings, constitutionally predisposed to experience grief and attend to the bereaved sadness of their male counterparts. Evaluated in this light, it is not surprising to find that Stephen expected to receive sympathy and special attention from other women, particularly his daughters (143). After Julia’s death Stephen turned to his children, especially his stepdaughter Stella Duckworth, for consolation: “My George and Gerald have helped me too; but in grief like mine a woman can do more, and a woman [Stella] who reminds me at every turn of her darling mother can give me all the comfort of which I am susceptible” (58). Stephen’s perception that “a woman can do more” in administering to the bereaved must be interpreted in the context of the sexual politics of Victorian mourning. In expecting his stepdaughter to attend to his pain, he views women as the nurturers and caretakers of men. Stephen’s perception reflects, therefore, an economy of bereaved sympathy that reinforces female subservience in the patriarchal household. The social norms of mourning permit him to assign a double-burden of

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loss to a woman, compelling his stepdaughter to embody the grief she may have experienced after her mother’s passing, as well as alleviate his own. The Victorian gendering of grief is at the center of The Mausoleum Book in another way as well; social protocols meant that male mourners like Stephen had to risk the charge of feminization when publically expressing their grief. In keeping with the social designation of mourning as a female duty, women through the nineteenth century were also viewed as being more susceptible than men to debilitating forms of bereaved depression. Seen as emotionally weak and unable to temper bereavement, women were frequently deemed to be excessive mourners. From Milton to Yeats, for instance, male elegists frequently portray immoderate and uncontrollable grief as belonging to women. Lest they open men to the charge of effeminate grief, male elegists describe their own mourning, as well as the grief of other males, as a stage that could be worked through expeditiously and overcome decisively. Read in this context, The Mausoleum Book conveys Stephen’s anxiety about expressing intense grief and entering a territory that had been gendered female.35 In a passage that makes abundantly clear his unease about declaring the extremity of his pain, he compares his earlier experience of bereavement to that of his late wife; Stephen recalls that he and Julia had been attracted to each other because of their “likeness in sorrow,” Julia having lost her first husband in 1870 and Stephen his first wife in 1875. Proposing marriage to Julia in 1877, Stephen explains that she rejected his offer for a full year because she believed her prolonged mourning for her first husband and recurring bouts of depression would compromise any second marriage. In raising the issue of their experiences of spousal death, Stephen establishes a clear opposition between male and female grief. In his words, “Julia ... had been numbed and petrified by her grief: womanlike she had accepted sorrow, a life of sorrow, or let me say a life clouded by sorrow, as her permanent portion” (47). Conversely, in grieving his first wife’s death, Stephen declares, “my sorrow, deep and genuine as it was, had not, so to speak, injured me organically” (47). While he admits being “plunged into melancholy,” Stephen insists that he “resented ... the thought of a complete abandonment of hope” (47). The use of the word “resented,” certainly a strong choice, may be interpreted as conveying the apprehension with which Stephen expresses extreme sadness. Stephen manages to


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distance himself, however, from any accusation of feminized grief; he attributes resolving his bereavement to his masculinity, claiming that it was “somewhere, deep down” in his “nature” that he found the strength “to carry on a struggle against the dominion of grief” (47). Writing The Mausoleum Book, it is crucial to recognize, did allow Stephen to express emotions associated with femininity and contest the image of the unemotional male; even so, however, he still subscribes to the gendered protocols of Victorian mourning by describing himself as the manly victor in the battle against grief. The Mausoleum Book asserts the masculinity of its formal lament by insisting that grief can be neutralized and bereavement brought to an end. Like other male writers in the elegiac tradition, Stephen ends his narrative by translating grief into consolation. He ends his mourning, that is, by redirecting emotional ties away from his late wife and reinvesting in the text that he himself has written. The recompense that Stephen derives from The Mausoleum Book, it is interesting to remark, echoes the gendering of loss analyzed by Juliana Schiesari. Unlike the quotidian terms with which women’s mourning has been culturally understood, male writers from Petrarch to Lacan, Schiesari argues, have been able to reclaim personal loss as social gain, the gain that derives from the public acknowledgment of the writer’s own sensitive and inspired genius.36 Stephen looks forward to exactly this type of cultural recognition when he aspires to having his manuscript published. To return to the issue of his intellectual legacy, Stephen declares that the “achievement” of Julia’s life surpasses the contributions of even “the best thinkers,” who become “superfluous” after a short time (95). But the declaration smacks of disingenuousness, as Stephen goes on to claim the even greater achievement of “spreading” Julia’s influence to others, “making one little fragment of the race happier and better and aware of a nobler ideal” (96). We might conclude, then, that Julia has departed from her husband’s life only to reemerge in The Mausoleum Book as Stephen’s own elaboration of human perfection, his own representation of a “nobler ideal.” The lost other has been replaced, it appears, by a consoling textual artifact, one that purports to outlast and in some sense even outdo the one it mourns. Admittedly, Stephen rebels against the conventional elegiac salve according to which the dead live on in the timeless tomes of literature and memoir; he claims his books, including The Mausoleum Book, would “become obsolete in a brief

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time” (96). But again, his writing gives the lie to his own claim, as Stephen goes on to encourage his children to publish the text after his death. He claims that without access to The Mausoleum Book, no one, including his close friend F. W. Maitland, would be able to write an adequate biography of his own life (4). Stephen’s wish to have his elegiac narrative published, it seems fair to say, constitutes the final claim he stakes to being ranked among what he calls “the very few great names” of his day (96). In “Reminiscences,” Woolf criticizes her father’s writing as wholly self-serving, exposing Stephen’s self-interrogations as a thinly disguised appeal for personal salvation, for “something approaching a final absolution.”37 Rather than converting personal loss into her own artistic gain, Woolf refuses to assimilate her mother’s death to an idealized abstraction.38 The mother Woolf lost was not only an “angel,” but also a “most vivid” person, a maternal presence no formulation of words can recover. Woolf returns again and again to her central grievance regarding her father’s elegy, namely, that the “sincere, but conventional phrases” he used to memorialize Julia “could not honestly be referred to the dead.”39 Railing against Stephen’s sacralization of his wife and countering his propensity for encomium, Woolf contends that her father “did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom.”40 Woolf understood a fundamental function of the elegy: the transmission of the dead person’s legacy to the living. Given that Stephen’s representation of Julia as a marital and maternal ideal created an encumbering inheritance for the Stephen daughters, Woolf withholds the unconditional praise characteristic of stock elegiac gestures; her essay directs a healthy form of hostility toward the lost mother in order to selectively define what she will and will not inherit. Because Julia placed her husband’s emotional needs before her own, creating what her daughter calls a “legacy of dependence on his side,”41 Woolf overtly criticizes her mother for believing that “all men required an infinity of care” and making a “fetish” out of Stephen’s well-being.42 By disrupting the pattern of elegiac inheritance, Woolf refuses both her mother’s sense of wifely duty and the “terrible imposition” of her father’s idealized version of her.43 In To the Lighthouse, Woolf goes even further, addressing the question of maternal mourning in relation to the legacy of the Great War, a legacy she viewed as having fundamentally altered the practice


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of both social commemoration and individual mourning. Nowhere does Woolf bring together the issue of maternal loss and wartime loss more directly than in the “Time Passes” section, where she depicts the destructive forces of both passing time and the war years on the Ramsay summer home. Woolf, in this section, puts extreme pressure on one of the central tropes of elegiac poetry: the pathetic fallacy. An integral component of the genre’s compensatory machinery, the pathetic fallacy personifies a natural world that mourns along with the bereaved. Whether Spenser’s “medows mourne” or Milton’s “sanguine flower” is “inscribed with woe,” the pathetic fallacy assumes a deep affinity between the human and the natural: it consoles by promising the rebirth of the dead in a natural landscape governed by a cycle of growth, maturation, decline, and regeneration. Woolf was certainly not alone in her suspicious attitude toward the consoling power of the trope. The pathetic fallacy, in fact, undergoes a heightened critique in the commemorative lyrics of the Great War, as soldier-poets came to regard standard elegiac conventions as an ineffectual means of confronting man-made destruction. To cite just one example, Isaac Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump” challenges the healing power derived from nature. The war poem begins by recalling a measure of consolation, the consolation found in knowing that the “Earth has waited” for soldiers killed in battle, is now “Fretting for their decay” and “has them at last.” But Rosenberg’s poem undermines this consolation by concluding with an image of the inhumane treatment of the dead during wartime. Voicing a serious doubt about any sustained affinity between the human and earth, the speaker asks a plaintive question: “Earth! Have they gone into you?.”44 The possibility of the unburied body of a soldier disrupts the consoling idea of a natural order where regeneration trumps decay, a point Rosenberg’s poem makes to force the reader into a confrontation with the brutal realities of the Great War. “Time Passes” similarly challenges the resources of the pathetic fallacy, the salve that had long been used to make the experience of death less painful. In repudiating the idea of a natural order that mirrors a human one, Woolf’s writing goes so far as to identify the projection of grief onto the landscape with the violence found on the battlefields of Europe. “Time Passes” opens on one of the last nights of the summer vacation of the Ramsays depicted in the novel’s first section. Darkness descends on the house and “certain airs” already

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“gave off an aimless gust of lamentation” (127), an early anticipation of the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew Ramsay that occur during the family’s ten-year absence from the holiday home. Woolf’s narrator begins by recalling the consolations offered by theological and natural archetypes: “divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always” (127–8). But in keeping with the critical function of modernism, the narrator confronts the disappearance of both God and the sympathetic responsiveness of the natural world. Indeed, when Mrs. Ramsay dies, the search for meaning and solace yields next to nothing: “no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul” (128). While registering both a profound emptiness and at least an ongoing hope for future fulfillment, Woolf’s narrator moves on to produce an insightful account of how the painful extremity of loss gives the pathetic fallacy a powerful and nearly irresistible allure. Woolf attributes the personification of natural forces to a basic human longing, a longing for kinship with a world capable of overcoming death’s finality and providing closure to mourning. The speaker understands, that is, the immense attraction to a conception of nature that grants compensatory meaning to human loss: “it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules” (132). When Prue dies from a complicated pregnancy, the narrator remarks the return of pathetic fallacy, a confirmation of nature’s sympathy for human bereavement: the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind. (132) In response to the terrible thought of the death of mother and unborn child, the trope buffers the anguish of loss; it permits the consoling idea that nature participates in human grief and places the dead within an endless cycle of rebirth promised by the


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inevitable coming of spring. But even here the trope’s compensatory power is beleaguered at best, since Woolf’s narrator begins to short- circuit an empathetic nature by making spring, the very season of rebirth, assume the wintry desolation of bereavement. In response to the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and Prue, the pathetic fallacy lives on, ironically, by virtue of the tentative and questioning attitude with which Woolf’s narrator raises it; however, the trope disappears irretrievably as a result of an exploding shell that sends Andrew Ramsay and other soldiers fighting the Great War to an early grave: Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken. (134) The importance of this key passage resides in the way Woolf links the war’s destruction of human life to the shattering of an ageold affinity between the human and the natural. As noncombatants walk the beach and search for meaning in the face of wartime loss, Woolf’s narrator insists that “comfortable conclusions” and “sublime reflections” (134) are no longer possible, a lost transcendence also echoed in Robert Graves’s “Recalling War,” a poem that links the “foundering of sublimities” to the Great War.45 The beauty of the landscape, so long a source of healing in traditional elegiac verse, is now emptied of compensatory potential and suspiciously regarded for what Woolf calls its “lures” and “consolations.” The passage, however, suggests more than a rupture in the human relationship to nature. In associating Andrew’s death with the complete dissolution of the pathetic fallacy, Woolf establishes an identification between the practice of personification and the practice of war. The passage identifies the human projection of grief onto the natural landscape as a form of male mastery, the same display of male mastery that

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Woolf diagnosed in Three Guineas as a primary source of the brutal and protracted fighting of the war (108). The centrality of Woolf’s feminist critique of the patriarchal war machine has long been recognized. Most critics who address this issue, myself included, see the text’s critique of masculine attitudes and male dominance as central to her account of the war. Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter have observed that Woolf uses war imagery in describing men in the Ramsay circle in order to connect “domestic and public politics within a patriarchy”; this relationship indicates “how sexism and its concomitant behavior can provide a foundation for either heroism (which can be admirable) or fascism (which is deplorable).”46 But it is not enough to argue, as Bazin and Lauter do, that “Woolf integrates the concept of nature as destroyer and men as destroyer” (20). To address Woolf’s assault on the pathetic fallacy exclusively in terms of her feminist critique of the male ego is not wrong as much as incomplete: such accounts tend to focus on textual themes rather than formal structures, overlooking the impact the war had on the development of Woolf’s modernist aesthetics. “Time Passes” undoubtedly reflects Woolf’s feminist perspective; however, the section also engages what James Haule has addressed as Woolf’s specifically artistic response to the legacy of the war. In his study of the early holograph and typescript versions of To the Lighthouse, Haule demonstrates that Woolf eliminated numerous identifications between the war and masculine aggression; she also revised her characterization of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast by continuing to grant but significantly reducing the ability of these workingclass women to reanimate the human project after the destructive experience of the war. In Haule’s provocative thesis, Woolf opted against a direct account of the war’s patriarchal source “not because it was unpopular or because she lacked courage but because it was not the ‘history’ she wanted to write and, however appealing, it was not art.”47 That Woolf labored through extensive textual revisions indicates “her enormous faith in art” as an important and distinctive way of expressing the war’s impact on human character and social life (178). Woolf’s dismantling of the pathetic fallacy, it strikes me with some force, evidences her fundamental interest in redefining the resources of elegiac writing in light of the war years. If the abiding question raised in To the Lighthouse concerns the kind of mourning


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practice that is possible after the Great War, Woolf’s response could not be more directly demonstrated: art must be stripped of consoling social paradigms and redemptive literary tropes in order to confront the politics of manufactured death soberly. Scornful of elevated sentiment, Woolf uses her writing to proclaim that art can no longer responsibly serve the purposes of transcendence, consolation, and redemption. It is for this reason, I argue, that “Time Passes” details a house ravished by nature, a house where birds nest inside, rain rots the roof, and thistles break through floor tiles. By highlighting “the insensibility of nature” (138), Woolf strips the pathetic fallacy of all consolatory effects, insisting that when art neutralizes the anguish of loss, it obscures the very conditions that produce destructive violence. Woolf’s critique of consolation is reiterated in her treatment of Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Blast, characters who may succeed in salvaging the summer home from the total destruction of nature and time, but who never forget that the returning Ramsays and friends would “find it changed” (139). Instead of depicting an unchanged place that reassures the mourners of their own temporal continuity, the surviving Ramsay circle returns to a house fundamentally altered by the war years, a house that Woolf represents in poetic language to call attention to those characters who can no longer return. The conception of mourning that Woolf forges in relation to the war assumes a wider relevance, as she describes the resistance to consolation in relation to the loss of a mother figure. Having resisted the allure of the pathetic fallacy in “Time Passes,” the novel’s third section demonstrates how her artist, Lily Briscoe, retreats inward and discovers in the contents of a bereaved consciousness the need to resist her own attraction to art’s consolatory power. In attempting to complete her painting, a post-impressionist rendering of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James begun a decade earlier, Lily considers that she still has not experienced the “great revelation” (161); she has failed to resolve the aesthetic dilemma that brought her painting to a standstill. However, the wartime violence that claimed Andrew’s life, along with the premature deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and Prue, have made Lily acutely aware that any present solution depends on distancing herself from the compensatory imagination of both conventional mourning and commemorative art. When she returns to her canvas, Lily imagines and scrutinizes a consoling


image of Mrs. Ramsay, an image of a flower- crowned woman moving across fields with a lover: For days after she [Lily] had heard of her [Mrs. Ramsay’s] death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and going unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields. The sight, the phrase, had its power to console ... But always something—it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying Standard, News—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the end an effort of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually remade. (181) The potential for the image to “console” Woolf’s artist is held out even more distinctly to the reader, who may hear echoes of the epiphanic revelation experienced by Mrs. Ramsay ten years earlier. Looking up from her knitting and seeing the third stroke from the lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to sense “her own eyes meeting her own eyes,” an intimation of unmediated selfhood that revealed “a triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity” (63). This moment of being, as these revelatory flashes typically reserved for Woolf’s female characters have come to be called, gives rise to a spectral scene that concludes Mrs. Ramsay’s illumination: “There rose ... from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover” (64). But for Lily, the image of woman and lover, however poignant, cannot be elevated to the level of transcendent truth, much less rendered on her canvas. She recognizes that a world exterior to consciousness, a world of others and politics, has rendered her attraction to a romanticized form of consolation impossible to sustain. By maintaining a resistance to her own desire for consolation and the forgetting associated with closure, Lily is able to acknowledge that both her mourning and her mourning art must be “perpetually remade.” Rather than view her painting as an adequate representation of Mrs. Ramsay, Lily sees her art as an ongoing interpretation of loss, one that can never be complete. In Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism Pamela Caughie pursues a productive line of inquiry about Woolf’s failed artists by evaluating her fiction in terms of postmodern theories of language. Caughie does not categorize Woolf as a postmodernist, for she “resist[s] generalizing from reading Woolf’s work in terms of postmodernism to


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concluding that she is postmodernist.”48 Rather, Caughie uses postmodern concepts to challenge the adequacy of modernist paradigms to explain Woolf’s writing. She argues that Woolf’s antithetical relation to modernism is particularly evident in her characterization of painters, writers, and dramatists. Woolf’s artists not only draw attention to the failure of their own artistic creations; they also reject, in Caughie’s analysis, an array of modernist positions, particularly the assumptions “that the artist is a special and self-sufficient individual, that the artwork is original and autonomous, and that art is a means of providing order or revealing truth” (29). The emphasis Caughie places on aesthetic issues that are raised and assessed rather than resolved by Woolf’s fictional artists has informed my understanding of the resistance to formal consolation in To the Lighthouse. However, Caughie’s “refusal to choose” (197) any classification for Woolf’s work strikes me as limited; her study, we might say, perpetuates the nearly monolithic view of modernist aesthetics as a kind of secular substitute for religion, a representation, in her words, of “aesthetic harmony or unity out of the flux of experience” (31). Rather than claim that modernist conceptions of language and narrative cannot account for Woolf’s writing, I read To the Lighthouse as a means of articulating Woolf’s own formulation of modernist aesthetics, a writing strategy characterized by the rejection of formal unity and the refusal to allow art to console in a world that has been fragmented by personal and social loss. Having ransacked her culture’s healing rhetoric, the religious and patriotic discourses that urged survivors to substitute ennobled memory for wartime loss in Jacob’s Room, Woolf turns her mourning lens more fully on her own medium, using To the Lighthouse to scrutinize the propensity of literature to serve the consolatory aim of closure. In making the production of Lily Briscoe’s painting emblematic of the production of the novel, and by interrupting both with the rupturing effects of the Great War, Woolf grounds a practice of anti-consolatory mourning on the very failure of her artist to derive recompense from the work of art. Just as Lily refuses to regard her painting as an aesthetic substitute for the absent Mrs. Ramsay, Woolf’s modernist text distances the reader from the consoling and recuperative function of literature itself. Consider how Lily questions the practice of redemptive art when she stirs her paints and looks to Augustus Carmichael, a friend of the Ramsays whose poetry was well received after the war. She

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imagines how Mr. Carmichael would respond to the traumatic losses wrought by time and the war: “That would have been his answer, presumably—how ‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays, all changes, but not words, not paint” (179). Mr. Carmichael, at least as far as Lily surmises, endorses a theory of the aesthetic where the dead live on in the timeless memorials of elegiac art. He invests literature, that is, with a transcendent capacity usually associated with religion, a view of art that becomes a substitute for both the loss of God and the loss of socially performed mourning rituals. Literature, as he sees it, steps in and fills the vacated space of the sacred and of ritual mourning in the postwar years, replacing outworn social ceremonies with the aesthetic ceremonies of elegiac art. Woolf both raises and evaluates this compensatory aesthetic, giving the lie to the assumption that art transcends the determinants of history and politics. Her repeated citation of a line from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” a poem where artistic memory serves as an immortal replacement for human life, bears out this point. Tennyson memorializes those who died during the Crimean War battle at Balaclava when an offensive into enemy lines resulted in the death of more than one-third of a cavalry of 637 men. “When can their glory fade?” Tennyson’s speaker asks.49 The answer is implied: their heroic achievement will not be forgotten so long as the poem itself stands as a timeless testament to the noble deed. Woolf’s text, in contrast, deflates the ascendancy of poetic memory; it identifies Crimean War leaders who “blundered” in ordering the suicidal charge with Mr. Ramsay, the patriarchal “leader of the doomed expedition” whose failure to achieve lasting distinction as a philosopher causes him to appeal to his wife for sympathy (36). This redemptive aesthetic, it is interesting to note, is sustained even by a poet as critical of the Great War as Graves. In “When I’m Killed,” Graves imagines achieving immortality not in God or nature but in a literary artifact. The speaker defines the poem itself as the place of his burial, a literary site of memory that he opposes to the military cemetery: “You’ll find me buried, living- dead / In these verses that you’ve read.”50 In line with Carmichael’s theory and Tennyson’s poem, Graves’s self- elegy offers consolation to both writer and reader, the consolation furnished by substituting the immortal literary text for a mortal soldier who may not survive the war. It is this redemptive aesthetic that establishes the terms Lily both questions


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and resists in her effort to complete her “tribute” to Mrs. Ramsay. When she returns to her painting after the decade hiatus, Lily places her easel “not too close to Mr. Carmichael, but close enough for his protection” (147). Woolf’s artist seeks, in other words, to perpetuate the public significance enjoyed by Carmichael’s poetics, at the same time she determines to disentangle her painting from the notion of commemorative form as a permanent replacement for human life. Woolf’s artist has good reason for rejecting the notion of art as a realm of timeless perfection. Such a notion, in fact, overlooks the gender politics involved in canonizing those works that have been designated as the most significant and lasting artifacts of tradition. Woolf already addressed this point in A Room of One’s Own, a text that Tillie Olsen has read as an elegy for all the women artists absolutely forgotten by history and lost to tradition.51 If Woolf criticizes the construction of a canon that has neglected women, she also turns this critique into an enabling condition. In Lily’s case, the awareness of the historical silencing of the lost traditions of women’s art, along with an awareness of the irrecoverable loss of Mrs. Ramsay, informs the aesthetic principle that enables her to complete her painting. Woolf’s artist shifts the focus from the art work to her own creative process, from the “actual picture” to “what it attempted.” She considers that her painting might “be hung in attics” or “rolled up and flung under a sofa” (179); this consideration enables her to wrest her mourning art from public expectations. In this regard, Woolf focuses on Lily’s creative process, a process of bereaved inspiration that begins by recalling Mrs. Ramsay in both loving and aggressive ways. In the course of working on her canvas, Lily not only praises the lost matriarch’s power to gather others into a meaningful collective, she also criticizes Mrs. Ramsay’s inability to see women beyond their role as wives, a form of mournful aggression Woolf’s artist deploys as a means of selectively determining the contents of her maternal inheritance. For Lily, however, even this emphasis on her own bereaved consciousness elicits suspicion, for the focus on Lily’s grief “sounded even to herself, too boastful” (179). Woolf’s text moves on, then, to dissolve her artist’s desire to recover the lost Mrs. Ramsay in the portrait initially intended to immortalize her. This dissolution finally enables Lily to see her painting, as we might see Woolf’s novel, through the “tears” and “pain” of mourning, through a perspective clarified by ongoing grief that registers the futility of any aesthetic

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effort to console for the loss. By sustaining rather than overcoming grief, Lily demonstrates how the very wish to recover the lost object might be placed in the service of creating an anti- consolatory and anti-redemptive work of art. The final brush stroke down the center of Lily’s canvas has often been read as constituting the novel’s aesthetic wholeness, as the culmination of Woolf’s attempt, in the words of James Naremore, “to attain an absolute unity with the world.”52 Woolf certainly engages this search for an essence beyond appearance, for a concept of the stasis of being beyond the flux of becoming. Indeed, the painting’s completion suggests both the resolution and fusion of the novel’s main thematic concerns: Lily has her vision, Mr. Ramsay completes his quest for self-knowledge, and James resolves his oedipal struggle, even as his sister Cam highlights the rapidity with which he abandons his fight against paternal “tyranny.” However, as I have sought to demonstrate throughout, a certain critical self-consciousness inheres in Woolf’s modernist depiction of art as an aesthetic remedy for the painful experience of loss. In fact, her text does not ultimately reward but critiques nostalgic longing for lost immediacy by employing Lily’s canvas to articulate a new relationship between past and present. The issue of relations, it is important to recall, had been fundamental to Lily’s painting from the start. In attempting to venerate mother and child in abstract form, Lily questioned “how to connect this mass on the right hand with that on the left” (82–3). When her final “vision” prompts her to draw a line at the painting’s center, Lily divides her canvas in two parts, a division that recalls the way “Time Passes” separates the novel’s own pre-war and postwar sections. At once a thematic and structural feature, this division highlights Lily’s awareness that past and present cannot be seamlessly joined together; the latter cannot fully absorb the former. Put differently, the painting’s central line distinguishes a time characterized by Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and another by her absence, a time before and after the war, inviting us to read Lily’s final gesture as a sign of the impossibility of fully assimilating the past to a redeemed present. That Lily conveys both absence and presence in the space of a single canvas does not suggest the attainment of a mythic unity typically associated with modernist aesthetics, but rather the fundamental importance she places on a relation to the past that allows the loss of Mrs. Ramsay and pre-war cultural values to continue to


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inform present understanding.53 Without such an understanding Lily runs the risk, as do we, of endorsing a narcissistic absorption in the self, as well as the cultural amnesia that results from declaring the past fixed, digested, and closed. In recasting the issue of aesthetic wholeness as a question of relations, Woolf’s artist succeeds, then, in granting the present a mournful awareness of losses suffered in the passing of time, of losses that must be endured, interpreted, and ceaselessly mourned. In her fiction on war and mourning, Woolf dramatizes the endurance of grief to demonstrate that emotional bonds to the lost other have not been severed, that wounds have not healed. In similar fashion, her novels refuse to fully digest and be done with the past. Only by preserving the intractable otherness of the lost other and the historical past, only by adapting art to an articulation of what Woolf called “invisible presences,” can the possibility for an anticonsolatory mourning practice be fully realized.54 Woolf’s resistance to healing is important to our understanding of her modernist mourning project, for she asks us to live grief in such a way, to borrow Kathleen Woodward’s suggestive formulation, “that one is still in mourning but no longer exclusively devoted to mourning.”55 With the final brush stroke down the center of her canvas, Woolf’s artist shows us why we need to perpetually remake our grief and perpetually remake our mourning art. Woolf teaches us, finally, that refusing consolation and sustaining grief makes loss available for new interpretations of gender and new identifications with feminist aims.

2 Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction

Grief, like few things else, is a private affair. (William Styron, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief”) The short story “Beyond” illustrates the way Faulkner represents unresolved grief not as a melancholic disorder but as a condition of subjectivity that has positive, even ethical, significance. Written around 1930, the story raises the alluring attraction of the afterlife, a transcendental realm where an unnamed judge might be reunited with his only child, a boy who fell to his death from a pony 18 years earlier. But the old judge, who dies at the narrative’s opening and posthumously narrates the tale, maintains his stance as a supreme rationalist; he refuses to believe that his son lives on in heaven. In rejecting the idea of religious immortality, the judge does not resign himself to existential nothingness.1 Rather, he regards the finality of death and persistence of grief as a uniquely meaningful experience. Given the absence of any certainty about the rebirth of the dead in God, he affirms nearly two decades spent in mourning, insisting that sustained grief expresses his enduring connection to his lost son: You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all of immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for 56

Economies of Loss in Faulkner’s Fiction

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peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.2 The judge offers ongoing grief as a gift to his son, a testament of love that persists beyond the grave. But grieving in Faulkner’s story reflects more than a loving homage to the dead; it entails a creative mode of living, a means of honoring the dead by attending to one’s own mortality. When the judge founds his “I” in an experience of loss, he refuses to endorse a staunchly singular conception of the ego. Rather, he gives voice to an understanding of identity that is intersubjective and indebted to loss for its very constitution. Consequently, the judge recognizes the presence of otherness in the self, an intimation of his own mortality that has been made painfully clear in the wake of a beloved son’s passing. His address to the reader in a posthumous voice clarifies that acknowledging his son’s irreducible uniqueness, as well as his own mortal contingency, has led to a performance of mourning understood as ongoing and unfinishable. As the example of “Beyond” clarifies, Faulkner represents mourning not as a communal ritual bent on resolving grief but as a private experience that manages to sustain attachments to loss. However, while “Beyond” might be said to focus on the bereaved psyche at the expense of the social order, two of Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, demonstrate how a world outside the self informs even the most seemingly private structures of bereaved feeling. Both novels challenge the view of grief as a wholly private affair. 3 Given that Faulkner’s work dismantles the opposition between the inside and outside, the psyche and social, it is ironic, indeed, that his own death prompted William Styron, who covered Faulkner’s funeral for Life Magazine, to express one of the most persistent modern assumptions about mourning; Styron defines grief, as suggested in my epigraph, as a paradigmatic instance of private experience.4 In contrast, Faulkner’s work offers an extended consideration of the public determinants of loss. His texts define consciousness, even one in mourning, as an embodiment of external norms. Faulkner’s writing, as I discuss in what follows, demonstrates how a certain interiorization of loss might be brought into social discourse to challenge dominant currents, particularly the increasing commercialization of modern life, within the culture of modernity.


Although some two decades separate the publication of As I Lay Dying and Requiem for a Nun, both texts evaluate how commodity culture seeks to deny the fact of death and the relevance of the past. By the 1930s, when Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury already described the growing unfamiliarity with death, at least among the Compson children who were oblivious to the meaning of their grandmother’s funeral, the place of the dead in American culture had dramatically shifted. Dying no longer occurred at home but typically in the hospital; preparing the deceased for burial shifted from the responsibility of family members to an increasingly professionalized cadre of funeral workers; the ascendency of the practice of embalming masked the processes of bodily decomposition; and the expensive and lavish funeral that declined in Britain during the same period gained favor and came to characterize a uniquely American way of death.5 Although the disappearance of death from the spheres of everyday life occurred more slowly in rural areas and in the South in general, Faulkner saw the writing on the wall.6 He conceived of As I Lay Dying as a story about death where the laying of modern roads brought modernity to a rural family farm; Requiem for a Nun, the sequel Faulkner wrote in dramatic form to his sensational and bestselling novel, Sanctuary, similarly explores how the modernization of social life impedes the ability to confront the traumas of the past for both the individual and culture. These texts, I argue, question what becomes of mourning and memory in a culture mediated by profitmaking impulses and institutions laden with historical privilege and power. As mourning reemerges in the material and social constellations of modernity, Faulkner’s work pitches an interpretation of loss against the culture of the commodity, a culture that banks on a certain indifference to death and history.

Bereavement and commodity culture in As I Lay Dying We have grown accustomed to using the word “grief” to designate a private sorrow caused by the loss of a cherished other or ideal. However, this meaning is clearly a modern one; the O.E.D. lists six definitions before the entry that equates grief with the personal anguish that follows a loss. In its older usages, “grief” denotes “a hurt, harm, mischief or injury done or caused by another”; grief signifies


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a “wrong or injury which is the subject of formal complaint.”7 This signification of grief implies an experience of loss that is social in nature; grief gives rise to a public declaration of grievance and an expectation that the hardship will be redressed. Older designations of “grief” thus establish a logic of substitution where some form of material or symbolic gain offers compensation for the social injury. This bookkeeping principle seems a far cry from the modern sense of private “grief,” but the twentieth- century understanding of the word is more structurally like its antecedents than might be initially thought. The psychoanalysis of loss, as we have seen, has frequently defined grief in terms of this structure of compensatory substitution, whether the substitute constitutes a replacement object, as in Freud’s early mourning theory, or the acquisition and masterful use of language, as in Abraham and Torok’s work. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner invokes this equation of grief with compensation; the text simultaneously explores and dismantles the myriad ways in which loss is submitted to the logic of substitution. Faulkner’s novel, more specifically, demonstrates how commodity culture plays on this substitutive drive, a demonstration, as I argue, that seeks to shore up the bankruptcy of this bereaved economy in order to provide an alternative meaning of loss. Consider the novel’s second section, “Cora,” where a logic of substitution governs the effort to convert loss into compensatory gain. In a chapter ostensibly unrelated to the novel’s central issue of Addie’s death, Cora Tull tells a story of unbought cakes. Having convinced her husband to stock their chicken coup with an expensive breed of good layers, Cora worries when many of the chickens fall prey to possums and snakes. She accepts a job baking cakes for an unnamed rich woman, planning to recoup the financial investment and “increase the net value of the flock the equivalent of two head” (7). The chickens lay well beyond what the Tulls commissioned to sell, prompting Cora to imagine that the windfall negates the cost of the eggs, as well as the flour and sugar that went into baking the cakes. When the woman cancels her order, Cora cannot convert the loss in monetary gain, but she uses the same compensatory logic to imagine a more symbolic form of recompense. Cora raises the possibility of eating the cakes and hopes to persuade her husband that this form of consumption offers adequate compensation: “I can tell him that anybody is likely to make a miscue, but it’s not all of them

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that can get out of it without loss, I can tell him. It’s not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him” (9). Although the loss of Cora’s chickens cannot be recovered by selling the cakes, she desperately tries to convince herself that nothing, in fact, has been lost; just as the cakes substitute for the original loss of the chickens, eating them might negate the lost opportunity for financial profit. What it means, however, to eat a loss—to internalize a loss along the lines of a Eucharist ritual of bodily ingestion—is a mourning practice based on compensatory substitution that Faulkner challenges over the course of the novel.8 The example of Vardaman, the youngest Bundren, defines this substitutive drive as an effort to ward off the fragmentation of the self in the wake of his mother’s death. As Addie’s youngest child, Vardaman experiences his mother’s death as nothing less than a lifethreatening event, a shattering of self that threatens to dissolve his own existence. Addie’s death generates in her young son an urgent need to recover the lost maternal object, a recovery upon which his own fragile sense of independent selfhood depends. When Vardaman catches a fish from a nearby stream at roughly the same time as his mother dies, the temporal proximity prompts him to conflate the two: “My mother is a fish” (79). Consequently, he projects onto the fish his thoughts about his mother’s identity after she has died: It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. (63–4) Despite his young age, Vardaman takes on some of Faulkner’s most complex formulations about identity and loss. His interior monologue complicates the sense of both his mother’s identity and his own as separate and discrete wholes; Vardaman calls this conventional conception of identity an “illusion.” He replaces it with an understanding of the communal constitution of the self, suggesting that Addie’s identity is constituted by identifications with her family, just as theirs are constituted by identifications with her. But Vardaman, like his father and most of his siblings, betrays this


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insight, seeking to sustain a self-sufficient identity that the loss of Addie both necessitates and renders impossible. He seeks, in other words, to resolve his crisis of loss in much the same way as did Cora, through an imaginative ritual of Eucharistic eating where the fish promises to compensate for the loss: “And tomorrow it will be cooked and et and she will be him and pa and Cash and Dewey Dell and there wont be anything in the box and so she can breathe” (63). An economy of substitution governs Vardaman’s effort to detach emotional ties from the lost object. Because the fish has become a substitute for Addie, he imagines that eating it enables him to fully digest and absorb the lost mother within the self. Faulkner’s articulation of this substitutive logic extends to nearly all of the Bundrens, including the eldest son Cash, whose grief takes the literal form of a Trauerarbeit, the sense of mourning as an emotional labor or work. Cash brings his skills as a carpenter to the painstaking task of building his mother’s coffin, a work that already begins while she lies dying within earshot of his sawing and hammering.9 Crafting the coffin offers Cash a means of divesting pain, “of sawing,” as his sister Dewey Dell put its, “the long hot sad yellow days up into planks and nailing them to something” (25). Cash’s bereaved artistry and meticulously unhurried labor—his insistence on matching planks, beveling boards, and trimming out screw holes—bespeaks his loving regard for his mother. However, like Vardaman’s fish, the coffin obscures the event of loss; it emerges as a symbolic substitute for the lost maternal object. In a suspiciously sober and unemotional account of his work, he explains that beveling the wood makes the coffin waterproof and strong enough to withstand the weight of the body inside and earth outside. Cash’s well- crafted coffin, we might say, seeks to ward off the anguish of imagining his mother’s bodily decomposition. The act of constructing the coffin does not simply attempt to neutralize the pain of grief, but raises the promise of compensation for Addie’s death, the compensation Cash derives from substituting an object of his own craftsmanship for the lost mother. If Vardaman and Cash display an unsullied love for their mother that shapes their search to refind her in substitute objects, Jewel, Addie’s third son, presents a much more ambivalent response to her death. The heightened aggression of his grief may be attributed to his having been conceived during Addie’s adulterous affair. Seeing her own infidelity as a source of both pride and shame, Addie


came to regard Jewel as her special but guilt-ridden gem. She always “whipped” and “petted” him more intensely than her other children (17). In Faulkner’s description, Jewel has clearly inherited the ambivalence of this relationship. Unlike his brothers, Jewel seeks a measure of independence from the family and Bundren farm, secretly working to clear a neighbor’s field and buying a horse with his earnings, a horse he pledges to feed from his own resources. Jewel responds to Addie’s death by redirecting his complicated feelings onto his horse. If Vardaman’s mother is a fish, then “Jewel’s mother is a horse” (95), as his brother Darl says, an animal that not only stands in for the lost mother but also becomes the surrogate object of Jewel’s ambivalence for Addie, of his “cursing” and “caressing” (12). Because Jewel has secured a symbolic replacement for the lost other, he resolves to lay his mother to rest and ensure she receives a proper burial. More than others in his family, Jewel regards conventional funerary customs as an adequate means of severing attachments to loss. In fact, during the harrowing journey to bury Addie among her kin in Jefferson, he finds a pleasurable self-image reflected in his efforts to rescue his mother’s coffin from the occurrences of flood and fire, ultimately ensuring that she has been properly buried. In Faulkner’s anatomy of a family’s grief, Dewey Dell experiences loss in terms unique to her status as Addie’s only female child. If her brothers accept external substitutes for the mother in order to reassure themselves of their own psychic integrity, Dewey Dell’s experience of loss follows a more complex trajectory; the substitute she seeks resides in a certain relationship to her own body, a relationship complicated by a pregnancy conceived out of wedlock that she wishes to terminate. Dewey Dell has a difficult time confronting the loss, attributing her inability to experience grief to her time- consuming domestic chores and the thought of her mother’s own premature departure. She describes her grief as suspended, as forestalled by the kind of female duties and household responsibilities that may well have contributed to Addie’s own early death: “I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon” (114). Dewey Dell’s own pregnancy informs her experience of grief. Like her mother, she regards childbearing as “a process of coming unalone” (62), where a sense of singular identity


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gives way to a conception of the communal constitution of the self. That Dewey Dells regards this process as “terrible” clearly registers her anxiety about transgressing social conventions regarding childbearing outside the bounds of marriage. Her negative attitude about pregnancy also contains something of her mother’s resentment of motherhood in a culture where women do not control the means of reproduction, the capacity to decide whether or not to bear children. As Dewey Dell puts it, “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (64). It is not surprising, then, that she seeks to resist any continued identification with the lost mother. Dewey Dell attempts to sever her attachment to Addie by acquiring an abortifacient during the funeral journey to terminate her pregnancy. We might understand her desire for an abortion, then, as an effort to substitute her own childless body for the lost mother. In fact, the novel figures the abortion Dewey Dell seeks less as a means of terminating an unwanted pregnancy and more as a daughter’s resource for “killing off” the maternal other, a strategy for restoring her sense of aloneness and refusing the mother in herself. The economy of loss and compensatory substitution that governs these psychic examples of mourning has led André Bleikasten to interpret As I Lay Dying as an object lesson in healthy grieving, an interpretation according to which the Bundrens eventually succeed in learning how “to displace corpses and replace mothers.”10 But there is more than ample reason, I would argue, to read Faulkner’s modernist novel not as endorsing but collapsing this bereaved economy. In the cases thus far raised, Faulkner employs a narrative strategy of suspension and undoing, a strategy that resists any conception of grieving aimed at compensatory substitution. Cora and her family, for instance, are never shown eating the cakes; in fact, the narrative shrouds the cakes in mystery, compelling the reader to assume that Dewey Dell plans to sell them in the town, only to discover that the cakes were never in her parcel. Similarly, Vardaman does not eat his famed fish; quite the opposite, indeed, for his discovery that Cora has finally cooked the fish during the funeral gathering prompts Vardaman to flee the scene in desperate revolt. In Cash’s case, the coffin, despite his fastidious labor, neither protects his mother’s body from decay, as attested by gathering buzzards during the journey to Jefferson, nor does it succeed in balancing properly. The coffin falls into the river after neighbor women insist on laying Addie’s feet at

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the coffin’s head in order to accommodate the expanse of her wedding dress. Even Jewel cannot sustain ownership of his substitute object; his father sells his horse and uses the money to replace their team of drowned mules. In one of the most wrenching displays of thwarted substitution, Dewey Dell finds quite the opposite of what she seeks, not only acquiring placebos instead of an abortifacient but also being tricked into a sexual act by the drugstore clerk. In these moments of narrative undoing, Faulkner’s novel unmistakably subverts the logic whereby substitution compensates for loss. The Bundrens fail to maintain possession of the objects they seek as both replacements for Addie and salves to heal themselves. Instead, these objects begin to emerge as the markers of a loss that cannot be easily laid to rest but must be ceaselessly remembered and mourned. If Faulkner’s novel dismantles a psychic economy of loss based on substitution, it also gives the lie to any illusion of strict privacy, showing how a public economy of wealth and impoverishment interpellates the hidden recesses of the grieving self. Indeed, Faulkner situates the very objects that threaten to substitute for loss—cakes, fish, horse, coffin, abortifacient—within a social context motivated by economic concerns. Cake baking for Cora begins as a profitmaking scheme; fishing for Vardaman may be an enjoyable pastime, but it provides food that the financially-strapped Bundrens would otherwise need to buy; horse ownership is possible for Jewel because he sells his labor; and the termination of an unwanted pregnancy requires Dewey Dell to obtain money from her sexual partner. The mourning of loss, even in the most ostensibly private sphere of familial death, does not occur in a social vacuum. Mourning, as Faulkner’s text insists, takes place and assumes specific forms within a capitalist economy of financial exchange. Admittedly, Cash’s coffin-making seems to resist the commodification of loss; it recalls the funerary customs of a by-gone age, of a time prior to the rise of the modern funeral home and the embalmed corpse laid out in an elaborate casket during an increasingly costly funeral. By assigning the Bundrens the responsibility of overseeing the rituals of death, Faulkner’s novel might be read as a nostalgic record of lost intimacy, a ritual of caring for the dead within the intimate domain of the family that disappeared when commercial development and technological innovation spread to the funeral industry.11 Faulkner himself, it is interesting to note, resisted the


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commercialization of the funeral in his own life; he observed his mother’s wishes, when she died in 1960, “for the quickest and cheapest funeral” to be held at home with “no flowers, and no fuss,” and for her unembalmed body to be buried in a simple wooden coffin. Faulkner also requested a similar simplicity in coffin and ceremony when he died two years later.12 Moreover, as Faulkner’s novel clarifies, this refusal of commercialized funerary practices takes place without indulging nostalgia for the past. Even as the novel gives voice to dying death rituals by describing Cash’s coffin, the family’s laying out of Addie’s body, and the funeral journey to bury her, Faulkner undercuts nostalgia for these familial customs. His black comedy, his “monstrous burlesque of all bereavement” (78), describes the unpleasant underbelly of what has come to be seen as this prior intimacy with death. The text highlights the holes in Addie’s face that Vardaman inadvertently drills when creating air passages inside the coffin, the stench of Addie’s unembalmed corpse as it decomposes, and the dangerously infected broken leg that Cash suffers during the journey. To the extent that these rituals are recalled in Faulkner’s modernist text in broadly comedic fashion, his novel casts a critical eye upon the present without succumbing to nostalgia for the outmoded customs of the past. I have been discussing up to this point how Faulkner’s novel articulates the public determinants of private grief, the financial concerns that inform the psychic performance of mourning. As Faulkner follows the family’s burial journey from the isolated rural farm to the bustling town of Jefferson, his novel moves on to an even more thorough consideration of the way loss emerges within the new social constellations informed by commercial culture. The narrative, in fact, repeatedly turns our attention to the commodities that the Bundrens wish to buy in Jefferson. From the very outset of the journey to bury Addie, family members view the trip in selfinterested ways, as their access to mass-produced consumer goods. Vardaman longs for a toy train displayed in a Jefferson shop window; Dewey Dell seeks her abortifacient; Cash wants a gramophone. But it is the family patriarch, Anse, who epitomizes the reinscription of private grief in a cultural sphere structured by the forces of commodification, a culture of commercialism and mass consumption that modernist art like Faulkner’s, as Fredric Jameson has argued, both describes and seeks to challenge.13 As Anse encounters Addie’s body

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lying in bed moments after she has died, one of his sons observes how his father’s heartfelt grief quickly gives way to an irreverent display of consumer desire: He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smoothe it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw, smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side and stroking itself again, palm and back, on his thigh. The sound of the saw snores steadily into the room. Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums. “God’s will be done,” he says. “Now I can get them teeth.” (52) Faulkner’s description conflates an experience of personal loss and consumer desire. The passage begins by depicting Anse’s genuine regard for Addie. His wrenching and awkward efforts to properly arrange his wife’s bed clothes convey the painful intensity of his loss. And yet, in the same scene where he resolves to make good on his promise to bury Addie among her Jefferson kin, Anse comes to view the funeral trip as an opportunity to purchase dentures. When evaluated in terms of a commodified economy of loss and substitution, Anse’s mourning must be deemed successful. With the money he extorts from his daughter, Anse buys his desired false teeth, receiving a form of compensation for his wife’s death. In the logic of the novel, however, compensatory substitution emerges as an absurdity, a practice that is ridiculed and critiqued, rather than upheld and celebrated. In a family where many seek substitutes for the lost Addie, Anse goes well beyond merely acquiring dentures. He installs a more literal kind of replacement for what he has lost; the novel concludes when he secures a new wife and introduces her to his children: “Meet Mrs Bundren” (261). Far from upholding this resolution to grief, the text’s conclusion should be read as a cautionary tale about the substitutive economy that fuels Anse’s mourning. With a new wife able to perform the domestic labor necessary to life on a remote family farm and the new teeth required to eat the food she prepares, Anse appears to have successfully brought his mourning to an end. But in Faulkner’s depiction,


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he garners attention only as a negative example, as a case where mourning has been fully resolved and terminated at the expense of a more vital encounter with loss. Faulkner represents Anse as a rural patriarch who exploits his children’s finances, as well as a character whose self-image as an independent farmer, one who would not be beholden to others, clearly belies the amount of material assistance he receives from friends and neighbors. Seen in this light, the burial of his wife emerges as a selfish test of personal strength, a sign that he has been deemed worthy by a higher power of the tragic and monumental task of confronting the death of one of his own. The obstacles of raging river and burning barn may confirm Anse’s self-perception as a distinguished subjectivity, a man who meets his endurance test, as Job met his, with unwavering and righteous determination. But in holding up to ridicule Anse’s self-serving motivations, the novel insists that any mourning that finds its substitutes is no mourning at all. The critical function and oppositional politics of As I Lay Dying have been addressed by J. T. Matthews who pays particular attention to way the novel resists the social transformations wrought by an emergent modernity in the South. The text, as he puts it, “openly worries that modernization will lead to greater misery” (85). Matthews reads Faulkner’s text as both embedded in and resistant to the modernizing forces of technology and commodification, noting how Addie’s death functions as “a synecdoche for a whole set of disintegrative events,” including the fall of the Southern gentility, the dissolution of white male privilege, and the decline of the independent farm. He argues that Faulkner’s novel reproduces the logic of marketplace by seeking “to pass off replicas and substitutes as the real thing” (96); however, it does so with a critical difference. The text calls attention to numerous “[s]lips, miscues, gaps, and hesitations,” moments of textual rupture that resist the powerful drive toward social reintegration. For all Matthews’s insights, however, he pays scant attention to the way the Bundrens mourn Addie’s death; in his account loss functions exclusively as a metaphor for social disintegration. Faulkner’s critique of modernity, I submit, cannot be fully understood apart from the new performance of mourning he represents. His novel’s effort to thwart full absorption within commodity culture, as my reading demonstrates, rests on nothing less than an innovative, anti-consolatory, and anti-substitutive model of mourning.

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While Bundren mourning, as we have seen thus far, engages private forms of grief that nevertheless reveal the mediation of modern culture, Faulkner places unique emphasis on the character of Darl, whose interiorization of loss emerges in opposition to the strictures of modernity. The notion of radical privacy that Faulkner embodies in Darl renders him a complex figure; he is portrayed as both clairvoyant and deranged, a visionary whose special insight sets him apart from others and a mental patient in need of a cure. Darl’s refusal to seek any substitute for the lost mother may be inspired, but it also culminates at the novel’s end in his institutionalization in a Jefferson asylum. Rather than discount him as a melancholic character, however, Faulkner invites us to focus special attention on Darl, giving him 19 of the novel’s 58 monologues, by far the most of any single character. In Faulkner’s portrayal, Darl’s refusal to conform to social norms makes him a purveyor of truth, a hypersensitive character who indicts social practices by exposing the impoverished resources available for mourning. From the point of view of others, Darl seems “queer,” a young man who elicits doubt about his sanity (145). His refusal to adopt conventional standards of behavior offends the sense of propriety important to others. Darl creates an unsettling presence, however, not because he blurs the distinction between sanity and insanity but since he compels others to see themselves in relation to this boundary violation. As Tull observes, I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you were looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (119) Darl’s special capacity to expose the unacknowledged motivations and unconscious desires of others defines him as the novel’s social critic, a critic of the compensatory economy of his family’s mourning.14 The only Bundren who refuses to seek a substitute for Addie, Darl’s critique invites the reader to imagine what mourning might mean when removed from any compensatory drive. Others regard the funeral journey as an occasion to buy teeth, secure abortions, purchase trains, and acquire gramophones, but Darl responds to his mother’s death in genuinely reflective terms, as an occasion to acknowledge his own “authentically temporal


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destiny,” to borrow Paul de Man’s term for this cultivated wakefulness to mortality.15 Faced with the flooding river the family must cross to reach Jefferson, Darl raises one of the most enduringly human responses to loss: the tendency to see grief reflected in the natural world. The anthropomorphizing of nature emerges in Darl’s perception of the flood-ravished earth; he views “a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water” (135). Seeing his own grief reflected in the river raises the possibility of a reassuring sense of transcendence, an intimation of eternity granted by nature’s promise of cyclical renewal. The uprooted trees and dislodged road, as Darl puts it, “leave in its spectral tracing a monument to a still more profound desolation than this above which we now sit, talking quietly of old security and old trivial things” (136). In his philosophically oriented and literary minded reflections, Darl invokes the pathetic fallacy; he seeks in the natural order a consciousness of eternity that might provide an unassailable sense of security and meaning. However, his projection of grief onto the landscape ultimately yields an awareness of the temporal predicament that conditions human life. As much as Darl longs for an “old security” capable of surmounting death, furnishing immortality, and ending grief, so too does he come to abandon the consoling thought that human life partakes of a natural cycle of decay and regeneration. The final image with which he concludes, that of the family’s drowned mules floating belly-up downstream, confirms the natural order’s utter disregard for human endeavor and the painful experience of loss. Tull may be right that Darl’s tenuous hold on reality stems from the fact that he “just thinks by himself too much” (68), but Darl’s recognition that nature offers no salve capable of neutralizing grief produces an important response; it recalls him to his own mortality. One of the main claims that drives my analysis of mourning in the modernist and postmodernist novel is that writers of formally innovative fiction do not simply thematize bereavement in new ways; changing conceptions of loss compel writers like Faulkner to develop aesthetic structures that enact the performance of mourning loss their texts otherwise describe. In the case of As I Lay Dying, the appearance of Addie’s monologue, which presumably occurs after she has already died, frames the loss that generates the rest of the novel. The centrality of this loss establishes a modernist aesthetic


that confounds the conventional boundaries between life and death, presence and absence, loss and gain. Addie begins by raising an adage her father frequently repeated: “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” (169). On the face of it, the lesson here seems to be one of absolute forgetting, of living a life in such a way that it will not haunt or even occupy the memory of others once it has expired. But Faulkner complicates this meaning. Addie’s story of her violent whippings of her students and her pregnancies as an experience where her “aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation” (172) articulates a conception of the self that is constituted by identifications partly composed of unresolved grief, bodily ties to others that can be severed only at the expense of dissolving the self. In the same way that lashing her pupils compels them to regard her as having “marked” their “blood” with her “own for ever and ever” (170), Addie’s identifications with her children suggest a conception of identity based on intersubjective bodily ties. The “confusion of identity” that Addie expresses, as Eric Sundquist has eloquently put it, inverts the one expressed in the process of death, in which the impossibility of conceiving of the self as a singular identity is made paradoxically conspicuous in the sudden need to preserve those connections that define the self even as they pass away.16 Addie invests this conception of the communal constitution of identity with a nearly spiritual significance: having children partakes of an experience of eternity, a world without “beginning and ending” (175). Just as her pregnancies prompt her to speak of attachments that cannot be dissolved, Addie comes to understand the meaning of her father’s adage, even if “he could not have known what he meant himself” (175). Since the mourning of loss that Faulkner describes can never be finished, to “stay dead” means, quite paradoxically, to remain alive, to leave behind an enduring realm of remains without fixed significance. Insofar as Addie herself functions as a kind of absent presence in the novel, her status invites a continued devotion to the lost object. This devotion, borne in and of mourning, has the effect of raising questions about selves and worlds that cannot be easily answered but compel ongoing interpretation.


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Darl comes closest to replicating the insights posed by Addie’s monologue, as he views his family’s mourning as little more than thinly disguised attempts to avoid the enduring obligation her death places on them. In his “emptied for sleep” speech, he imagines sleep as an annihilation of self that reiterates the death inscribed in his own living, an unconscious experience of the “is not” that conditions his “is,” his ability to say, “I am is” (76). The strange syntax of his thoughts clarifies that acknowledging his mother’s death requires him to acknowledge his own inevitable passing. Such an acknowledgment of mortality, as the novel shows, has the potential to dissolve the wish to master lost others and histories, a potential denied by the emphasis that consumer culture places on ceaseless consumption in the present. In contrast to his family’s compensatory mourning, their attempt to redress Addie’s death by acquiring material goods, Darl emerges as the single mourner who regards Addie as more than his possession, more than his lost object. In the sounds that her decomposing body makes as gases are produced and released, he hears Addie express her own need to “lay down her life” (215), a need he prioritizes over the needs of her mourners. As Darl struggles to disencumber Addie of a body she vacated days earlier, his efforts bring a seriousness to what one character expresses in comic fashion: Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but you’ve got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that’s been dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get her into the ground as quick as you can. (116) When Darl fails to prevent his family from recovering Addie’s coffin from the raging river, he takes even more drastic steps to release her from the possession of her mourners by setting fire to a barn where the Bundrens spend a night during the journey. Darl respects Addie’s otherness, an otherness that has been obscured by Jefferson’s commodified culture where signs advertise “the drug stores, the clothing stores, the patent medicine and the garages and cafés” (226). That Darl reads these signs as having only “an outward semblance of form and purpose, but with no inference of motion, progress or retrograde” suggests the extent to which Faulkner pitches Darl’s performance of grief against the emergent culture of the commodity (227).


More than any other character in the text, Darl embodies a certain spirit of Faulkner’s modernism; he is represented as a character whose response to the death of his mother promotes new ways of relating to loss, new modes of being. However, as powerful an antidote to the commodification of loss as it may be, Darl’s mourning ultimately takes the form of an aestheticized passivity. Darl’s position in the novel, like that of Faulkner’s alienated intellectuals, is made possible only by establishing a radical distance from the world and others. But, as Richard Moreland has perceptively noted, “The disenchanted artistic or ironic social critic in Faulkner is never quite allowed to leave—nor ever quite wants to leave—the social field of the action.”17 In Darl’s case, his incessant taunting of both Jewel and Dewey Dell reveals a character much more embroiled in the world than he acknowledges. He chides his brother for symbolically substituting his horse for Addie, at the same time he torments him with the issue of his paternity: “ ‘Your mother was a horse, but who was your father, Jewel?’ ” (212). Darl also realizes that Dewey Dell is pregnant, verbally challenging the sincerity of her grief and charging his sister with pregnancy denial: “ ‘You want her to die so you can get to town: is that it?’ She wouldn’t say what we both knew. ‘The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it?’ ” (40). The irony with which Darl vents his verbal barbs may well be aimed at deflating the importance his siblings place on the conventions of marriage and reproduction. But his speech acts also reflect a character who remains powerless to change anything, including the minds of his family and the way they mourn. In delimiting Darl’s potential to effect a world outside his own consciousness, Faulkner deflates the idea of a wholly private realm, the idea that any performance of grief can be radically liberated from social determinants. Consequently, Faulkner embeds Darl in the realm of the social. Despite the distance from conventional society that Darl strives to maintain, his personal interests are at stake, even if he attempts to ignore this fact. When Darl sets fire to Gillespie’s barn in order to release Addie’s corpse and invest her remains with a significance at odds with modernity, Dewey Dell takes the opportunity to silence her brother’s knowledge of her pregnancy; she discloses Darl’s arson to Gillespie. Narrative authority shifts to Cash, who directs the reader’s understanding of events. Cash regards Darl’s


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destruction of another man’s barn as a long overdue intervention to lay Addie to rest, to cremate a body in an advanced state of decomposition. But Cash ultimately defends the family’s decision to declare Darl insane and send him to an asylum rather than incur litigation and the cost of restitution: “I can almost believe he done right in a way. But I don’t reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a man’s barn and endangering his stock and destroying his property” (233). By siding with the laws of property against Darl, by rendering problematic the critical distance that Darl attempts to maintain in the exercise of his mourning, Faulkner’s text comes down against the merely personal; it demonstrates how the social contract that ensures the functioning of commodity culture also manages to circumscribe even the most seemingly private zones of being. Even as Faulkner retreats from the isolation and privacy implied by Darl’s position, however, he does not simply abandon the kind of mourning articulated by Addie’s son, a mourning practice, as we have seen, that pitches a continued devotion to loss against an uncontested acceptance of modernity. Toward this end, the novel locates possibilities for sustained grief not outside culture but within it, not in the practice of a social critic who effects a distance from the world, but in those who accept their embeddedness in it. I have already addressed how many of Addie’s children attempt but fail to substitute the lost mother with the objects of commodity culture. Instead of trains, abortions, and horses, what they do get is a sack of bananas, a paltry substitute for the substitutes they seek. Even when Cash acquires the gramophone that Anse’s new wife brings along, it serves only to make him mindful of Darl’s absence from the scene.18 In keeping with modernism’s critical function, Faulkner’s text invests these failures with productive possibility; the novel shows how a performance of mourning that fails to find its substitutes may generate forms of selfhood and social life that Darl imagines privately but fails to actualize publically. What Faulkner articulates, then, is how a personal experience of loss might pose a challenge to the culture of the commodity. This is the point, it seems to me, of the novel’s elliptical conclusion and description of the Bundren children as they prepare to leave Jefferson and embark on the return trip home: The wagon stands on the square, hitched, the mules motionless, the reins wrapped about the seat-spring, the back of the wagon


toward the courthouse. It looks no different from a hundred other wagons there; Jewel standing beside it and looking up the street like any other man in town that day, yet there is something different, distinctive. There is about it that unmistakable air of definite and imminent departure that trains have, perhaps due to the fact that Dewey Dell and Vardaman on the seat and Cash on a pallet in the wagon bed are eating bananas from a paper bag. ‘Is that why you are laughing, Darl?’ (254) In the very failure to secure substitutes for the lost Addie, a failure that appears supremely ironic to Darl given his efforts to thwart the substitutive logic of his family’s mourning, the Bundren children take on an air of distinction; they assume an appearance of difference within a commodified culture that banks on the infinite replaceability of others and objects, as well as the insatiable desire for consumer goods. Despite themselves, Addie’s children depart Jefferson with an experience of an economic order that grants its privileges to some and withholds them from others. They leave town in sight of their loss, a loss whose meaning refuses to circulate within an economy of compensatory substitution. Between grief and the commodity, we might conclude, Faulkner compels the Bundren children to take grief.

Historicizing trauma, traumatizing history, and Requiem for a Nun When delivering his 1950 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Faulkner raised a lament for literary production in the years following World War II. The fear of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War period, he claimed, prompted writers to ignore the past, concern themselves solely with the present political climate, and believe in “defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope.”19 This absorption in the social present resulted in what Faulkner saw as a turning away from the literary preoccupation with “the human spirit,” with the “compassion, and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his [the writer’s] past” (120). Faulkner’s account of the impoverishment of literature focused exclusively on the exigencies of the political moment bears a striking similarity to Woolf’s discussion of women who limit their capacity as writers when they reduce


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their fiction to expressions of female anger about gender inequality.20 As antithetical to real-world concerns as these expository chronicles sound, it ought to be observed that neither Woolf nor Faulkner endorse an apolitical aesthetic practice. Rather, what they call for are new ways of evaluating the present. Far from divorcing literature from the problems of social reality, Faulkner, like Woolf, imputes modernist writing with a mode of mournful memory that provides an important framework for critical inquiry. Without the development of a literary model of remembrance, Faulkner warned that postwar writing ran the risk of establishing a temporality of the perpetual present, a temporality that would be untethered from history and incapable of reflective assessment. Of the writer who ignores the personal and historical past, Faulkner wrote, “His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars” (120). Though we might object to Faulkner’s invocation of universality here, what is interesting about his formulation, as well as paradigmatic of his own modernist enterprise, is that an investment in the visible remains of loss constitutes a productive response to the problem of postwar writing in the culture of modernity. By conceiving of literature as a mournful and memorializing form that counters the tendency toward social amnesia, Faulkner arrived at a conclusion that may be optimistic but that indulges no cultural nostalgia; he claimed that writers do not merely offer a “record of man,” but can become “one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” (120). At first glance, such a conception of the past might appear counterintuitive, especially when evaluated in relation to the lawyer Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, who proclaims, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (80). In the context of his utterance, Stevens suggests that traumas of the past have the power to reduce the present to a repetitive replaying of the injuries. Faulkner already articulated the devastating effects of traumatic repetition in Absalom, Absalom!, where the sins of the fathers return to haunt the sons. Similarly, Requiem for a Nun depicts the symptoms of trauma that persist nearly a decade after the gruesome rape of Temple Drake. However, Faulkner’s text, which was the first to follow his Nobel Prize, does not impugn the past, as much as it discovers from within the vexed temporary of trauma a personal and social history of loss, a history of suffering that might otherwise remain untold. Traumatic injuries suspend any pretense to linear time, as Freud pointed out,


when victims experience the past as if it were the present and relive the event again and again in dreams, physical symptoms, and emotional dispositions.21 Such injuries point to a past event that may not have been consciously perceived but that will not go away. Faulkner’s strategy, as I explore here, is to exploit the resiliency of the past made transparent in cases of traumatic injury; he represents the repetitive effects of trauma as an occasion to uncover private spheres of internalized experience that have unacknowledged yet undeniable public relevance. When Sanctuary, the prequel to Requiem for a Nun, appeared in 1931, public reception was polarized; some regarded the novel as a licentious account of deviant sexualities, while others admired the powerful rendering of the story. What is beyond dispute is that Sanctuary was a strong selling and widely popular book. Noel Polk has raised the suggestion that its popularity stems from the revisions Faulkner made to the 1929 manuscript; the revised text eliminated many flashbacks of the characters and made for an “almost completely straightforward narrative, moving from its beginning to its conclusion with economy and precision.”22 Unlike the textual difficulty characteristic of Faulkner’s typically modernist writing of the 1920s and 1930s, Sanctuary follows a chronological narrative structure; it offers a linear and hence accessible account of Temple’s story.23 And yet, what Polk overlooks is the way Faulkner also gives his female character a different experience of time, one characterized by the fractured sense of reality and cognition that Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have isolated as a major component of traumatic experience.24 The two temporalities in the text occupy competing positions; Faulkner employs these conflicting time schemes in order to show how official time elides the traumatic nature of Temple’s experience and, in turn, how her trauma manages to pose a challenge to the public meanings and privileges of officialdom.25 Sanctuary represents the traumatic experiences that continue to haunt Temple in Requiem for a Nun as a series of events so threatening that they disrupt the functioning of the psyche and suspend the capacity for conscious perception; Temple’s trauma bars her from conscious experience.26 Beginning when her escort Gowan Stevens crashes his car near the Old Frenchman place, Temple becomes removed from her own physical being. When she sees two shotguncarrying men from the Frenchman house approach the accident


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scene, she starts to run without being able to register her bodily actions mentally: “Still running her bones turned to water and she fell flat on her face, still running” (38). Before ever stepping foot in the Frenchman house, Temple has become detached from her own experience. She fails to perceive the present situation fully, as when she makes her way into the woods the next morning and detects a man secretly watching her: “For an instant she stood and watched herself run out of her body, out of one slipper” (91). To gain unimpeded access to Temple’s body, Popeye murders Tommy, another bootlegger. When Temple hears the gunshot from a few feet away as if it were “no louder than the striking of a match,” she experiences an “isolating” moment that henceforth reduces her future to a repetitive replaying of this dimly perceived traumatic event (102). In these scenes, Faulkner dramatizes a breach in consciousness, a disruption of Temple’s normal capacity for observation and memory that embeds his character’s traumatic experience in an epistemological economy of knowing and not knowing. Critics have repeatedly commented on the strange silence with which Sanctuary figures Temple’s rape by the impotent and corncobwielding Popeye.27 What exactly takes place in the bootlegger’s den may be hinted at, but it is not directly represented. In a text so explicitly preoccupied with sexual behaviors, what are we to make of this elision? Why bar the reader from a fully transparent account of the violation? Faulkner’s withholding of the description of the rape, it seems to me, has the effect of directly engaging the reader in the temporality of trauma. Just as Temple, who has been numbed by the shocking occurrence of the car crash, her violated privacy, and Tommy’s murder, undergoes rape as yet another violent assault unavailable to consciousness, the reader is confronted with a hiatus in the text. Our own inability to read the rape scene implicates us in the kind of eclipsing of conscious perception characteristic of trauma. More crucially, this unreadability suggests the extent to which our understanding of the violation will require an act of retrospective reconstruction, a historical account concerned less with objective reality than subjective truth that will need to arise because the immediacy of experience has not. In some sense, however, the most “unreadable” event in Temple’s story does not occur at the Frenchman place but during the six weeks she spends in a Memphis brothel to which Popeye has brought her.

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It is here, in fact, that Faulkner introduces a loss that crystallizes the need for a new way of mourning, a performance of grief that he will go on to articulate in Requiem for a Nun. The whorehouse segments culminate in Temple’s experience of a decisive occasion for grief: the death of Alabama Red. This is surely a curious kind of grief given the fact that Popeye acted as a sort of pimp, bringing Red to her room, compelling her compliance, and watching their sexual acts. When Temple discovers that Popeye plans to kill his rival, she initially appears impatient for the murderous deed to be finished: “She could hear herself saying I hope it has. I hope it has” (37). But there is reason to assume that her involvement with Red had taken a form more complicated than the forced violation initially arranged by Popeye. Despite the elliptical description of the relationship between Temple and Red, the narrative defines the thought of Red’s death as eliciting anguish on Temple’s part. As the narrator describes, “she was overcome by a sense of bereavement and of physical desire” (37). In raising a sexualized form of grief in this scene, a grief that cannot be publically displayed, Faulkner reminds us that there are no social rituals or conventionalized mourning practices able to accommodate his character’s trauma and her complex experience of loss. The social customs that regulate bereavement, organized as they are around the dictates of propriety and restraint, offer no ceremonial outlets for Temple to express what she has suffered. The subjective truth of her experience exists, then, only in a psychic realm internal to the character, a point the text reiterates by demonstrating how social institutions have utterly silenced her perspective of the events. Ending with the defeat of this 18-year- old female, Sanctuary describes how the justice system fails Temple by convicting Popeye of a crime he has not committed and how her father removes her from the local scene by ushering her off on a European trip. To the extent that the institutions of law and family have succeeded only in silencing the traumatic experience of Temple Drake, they participate in consigning her future to a repetitive replaying of past injuries. At the outset of Requiem for a Nun, the reader is lured into believing that Temple has buried the past and made a fresh start; she is now a 26-year- old mother of two young children and wife to the man who escorted her to the Frenchman house. Her marital status enables Temple to venture a bold claim; she declares “Temple Drake is dead” and has been replaced by “Mrs. Gowan Stevens” (80). Faulkner’s


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text casts suspicion on Temple’s declaration by placing her in an apartment that emblematizes the attempt—and failure—of modernity to eclipse the past. The stage directions describe the Stevens home as assuming the appearance of the modernized present; the living room is “smart, modern, up-to- date” (46). However, the room itself also recalls an earlier time: “the high ceilings, the cornices, some of the furniture; it has the air of being in an old house, an ante-bellum house” that has been converted into expensive apartments and “rented to young couples or families who can afford to pay that much rent in order to live on the right street among other young couples who belong to the right church and the country club” (46). The stage setting of the Stevens’s home manages to crystallize the complex issue Faulkner explores throughout the text: material concerns have structured the culture of the modernity in ways that obscure the relevance of the past, though the claims of this past will not be decisively buried under the veneer of a modernized present. Faulkner’s text demonstrates how Temple’s thoroughly modern life has been structured as a substitute for confronting and mourning her past. Her present actions constitute a series of delayed responses to her rape and experience in the brothel, responses that repeat the past in various ways. Just as Gowan hopes to reclaim the status of Southern gentleman by marrying the woman he abandoned at the bootlegger’s house, Temple seeks redemption by bearing children whose innocence she has pledged to protect. And yet, at the center of her life remains a wound that continues to defy healing. As in cases of trauma when victims repeatedly relive past injuries, Temple relentlessly searches for people who compel her to replay her traumatic past unconsciously. By hiring a black domestic worker, Nancy Mannigoe, a recovered “dope-fiend whore,” she surrounds herself with a comforting presence of a reformed woman; however, Nancy also brings Temple into daily contact with a memory of her earlier self, the former Sanctuary self she sought to bury rather than confront. When Temple threatens to take her infant daughter and run off with Pete, the brother of the murdered Red, Nancy murders the child, seeking to save her from a life of abuse and crime, the same life she and Temple have lived. In Faulkner’s representation, the infanticide figures as a traumatic repetition where the past comes crashing back into the present in ways that can no longer be avoided.

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Since the early 1990s, the study of trauma has centered on public events, including the Holocaust and modern wars, especially the Vietnam War. Conversely, private experiences of sexual abuse and domestic violence, while treated in terms of traumatic experience, have not exerted the same force upon the construction of social memory as the publically shared cataclysms of the twentieth century.28 It is in this context that the innovative form of Requiem for a Nun—part narrative history, part play—should be evaluated.29 Indeed, on the level of form, Faulkner accords an equal measure of value to remembering the traumas not just of communities but of individuals like Temple who have suffered rape and abuse. The text oscillates between three narrative accounts of Jefferson history and three dramatic acts focused on Temple’s crisis. Far from a pointless case of aesthetic experimentation,30 the juxtaposition of narrative history and dramatic dialogue not only clarifies that Temple’s private crisis has public significance but also demonstrates that Jefferson’s history includes a set of violent acts and unacknowledged losses suffered by groups of people because of their ethnicity, race, and gender, losses that have been obscured by the historical record. In Faulkner’s text, both the individual and community, then, are governed by a temporal logic of trauma. Just as Temple’s traumatic past has taken hold of her present, this fictional Mississippi town appears to be doomed to repeat its injurious history and inflict suffering on the descendants of those who were marginalized at its founding. In depicting a sense of inescapable doom that governs both character and town, Faulkner’s text historicizes Temple’s trauma and articulates the traumatizing of southern history; in so doing, Requiem for a Nun does not seeks to suture these wounds, but open them up for fresh examination, compelling readers and audiences to reevaluate the modern present in relation to a history of suffering that refuses to go away. The historical narrative that begins Act I, “The Courthouse (A Name for the City),” defines the social wounds incurred at the moment the town of Jefferson was established; the section tells the story of the loss of “ancient monster iron padlock,” and its “transubstantiation into the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse” in the mid-nineteenth century (9).31 The history of Jefferson’s founding articulates how traumatic repetitions emerge when losses are covered over and disowned. The lock, owned by Alexander Holston, a settler


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who established the area as a Chickasaw trading post, originally served a symbolic function; it emblematized “a gesture of salutation, of free men to free men, of civilization to civilization across not just the three hundred miles of wilderness to Nashville, but the fifteen hundred to Washington” (11). When this symbol of individual freedom and cultural diversity goes missing after being transported to the poorly fortified jail, a number of proposals are raised to deal with the loss and reimburse Holston for the lock. The first plan is to pay Holston 15 dollars, but Jason Compson objects to the personal expenditure. In response, Ratcliffe, another spokesmen, offers a “fair and decent” proposal so that no one would “escape any just blame” (19). He suggests that they write off the cost in an accounting ledger established in the early 1800s when the Chickasaws were forced to sell land in exchange for credit to purchase goods. In Ratcliffe’s proposal, the federal government stands the debtor, and Mohataha, the Chickasaw matriarch, occupies the role of creditor in the name of “her descendants and subjects and Negro slaves” (19). Interpreted literally, the proposal smacks of deceit, for the Chickasaws would be credited with the receipt of a lock that they did not possess. But read symbolically, the ledger plan bespeaks an undeniable truth, given the fact that the Native Americans clearly paid a hefty price for the town’s establishment through the dispossession of their land and later relocation to Oklahoma, as did black slaves through enforced labor. Consequently, the significance of Ratcliffe’s plan cannot be overestimated. As Richard Moreland has insightfully discussed, the proposal succeeds in acknowledging a set of incommensurable losses and gains incurred at the moment of Jefferson’s founding, the losses suffered by Chickasaws, slaves, and their descendants, and the gains enjoyed by the town’s white founders.32 Faulkner’s point in recounting this narrative is to show how the official record manages to silence Jefferson’s history; it effaces the story of those who have lost and those who have gained. Because the social wounds involved in the town’s founding have not been acknowledged, they usher in the belated temporality that characterizes so much of Faulkner’s fiction, the temporality of trauma. When Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew, the postal carrier, claims that the lock became the property of the federal government at the moment it was transported to the jail in a U.S. mail bag, community leaders overturn Ratcliffe’s proposal, ditching the scheme to charge the loss to the


federal government in Mohataha’s name. They do not simply return to the earlier plan of paying Holston themselves, but now go even further by deciding to establish the town of Jefferson in the bargain, an act they symbolically achieve by building a wooden courthouse adjacent to the jail. By paying Holston themselves, Ratcliffe argues, the founders commit a “fatal and irremediable error” (38) that provides “neither restoration to the ravaged nor emolument to the ravager, leaving in fact the whole race of man, as long as it endured, forever and irrevocably fifteen dollars deficit, fifteen dollars in the red” (32). From Ratcliffe’s perspective, the leaders have doomed both themselves and the dispossessed to a futureless present in which the injurious past will continue to reappear in ever-new and troubling forms. The missed encounter with the reality of loss has not been publically recognized, thus rendering the town’s history of traumatic wounds unavailable for the work of restitution and mourning. Faulkner’s conception of historical trauma, it should be noted, implies that injuries suffered at a specific time assume a transgenerational quality. These historical injuries are shown to migrate across generations to the modern descendants living in Jefferson, especially Temple and Nancy. By situating trauma on a kind of transhistorical plane, Faulkner’s work might be read as transforming historical loss into structural lack, the kind of lack that critics including Dominick LaCapra and Gillian Rose locate in poststructuralism and contest for obscuring the identifiable object of loss and invalidating modes of successful mourning able to heal.33 Faulkner’s modernism clearly leaves itself vulnerable to such a charge. Even as his text makes us cognizant of the historical antecedents of an absence that comes to defy representation, it represents the transformation of a material loss into an abstract lack, a constitutive lack in both private and public life that cannot be cured but only passed on and inherited. What is important to understand, however, is that Faulkner’s work not only deliberately rejects the viability of a complete working through of loss; it also resists the recurring repetitions of traumatic injury that LaCapra and Rose view as the only alternative to successful mourning. In place of the concepts of “healing” and “cure,” concepts that imply a forgetting of the past and moving on in the name of progress, I use the phrase “ongoing convalescence” to describe Faulkner’s representation of mourning. This convalescence, in the spheres of both the private and public, acknowledges that the melancholic fixations


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of history have not disappeared, that past wounds have not been healed. In response, Faulkner’s text enacts a form of mourning dedicated to uncovering the stories of loss suffered by those who have been unaccounted for in history. In tracing the way that historical trauma is passed on to subsequent generations, the text offers a mode of convalescence that allows these injurious histories to inform the interpretation of the past and forge alternative sympathies with those who have suffered. The reverberating effects of historical trauma return in the present as the curtain rises in Scene 2 on the Yoknapatawpha County Courthouse in 1951, where Nancy receives the death penalty for murdering Temple’s infant daughter. In figuring Nancy as a “nun” whose impending death calls for a textual form of mourning, Requiem for a Nun alerts us to the reoccurrence of a social wound that has not been healed, one that repeats itself in the act of infanticide. The text situates Nancy’s guilt within the context of an unappeased past, offering a complex understanding of her crime. On the one hand, Nancy stands rightfully accused of the murder, suggesting the extent to which historical trauma cannot be easily laid to rest. On the other, Nancy’s murderous act is represented as a rebellion against the culture of modernity and its abjecting of blacks and woman.34 That she will be hanged for her criminal rebellion, for her attempt to save an infant from the same violence she has suffered, reiterates the need to construct a history not simply of political events but of individual loss, a history that is not just taken in and remembered but reworked differently and projected outward. Nancy’s death sentence has been passed in the only Jefferson building to have been “exactly” restored to its pre- Civil War status after wartime damage, the very same courthouse, as we have seen, founded on a traumatic yet disavowed history of loss. By placing Nancy in this setting, Faulkner’s text demonstrates that our institutionalized practice of justice, founded on the sanctity of the rational individual, renders verdicts of judgement with little regard for a history of suffering that has conditioned the present. Faulkner’s extended critique of the Jefferson courthouse, the seat of justice founded on an unjust history, brings to light the need for a ritualized form of memory that conjoins the private and the public, the need for a form of mourning that places the return of traumatic effects within new social constellations and seeks to dissolve their deadly consequences.


Requiem for a Nun articulates this mourning, this ongoing convalescence, as an act of testifying and bearing witness to trauma. At the same time, however, the text poses a challenge to early theories of testimony by reminding us that testifying to trauma does not occur in a social vacuum. 35 The scene of testimony at the play’s center does not dramatize the willingness but the refusal to hear trauma speak, the refusal of those onstage to bear witness to the traumatic experience that Temple relates in a first-person account of her past. Temple tells a story that in a certain sense defies telling insofar as the traumatic events themselves were never consciously experienced; she cannot adhere to the dictates of simple “truth,” as one of her interlocutors commands (78). Rather, she can only repeat the trauma again in the telling. Temple acknowledges the extent to which testifying causes her to relive the past again; the purpose of telling her story, as she puts it, is “to give Temple Drake a good fair honest chance to suffer” (116). As a repetition of traumatic suffering, testimony requires the role of the listener, a person or persons who provide a safe space for the telling. The role of bearing witness is a difficult one, as Cathy Caruth and other trauma theorists have argued, because the teller’s traumatic reenactment “contaminates” the listener; it is not an account of the shock but the shock itself that is transmitted, thus transforming the witness into a traumatized co-participant now responsible for safeguarding the truth of the event.36 What Faulkner represents, however, is not the productive potential entailed in this difficult process but the missed opportunity to hear trauma speak. He does not portray Temple’s listeners as sensitive individuals already predisposed to sharing the difficult experience of another’s suffering but characters whose self-interest compel them to impose their own economies of knowledge onto her account. In their positions of political and legal power, these men reduce the meaning of her testimony to conventional social categories of understanding.37 By highlighting how the listeners onstage fail to hear Temple’s account apart from their own power-laden frames of reference, Faulkner’s text articulates how the testimony of suffering might as easily spawn recalcitrant defenses of the status quo as imperatives to social change. Acts of testimony are fraught with a kind of uncertainty that trauma theorists have only begun to articulate, an uncertainty that Faulkner’s text foregrounds in order to demonstrate that the public


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response to traumatic testimony is as important, and in some sense more, as the testimony itself. The ability to bear witness to Temple’s testimony depends on the capacity to see the present in the light of the past, to evaluate modernity in relation to the history that has conditioned it. When Temple travels to the Mississippi capital to submit an account of her traumatic experience as a mitigating circumstance in Nancy’s crime, she fails to save Nancy from execution; however, she does manage to convey the silent territory of a private past. As she relates her memories, memories that never simply reveal the objective reality of the trauma, Temple represents herself as a licentious woman responsible for the loss of her sexual innocence, her rape, the murder of Red and her child, and Nancy’s impending execution. However, Faulkner locates our capacity to hear the special truth of her trauma not in the words she says or what they ostensibly signify, but rather in a kind of literary dimension that manages to convey more and more clearly how her testimony functions as a critique of her culture. What Faulkner’s text communicates, in fact, is Temple’s resistance to a society that has withheld strong subject positions for women. Without mother or sisters, Temple recalls growing up in a household headed by men, one where her father, a prominent judge, and her brothers exerted authority over her actions. She tells her listeners that she broke college rules to meet Gowan on the devastating night depicted in Sanctuary because she had been a “foolish virgin.” Referring to a younger version of herself in the third person, Temple explains: “She just had unbounded faith that her father and brothers would know evil when they saw it, so all she had to do was, do the one thing which she knew they would forbid her to do if they had the chance” (118). Admittedly, Temple’s recollection of transgression seems to emerge as a means of verifying masculine authority to adjudicate sexual norms. But what the account of her experience succeeds in communicating is that the conventions regulating sexuality have not simply failed to protect her from Popeye; they placed her at the scene of her violation in the first place. In this light, her testimony may be interpreted as a challenge to the male policing of female virtue, even while Temple’s own assessment of this challenge remains limited by her culture’s conventional economy of knowledge: she cannot see herself as a chaste female so she must be a deserving whore.

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While Faulkner’s rendering of the testimony scene manages to disclose the hidden meanings of Temple’s story, it also demonstrates how the powerful males who listen to her account assume the authority to define the significance of her traumatic losses. When Temple raises the issue that has troubled readers of Sanctuary, her failure to extricate herself from Popeye, she again represents herself as the perpetrator of her traumatic experience, while Stevens insists on figuring her an innocent victim. Temple claims that she could have walked away from the car accident and found transportation “to the nearest town or railroad station or even back to school or, for that matter, right on back home into my father’s or brothers’ hands” (121).38 But, she declares, “I choose the murderer—“ (121). Stevens imposes his own meaning on her narrative by blaming the evil she has suffered on one man, rather than indicting the role that cultural values have played in her tragedy. He informs the governor that Popeye was a “psychopath,” little more than “a slightly deformed cockroach: a hybrid, sexually incapable” (121). Stevens’s account accords with textual evidence, since Sanctuary goes so far as to disclose that Popeye mutilated small animals as a child before bootlegging, raping, and murdering as an adult.39 However, Temple’s testimony strains toward a truth that moves beyond Popeye’s documented depravity or her own culpability; it conveys a complex mode of female survival in a brutal male order where Temple seized the opportunity to prey upon Popeye’s impotence by using her sexual involvement with Red as a weapon against her male captor. Stevens cannot hear Temple’s insistence that she “choose the murderer” as a story that impugns a masculine economy of knowledge, the very economy that grants him privilege. Rather, he interprets Temple as innocent victim and Popeye as evil victimizer, an interpretation that has a measure of validity but nevertheless fails to hear Temple’s recollection of traumatic experiences as a plea for a new interpretation of the past. The painful core of Temple’s testimony, the story of her involvement with Red, demonstrates how traumatic loss takes the regressive trajectory of a repetitive return. In testifying to her relationship with Red, she speaks of a strong attachment that grew out of sexual encounters arranged and watched by Popeye for his own visual pleasure: “I met the man, how doesn’t matter, and I fell what I called in love with him” (127). Red was murdered on his way to their first private meeting, a meeting Temple regarded as their opportunity to


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purge the relationship of shame. Consequently, she blames herself and not Popeye for Red’s death. “Oh yes.—Died, shot from a car while he was slipping up the alley behind the house, to climb up the same drainpipe I could have climbed down at any time” (132). Because her love affair began as a spectator sport in a brothel, and because she sees herself as directly responsible for Red’s death, Temple has a difficult time confronting her loss. She does find in Nancy, “the only animal in Jefferson that spoke Temple Drake’s language” (136), a kind of priest in the “Catholic Church” who knew how to “listen” to her story of the love she “missed that other time” (134). But, as her testimony suggests, the bereaved exchange took place in an atmosphere of extreme secrecy, underscoring the need to disavow her loss and assuming the dire consequences of traumatic reenactment. When Red’s brother Pete blackmails Temple with the sexually titillating letters she wrote to her murdered lover, Temple’s response to the blackmail scheme takes the form of the belated temporality of trauma: “The letters turned up again of course,” she tells the governor and lawyer, “And of course, being Temple Drake, the first way to buy them back that Temple Drake thought of, was to produce the material for another set of them” (131). When she convinces Pete to run off with her and her infant daughter, Temple unwittingly establishes the conditions whereby she relives Red’s death in both Nancy’s killing of her child and Nancy’s subsequently impending execution. In Faulkner’s text, the failure of the social order to credit the legitimacy of Temple’s loss—or provide a means to mourn it—ushers in a terrible repetition of the past. How can traumatic experience be dissolved of its deadly repetitions, how can it be placed within a practice of convalescence, if trauma points to a past that evades conscious knowledge? How, in other words, can we respond to a past that remains unknowable? This is the central question the text poses and to which it responds; Requiem for a Nun represents the extent to which trauma exceeds knowledge, but it also transforms this limit into an alternative economy of knowing, an economy where the concept of unknowingness is articulated and shared. To the extent that trauma points to a past outside the contents of consciousness, it prompts Faulkner’s effort to apprehend this violent history through its perplexing repetitions and devastating returns. In the stories that give voice to these repetitive recurrences, Faulkner finds clear indications of a spectral history, to


invoke Derrida’s concept, that has fallen outside the interests of official documentation and conventional historiography.40 Faulkner’s text constructs a spectral history to demonstrate how the repetitions of past suffering can be made to yield different consequences for the future. This is the lesson, as I take it, of the Prologue to Act III, “The Jail (Nor Even Yet Quite Relinquish—),” where Faulkner’s narrator describes a “stranger,” an “outlander” who stumbles upon Jefferson, wants to know its history, and discovers that forgotten pasts are as much a part of the town’s history as the official knowledge preserved in “church registers and the courthouse records” (184). The stranger makes his way to the local jail, the only structure “in observation and memory ... older even than the town itself” (183). What he finds there are the remains and reminders of memories that have been largely obscured, histories that have been all but erased. The barely visible writing and pictures underneath layers of the whitewashed jail walls move the stranger to consider the “passion and hope and endurance” of those who have been rendered utterly silent by Jefferson history. Among those include American Indians, blacks, and women, the socially marginalized imprisoned for a variety of transgressions and deemed “significantless,” but who rank in both the stranger’s view and Faulkner’s text as the “unvanquished” (184). In articulating the discontinuities and disruptions of history, the prologue raises the knowledge of an unknowable past as a challenge to the homogenization of a modern social moment that banks on forgetting its injurious history. By situating the traumas of Nancy and Temple within this alternative economy of knowing, Requiem for a Nun identifies ongoing convalescence as a process where grief is made public in ways that open up history for alternative empathetic identifications. In the course of her testimony, Temple certainly encourages us to identify with Nancy, an “ex- dope-fiend nigger whore” (136), who deflates Steven’s moral indignation when he discovers that she cannot name the father of an unborn child she lost when one of her sexual partners beat her: “If you backed your behind into a buzz-saw,” Nancy “impatiently” asks Stevens, “could you tell which tooth hit you first?” (241). If Temple’s testimony offers a requiem for Nancy, a formal lament that gives public voice to the suffering of another, Requiem for a Nun performs a similar function for Temple, the “foolish virgin” who ostensibly “chose the murderer,” by inviting our identification


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with her. At the play’s end, Temple returns home with her husband, whom the governor and lawyer have allowed to listen in on his wife’s testimony secretly. The men reassert conventional forms of legality and domesticity as adequate responses to trauma, but Temple understands that her husband’s apology does not restore her innocence. She also understands the lawyer’s insistence on the simple truth has not facilitated the telling of her story and the governor’s claim that Nancy has sacrificed her “worthless life” does not comprehend the social conditions that have rendered her life supposedly worthless in the first place. Faulkner’s text not only exposes the failure of modernity’s institutions to hear trauma speak; it also establishes a modernist literary practice where an alternative economy of knowing is animated for the political and ethical work of mourning. As Temple’s testimony compels her to embark on a process of mourning that does not promise to end but that she herself understands will continue “tomorrow and tomorrow” (243), Faulkner’s text places audiences and readers in the role of witness, a role that holds open the possibility that a return of injurious histories will yield a different economy of loss and a different future for both the individual and community.


Part II Legacies


3 Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited

The great cultural decline of the twentieth century was first evident in the graveyard. (Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death”) Waugh’s novels mourn the collapsing tradition of Englishness once long- established social forms of life have begun to disintegrate. His narratives set in the 1930s focus on the deterioration of physical locations and places, as well as the dissolution of cultural practices and inherited ideals.1 Waugh identifies the public school, sports field, men’s club, and particularly the country house repeatedly at the center of his fiction as epitomizing a uniquely English tradition; he represents these places in various stages of decline and decay. The country houses of the nation—and all they stand for—are literally falling apart. The decaying homes of England’s aristocratic classes, even while they continue to stand, signal what has already largely passed into history: a national tradition where transcendental certainties secured linguistic meaning, Britannia ruled the waves, and people knew their proper place in the social hierarchy. In representing the decaying country house as a synecdoche for an array of fragmenting cultural experiences, Waugh’s fiction describes a multiplicity of literal and symbolic deaths, telling stories about the passing of characters, dissolution of religious faith, decline of the aristocracy, and collapsing authority of British imperialism. But his novels do not simply describe the decline of the country house. They seek, more fundamentally, to mourn the disintegration of a national tradition and adjudicate the significance of this loss for the future. 93


Waugh’s effort to mourn the passing of the country house tradition hinges first and foremost on an aesthetics of decay. His writing, in fact, focuses attention on the decay of English domestic architecture more than the structures themselves. Consider, for example, Work Suspended, an unfinished novel of the late 1930s, where Waugh introduces what I call a form of “critical” nostalgia for the country house and distinguish from “sentimental” nostalgia. The narrator John Plant gives expression to this critical nostalgia when he identifies “a specialized enthusiasm for domestic architecture,” especially those eighteenth- century classical houses that have begun to deteriorate, as one of the “peculiarities” of his generation: When the poetic mood was on us, we turned to buildings, and gave them the place which our fathers accorded to Nature—to almost any buildings, but particularly those in the classic tradition, and more particularly, in its decay. It was a kind of nostalgia for the style of living which we emphatically rejected in practical affairs.2 That Plant uses his inheritance to buy a country house, a place he believes will shelter him from the transience and moral dissipation of modern life, suggests that he imagines himself as a rightful heir to an English tradition of rural life, one he regards as valuable. However, he does not display any sentimental attachment to this artifact of historical distinction; Plant distances his fixation on the country estate from the conduct of everyday life. Even more to the point, he reserves his highest esteem not for the well-preserved house, but for one “in its decay.” Consequently, Waugh’s protagonist not only invalidates any project bent on historical recovery, but also views the living tradition of Englishness as a time that has essentially passed, a tradition he has been born into at the irreversible moment of its doom. If there is a species of nostalgia operating here, it does not express the sentimental longing to redeem the present by restoring the practices of the past. Instead, Plant displays a critical form of nostalgia, or what Peter Kalliney has recently addressed as a nostalgic longing for nostalgia itself.3 Rather than valuing a house that would enable him to sustain the English tradition of country life, he values a house that reiterates its loss; rather than fixating on a house that would obscure the fading splendor of the English past, Plant fixates

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on a house that highlights this decay. Plant cannot deny the impossibility of recovering the past. What he can do, much like Waugh himself, is regard the decay as a sign of his own temporal predicament, his having entered the country house tradition at a stage he regards as its fateful closure.4 Waugh’s fiction tells the tale of this closure by transforming the familiar discourse of nostalgic sentimentality into a politics of mourning, a politics that has the capacity to yield specific social consequences. His representation of mourning, as I argue in what follows, reflects a decidedly conservative vision of the future possibilities for subjectivity and culture. Waugh’s work does not merely place characters among the disintegrating architecture of the nation but invests special value in those privileged upper-middleclass figures who reject projects of restoration and recognize decay as an end in itself. By distancing his work from a nostalgic fixation on the past that threatens to lead to cultural stasis, Waugh redefines nostalgia for the modern age; his work transforms nostalgia from a sentimental disposition to a performance of mourning that makes the past newly available for a culturally conservative politics. If a national tradition that supported conventional Englishness cannot be recovered, it can still be interpreted, reverenced, and mourned in ways that foster sympathetic identifications in the present with those characters who align themselves with history’s old hegemonies. Mourning in Waugh’s work, it is important to understand, sustains some of the strictures of the modernist tradition as exemplified by Woolf and Faulkner. Waugh shares with these modernist writers a critical view of modernity; his writing demonstrates how technological development and the increasing materialism of modern social life have led to the disappearance of bodies, places, customs, and beliefs. In line with the innovative model of mourning that I have identified in a certain strain of modernist writing, Waugh as well does not regard loss as a wholly negative state but a unique opportunity to assign creating meaning to the lingering remnants of a lost tradition. His writing mourns lost characters, lost locations, and lost traditions to generate a specific set of empathetic identifications and social meanings. Crucial differences exist, however, between modernist narrations of loss and Waugh’s late-modernist novels. While Woolf and Faulkner represent sustained grief and ongoing mourning to promote new social constellations for female characters, the

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working classes, and African Americans, Waugh formulates bereavement to advance a conservative social agenda. A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited, as I discuss below, seek to instill a felt experience of bereavement for the irrecoverable loss of tradition.5 These texts not only encourage readers to identify with those characters who stand in for the victors of historical privilege, but also seek to renew consolation, particularly a religious form of consolation, for the loss of old social hegemonies. In promulgating a renewal of religious consolation for the modern age, Waugh’s novels demonstrate how the closure of mourning and the resolution of grief serve a bourgeois social order; his fiction establishes a consoling narrative of historical loss with a meaning that is fixed, stable, and no longer open to alternative interpretations. Despite Waugh’s complex use of irony, his mode of parodic critique that extends to characters who embody traditional as well as modern sensibilities, his novels ultimately come down on the side of the latter- day incarnations of history’s most privileged national figures. His texts attempt to elicit bereaved sympathy for these characters by lingering at their decaying domestic haunts. The way these characters mourn for the fading splendor of the English past—and the consolation they hold out to the reader—clarifies how the work of grief might serve regressive and reactive aims. The critical nostalgia in Waugh’s work, I argue, produces a consolatory mourning discourse that functions as a bulwark against the rise of the modern middle class, as well as local and global projects of emancipation.

Gothic ruins and English remains in A Handful of Dust A Handful of Dust does not simply explore the social status of the country house and English identity at a moment of historical crisis; Waugh’s text represents a traditional notion of Englishness as lost and describes the mourning of this loss as a mode of sustained identification with it. The novel takes place in the 1930s, when the country house tradition has already been dealt a decisive blow by a number of factors: the changing social scene after the Great War, the shift from landed to industrial wealth, and the introduction of new tax laws.6 Tony Last, the novel’s main character, understands the financial difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, of maintaining


his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey. While Tony employs 15 indoor servants, along with gardeners, carpenters, a night watchman, and other workers, he and his wife Brenda are forced to economize where they can, traveling to London mid-week when train fares are cheaper, deferring much-needed home improvements until death duties for Tony’s father have been paid, and postponing trips abroad. Beyond material constraints, Tony also realizes that the house itself “was not altogether amenable to modern ideas of comfort” (13). Its heating and hot-water systems, in addition to a paucity of bathrooms, appear wholly inadequate by twentieth- century standards. But from its owner’s perspective, Hetton continues to function as a page in an ongoing story of national and personal belonging. This is a story of English identity that Tony values and plans to pass on to his only child, John Andrew, by bequeathing the place to him. Hetton Abbey manages to define the sense of Englishness that Waugh’s protagonist has inherited and cherishes; he regards the house and its contents as “things of tender memory and proud possession” (14). His personal collection of “eggs, butterflies, fossils, [and] coins” (16) gathered as a boy on Hetton’s grounds suggests an organic understanding of house and nation, an organicism that Vita Sackville-West expressed when describing English country houses as an “essential part of the country, not only in the country, but part of it, a natural growth.”7 Tony similarly regards Hetton as part of a natural order of things, largely ignoring the exploitative structure of rural labor necessary to support it. He refuses to sell a house he can barely afford to keep up even though he realizes, as one character puts it, “There’s a lot in what these labour fellows say, you know. Big houses are a thing of the past in England, I’m afraid” (206). Moreover, Tony’s “framed picture of a dreadnought” serves to place this local narrative of national identity within a global context (16). The image of British naval authority, so crucial in the establishment of empire, suggests the extent to which imperialism has contributed to building the structure Tony inhabits. House, contents, and all they imply provide Waugh’s character with an English identity that has been grounded on class division at home and imperial authority abroad.8 The privileged position he has been born into furnishes Tony with a personal sense of Englishness, one he experiences as a “duty toward’s [sic] one’s employees, and towards the place too” (19). The protagonist regards the country house tradition as a “definite part of English


life,” whose disappearance “would be a serious loss” to both himself and the nation (19). Multiple economic and social pressures threaten Tony’s position as an old-style landowner; Waugh condenses these in the figure of Mrs. Beaver, a type of character that flourishes in the early decades of the twentieth century and reflects Waugh’s view of all that is wrong with the culture of modernity. An interior decorator and commercial developer, Mrs. Beaver profits during the financial crisis of the thirties by modernizing country homes and converting large London houses into affordable apartments. She displays a functional view of housing that Waugh already lampooned in his first novel Decline and Fall, where the fictional Bauhaus architect Otto Silenus demolishes a country house standing since the sixteenth century and builds a “clean and square” domestic structure in its place. Silenus, we are told, learned his profession from Le Corbusier, whose architectural aesthetic Waugh roundly criticizes in both his fiction and nonfiction as coldly mechanistic.9 Silenus himself gives voice to Waugh’s criticism when he defines the task of modern architecture as “the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form,” and goes on to claim, “[t]he only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.”10 It is this mechanized approach to architecture that Waugh attacks in his characterization of Mrs. Beaver. Driven by the sole consideration of profitability, Mrs. Beaver rents Tony’s wife Brenda one of her converted London flats, a small place “to dress and telephone” (52) that comes with “limitless hot water” and “space for a bed” (53). Mrs. Beaver realizes the flat enables Brenda to carry on a secret affair with John Beaver, Mrs. Beaver’s shallow and opportunistic son. For Waugh, the conversion of London houses to apartments registers the moral emptiness of modernity; such living spaces offer a facile alternative to country house life, a life that simply bores Brenda and prompts her to seek apparent excitement in the city and an extramarital affair with a man she hardly likes. A Handful of Dust defines the threat to the country house tradition as a social disease that originates in the London metropolis. The urban English are shown to be indifferent, even hostile, to all facets of rural life and Waugh draws on this anti-urban rhetoric in the novel to offer a defense of the country house. When Brenda brings Mrs. Beaver to Hetton, commissioning her to remodel the morning


room, an urban sensibility threatens rural space; the interior decorator declares the room “appalling” and admits that “the structure does rather limit” the possibilities, but nevertheless claims to know “exactly what Brenda wants” (106). Mrs. Beaver recommends covering the walls with “white chromium plating” (106). Waugh’s choice of material fuels his critique of the urban assault on English country life. Expensive chrome paneling, associated with the fast-paced modern world, underscores the financial motivation that informs Mrs. Beaver’s ideas about houses and interiors. As his novel conveys, Waugh categorically despises the materialism and architectural aesthetics of modern culture; however, he also reserves a special kind of hostility for sentimental nostalgia and those characters, like Tony Last, who display it. The protagonist’s surname signifies a decaying tradition that cannot be passed on, but the character himself refuses to recognize the degree to which financial and social pressures have rendered his country life a thing of the past. Signs of decay abound at Hetton Abbey but, rather than see them as a marker of the boundary that separates past from present, Tony regards decay as a sign of the past’s survival in the modern world and embarks on plans for restoration. Waugh’s narrator, in fact, figures Tony’s fixation on his house as a substitute for reckoning with the passing of the country house tradition and the emergent culture of modernity responsible for it: “All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent. Tony lay for ten minutes very happily planning the renovation of his ceiling” (16). Restoration of a plaster ceiling and its ornately painted decorations places Tony within a familiar discourse of sentimental nostalgia; he takes shelter in the decorative richness of the past as a means of avoiding the realities of the modern present. Waugh’s critique of this nostalgia demonstrates how the past that Tony idealizes does not express the ideal his protagonist imagines. Tony lives in a house built in the last half of the nineteenth century when his Victorian ancestors rebuilt the original estate in the Gothic Revival style. Waugh’s narrator gives voice to the opinion of many in the period who signaled out Gothic Revivalism, of all the myriad styles of English domestic architecture, for ridicule and condemnation when remarking that Hetton, “formerly one of the notable houses of the country, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest” (13).11 Waugh’s novel expresses disdain


for a style that has been widely criticized as the reduction of medieval forms to an ostentatious display of ornament. If the nineteenthcentury Gothic took inspiration from a vernacular style of medieval churches and castles, it did so in an imitative fashion that Waugh regards as reducing architectural substance to little more than a decorative facade. In this context, the narrator makes it a point to mention that Tony’s cherished but deteriorating ceiling is not the real thing, but an imitation of the real thing: “In order to make an appearance of coffered wood, moulded slats had been nailed in a chequer across the plaster” (13). The protagonist seeks to renovate the ceiling’s decaying plaster to restore what was originally merely the look of coffered wood. By representing Victorian Gothic architecture as itself a meaningless imitation of a genuinely admirable past, Waugh’s work defines the nineteenth century, and the emergent secularization and materialism that characterizes the period, as the beginning of the end of the country house tradition. “English Gothic—I,” the novel’s second chapter, demonstrates how Tony’s house draws inspiration from both the medieval church and fortress, but empties the architectural categories of spirituality and nationalism of significance. An abbey originally stood on the site that Hetton now occupies, suggesting that Tony’s Victorian ancestors selected the Gothic style when rebuilding to establish a connection between their privileged social status and medieval spirituality. But Hetton Abbey, like the Gothic Revival structures upon which it is based, is represented in comic fashion; the house appears, as it does to the novel’s journalist who visits and photographs it, as an “amusing” example of an architectural effort to forge a spiritual style of building that has gone grotesquely wrong.12 Waugh reiterates this empty spiritualism when depicting Tony’s churchgoing as a ritual he practices out of mundane habit rather than religious conviction. Just as the house embodies a false pretense to medieval piety, Hetton suggests the emptiness of its status as a symbol of national strength. Hetton’s battlements and armorial stained glass display signs of political power and family pride, yet Waugh’s narrator remarks on the way that Gothic design no longer signifies the national well-being of Tony and his family. “[T]he ecclesiastic gloom of the great hall” and a bedroom fireplace “like a tomb of the thirteenth century” suggest the degree to which the awe-inspiring interiors and mighty fortifications of the castle have now come to


signify little more than a depressing and inhospitable space (14). In keeping with the emphasis that Gothic Revivalism placed on medieval literary traditions, each of Hetton’s bedrooms has been decorated after a figure in Arthurian legend. But again, Waugh’s aim is to expose the meaninglessness of this borrowing. For all Tony’s veneration of this tradition, the protagonist appears woefully incapable of understanding its significance. Although his wife sleeps in a room suggestively called Guinevere, Tony fails, for instance, to read the obvious signs of Brenda’s infidelity. Tony may be “madly feudal,” as Brenda claims, but his house gives merely the appearance and not the substance of the venerable past. A Handful of Dust is a corrosively ironic text, extending its critique to both characters like Tony who embody the waning of tradition and characters like Mrs. Beaver who represent the ascendency of the modern. This corrosive irony constitutes the novel’s narrative structure; in refusing to endorse either position, Waugh plays one off against the other. The novel sets up an ironic exchange where tradition is raised to expose the vacuousness of the modern spirit and modernity, in turn, is represented to convey the foolishness of clinging to the past. In this light, the novel defines the interwar years as a cultural period poised between two wholly inadequate alternatives: characters either give themselves over to the antiquated ways of the past or the callous profitability of the modern. Nowhere is this simultaneous indictment of past and present more apparent than in the aftermath of the death of Tony’s son, seven-year- old John Andrew, who dies in a riding accident during his first fox hunt. The death scene describes the way that Tony and Mrs. Rattery, a financially independent and thoroughly modern American visiting Hetton, respond to the fatal accident. In Waugh’s handling of the scene, neither the traditional male nor the modern female appears capable of accommodating the passing of human life. The sheer lack of symbolic resources for the mourning of death emerges in the novel as a measure of a nation in decline, a measure of a dying England. The epigraph with which I began reflects the centrality that Waugh places on funerary traditions; in claiming that Western decline “was first evident in the graveyard,” he evaluates the impoverishment of modern culture in relation to the erosion of death rituals and mourning practices that began in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.13 Similarly, the novel’s death scene demonstrates

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that the funerary practices associated with the past have eroded and modernity offers nothing to replace them. In Tony’s case, Waugh raises Mrs. Rattery’s ability to directly confront the fatal accident in order to expose the protagonist’s inability to face his son’s death. The death of John Andrew, the only direct heir to Hetton, invites Tony to recognize a temporal rupture that separates life and death, present and past. But it is a recognition fraught with difficulty, as Tony struggles with time and attempts to resist its passing: It’s less than four hours ago that it happened ... it’s odd to think that this is the same day; that it’s only five hours ago they were all here at the meet having drinks ... It was twenty eight minutes past twelve when I heard. I looked at my watch ... it was ten to one when they brought John in ... just over three hours ... it’s almost incredible, isn’t it, everything becoming absolutely different, suddenly like that. (149–50) Tony continues to resist the idea of passing time when he considers the news reaching his wife, who has taken to spending most days in London with her lover: “Think of it, all the time between now and when it happened, before Brenda hears. It’s scarcely credible, is it?” (150). These repeated claims of disbelief may well reveal an element of traumatic incomprehension that testifies to the intensity of Tony’s grief. However, what Waugh primarily discloses in Tony’s temporal reveries is a character out of sync with the present, a character who desperately longs to return to a time before the accident and before the decline of the country house tradition. Waugh’s narrative clearly upholds the way Mrs. Rattery confronts the reality of John’s passing without hesitation or obfuscation; however, it also pitches the immense struggle Tony experiences in facing the loss against the ease with which Mrs. Rattery assimilates death to the vacuous rituals of contemporary life. Mrs. Rattery appears to have little difficulty in acknowledging the reality of the accident; she responds to Tony’s disbelief with brutal honesty: “It happened all right” (147). Waugh’s novel, nevertheless, critiques her response to the tragedy by highlighting the game of cards in which she indulges while keeping Tony company until Brenda’s arrival. More than a mere pastime, Mrs. Rattery’s game of solitaire emerges in the death scene as a replacement for the lost meaning once furnished by religion,


philosophy, and history. As the narrator describes, “Mrs. Rattery sat intent over her game, moving little groups of cards adroitly backward and forwards about the table like shuttles across a loom; under her fingers order grew out of chaos; she established sequence and precedence; the symbols before her became coherent, interrelated” (150). This description of an activity that imparts “sequence” and “precedence” on otherwise isolated symbols indicates that a card game has taken over the function of a grand signifying system. It is not religious faith, philosophical knowledge, or historical tradition but a game of cards that now discerns “order” from “chaos” and establishes a coherent system of signification. What this card playing scene reflects is Waugh’s view of an existential nothingness at the core of modern life. Indeed, Mrs. Rattery never once offers condolences to her host; she appears capable of experiencing bereaved sadness only when her game culminates in failure: “[I]t had nearly come to a solution that time, but for a six of diamonds out of place, and a stubbornly congested patch at one corner, where nothing could be made to move. ‘It’s a heartbreaking game,’ she said” (151). For Waugh, the emotional life of the modern character does not emanate from an interior depth but from a flat and meaningless surface, a superficiality reflected in the empty rituals of modernity. The impoverishment of mourning customs in Waugh’s account of a culture polarized between defunct traditions and modern meaninglessness ultimately takes the ridiculous form of a child’s game. When Mrs. Rattery urges Tony to pass time in play, he suggests the only card game he knows, Animal Snap. The two deal cards and make animal noises to signal when they have achieved the game’s object, securing a pair. Waugh highlights the absurdity of the scene when a servant enters the room and later reports, “Sitting there clucking like a ‘en ... and the little fellow lying dead upstairs” (154). The contemporary moment, the novel demonstrates, has nothing to offer in the way of bereavement practices since tradition no longer makes sense and modernity fails to provide positive replacements. With an irony that exposes the failure of both characters to confront loss, the text depicts a world utterly bereft of value, a world where private and public meaning has departed the national scene. But this is surely not the last word on what the interwar period signifies in Waugh’s novel. If it were, A Handful of Dust would constitute little more than a nihilistic message of utter futility; the novel

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would signify sheer meaninglessness insofar as the past is shown to be irrecoverable and the present devoid of value. Contemporary critics have read the novel largely in these terms, highlighting the text’s pervasive irony, its apparent refusal to choose sides. George McCartney, who seeks to recover Waugh’s work from reductive readings of simple conservatism, acknowledges that while the novel critiques the apparent superficiality of the culture of modernity, it also represents the social developments of modern life to challenge forms of nineteenth- century sentimentality.14 Michael Gorra, in his account of the text’s critique of both past and present, argues that the narrative “attempts to find the comforts of religion in secular form,” but fails in the effort. This failure culminates in the novel’s expression of cultural meaninglessness and leads, in Gorra’s estimation, to the overtly Catholic vision of Waugh’s later work.15 These critics have made us aware of the complex functioning of the novel’s ironic structure, but what has not been appreciated is the performance of mourning the novel manages to generate. In chastising traditionalists who struggle to restore the architectural achievements of history, as well as critiquing modernizers who advocate a full-scale demolition of historical artifacts, A Handful of Dust demonstrates how all characters refuse to recognize loss; they view the past as either surviving in or as absolutely surpassed by the present. By exposing this refusal, the novel’s ironic structure, I argue, seeks to establish a consciousness of loss, to imbue the reader with a critical nostalgia for a centuries- old tradition depicted in the process of disappearing. This nostalgia promises neither to restore nor to ignore the past. What it does seek to establish is a felt experience of bereavement that requires mourning. Indeed, mourning for the loss of the country house tradition emerges by the novel’s end as the only meaningful activity left to the English subject. Waugh clearly values the country house tradition, a tradition, to repeat, where Englishness depends on a local system of labor and global system of empire. It is a tradition, I have been arguing, that Waugh’s narrative represents as irrecoverably diseased and inevitably lost. The novel represents mourning not as thwarting the decline of tradition or ascendency of the modern but as constituting the final chapter in a story of English identity. Waugh represents Englishness, then, in what he imagines to be the only way left: the act of mourning its passing.


Ian Baucom, in an important study, Out of Place, has argued that literary writers from Ruskin to Conrad responded to the crisis that imperialism posed to national identity by representing Englishness as a community joined in grief.16 Colonial possessions abroad led to confusion at home about what it meant to be English, a confusion that prompted canonical writers to depict England as a nation in the final throes of death. The frequency of this mournful imagination in the nation’s literature “suggests that in some strange way to be English is, often, to be a member of a cult of the dead, or, at the very least, a member of a cult of ruin” (175). Baucom concludes that “England’s writers have insisted on this form of belonging, asserting that if the nation is an imagined community, then the English nation is a community in mourning” (176). Although Baucom makes no mention of Waugh’s work, A Handful of Dust represents Englishness in precisely these terms; the novel identifies one of the decisive factors involved in the demise of country house England as a crisis of imperial authority. When Tony’s wife seeks a divorce settlement that would require him to sell Hetton Abbey, Tony resolves to defend his ownership of the estate and embarks on a trip to British Guinea and the Brazilian jungle in search of a lost civilization, an ancient city where a continuous tradition of spiritual and civic life is rumored to have survived into the twentieth century. Colonial travel offers the novel’s main character an imaginative means to renew his besieged sense of English identity; however, Waugh’s handling of these scenes exposes the futility, even the deadly consequences, of refusing to acknowledge the inevitable passing of this national sense of belonging. In this context, the decaying estate at home and collapsing imperial authority abroad both conspire in Waugh’s novel to tell the same story: the death of English identity. The identity of the English subject in the high imperial period depended on a paradigm of Britain’s moral and intellectual superiority; it is a paradigm the novel shows to be utterly exhausted. Waugh introduces this exhaustion early in the text when the Hetton vicar delivers sermons he wrote years earlier in British India with imperialist references to life in the colonies. These references appear ridiculously out of context, though Tony and other parishioners express no surprise when the vicar acknowledges “our Gracious Queen Empress,” remembers “our dear ones far away” in England, and claims to be “united with them across the dunes and mountains in our loyalty

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to the sovereign” (39). Waugh’s narrator lays heavy scorn on these antiquated imperialist tracts to mark the end of this classic form of the colonizing mission. The sections involving Mr. Messinger, Tony’s guide in British Guinea and the Brazilian jungle, extend this account of empire’s decline by showing how Western rationality can no longer sustain the imperial adventure. To locate the ancient city, Messinger attempts to persuade a group of Indians from the Macushi tribe to lead the way through the unmapped jungle; he tries to convince the leaders to postpone their sacred harvesting of the cassava crop and traverse the terrain of the warring tribe, the Pie-wie. Messinger reasons with the Macushi, offering them trade goods and appealing to what he regards as their own material interests. Perfume, jewelry, tools, and weapons are tantalizingly displayed to the Macushi. When the goods fail to prompt the Macushi to guide the travelers, Messinger offers what he believes they will find irresistible, windup tin mice. The Macushi, however, regard these self-propelled toys as objects of mechanized horror. They flee the scene and abandon the white men in the outback, indicating an unbridgeable gap that separates their spiritual system from Western rationality. Waugh emphasizes the exhaustion of the ideology of empire by showing how Messinger dies as a consequence of his inability to exercise colonial mastery and how Tony finds himself gravely ill and alone in the jungle with nothing to fall back on. To suggest, as I have done, that the novel articulates the decline of imperial authority is in no way to imply that the text constitutes a repudiation of empire. Rather, Waugh’s aim is not to condemn the history of British imperialism as much as depict this history as coming to an end.17 In representing this closure, the novel not only destabilizes certain imperialist assumptions but also reinscribes others. This simultaneous dismantling and renewal of the colonialist mentality, according to Simon Gikandi, characterizes the work of British modernist and late-modernist writers. Gikandi argues that writers including Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene destabilize empire by representing the colonial subject as “driven by a sense of decay and decline,” while they also reinvigorate imperialist attitudes by depicting colonial space as “one of the few places in which this subject can recode its world or even hallow a space in which it can contemplate itself.”18 Waugh’s novel engages this ambivalent logic. The text deflates the triumphalism of the imperialist narrative, on the


one hand, by defining the protagonist’s journey to South America as motivated by an experience of domestic crisis; Tony embarks on the trip “because the associations of Hetton were for the time poisoned for him” (216–17). The novel also renews imperialist assumptions, on the other hand, by representing a colonized and primitive place as a reflecting surface for the protagonist to see himself and contemplate his own crisis. Tony’s colonial adventure enables him to glean new knowledge about himself, even if this knowledge forces him to confront the death of his English country house identity. The narrative description of Tony’s motivations make it quite clear that he journeys to South America in search of an image of what has been threatened at home. He does not simply seek an alternative to English country life that might be discovered in the encounter with cultural difference. Rather, the protagonist attempts to recover in a foreign territory the innocence he has lost at home. Before ever stepping foot in British Guinea, Tony imagines the ancient city as a reflection of his home; he fantasizes that the fabled city “was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transformed Hetton” (222). Now in the jungle with a dangerously high fever, Tony continues to see his foreign surroundings as a mirror of country house England. When Tony is rescued by Mr. Todd, a character of mixed descent born to an Anglo-Barbadian father and a Pie-wie mother, the protagonist sees his wood-and-straw structure as a reflection of Hetton: “Architecture harmonizing with local character ... indigenous material employed throughout. Don’t let Mrs. Beaver see it or she will cover it with chromium plating” (286). The primitive location finally brings Tony to an awareness about his home that he can no longer defer. His delirious utterances express, in fact, a consciousness of the loss of the country house tradition toward which the entire text has been leading: “I will tell you what I learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats” (288). Waugh’s protagonist has finally come to understand that the ancient city, a place sheltered from the onslaught on modernity, does not exist; he is also forced to realize the deadly consequences of having sustained for so long the illusion of English country house identity. The novel goes so far as to enact the protagonist’s symbolic death when the illiterate Mr. Todd holds Tony prisoner, falsely informs a


search party he has died, and forces the protagonist to read and reread aloud the complete works of Dickens. When faced with Mr. Todd’s chillingly sentimental nostalgia for the forms of Victorian culture, Tony is forced to acknowledge his own; his identity as an old-style country house owner has amounted to little more than a nostalgic clinging to outworn traditions. His South American journey teaches Tony virtually nothing about colonized places or primitive cultures. What the journey does teach him is that his sense of national belonging has been shattered; it teaches him that no amount of sentimental nostalgia can bring back his English country life. Although Waugh’s protagonist loses plenty in actuality, he does benefit, in an ironic sense, through the contemplation of what he has lost. Traveling to a colonized and primitive place, the colonial character encounters himself, an encounter that renders him conscious of the decay, dissolution, and impending death of English identity. Waugh’s text employs a circular logic in describing both civilized England and the primitive jungle. The protagonist embarks on the trip to South America because he regards primitive culture as an earlier version of country house England, a version prior to modernity’s assault on rural life. Although Tony sets out to escape the truth about his country existence, he finds himself confronted with the very knowledge he sought to avoid, the knowledge of a national tradition of domestic architecture and social life that has been lost. In this regard, the circularity governing Waugh’s description of his protagonist’s journey effaces the boundary separating the categories of the civilized and primitive. Modernity in England now appears to be the same as primitive culture; both are represented as barbaric. A Handful of Dust clearly dismantles the idea of British imperial authority by destabilizing the binary between civilization and primitivism. However, the novel, like Ninety-two Days, Waugh’s South American travel narrative upon which the novel draws, also reinscribes at least one of the conventional ideologies of colonialism: primitive culture is valued only for what it reveals about the English character.19 Even so, the circularity of Waugh’s irony adds yet another dimension of interpretative significance. The ironic self-consciousness with which Waugh depicts the protagonist’s failure to refind in a primitive location what he lost at home invites us to read the novel as foregrounding and exposing, rather than concealing and endorsing, the self-serving structure that governs the colonial character’s encounter with difference.


The corrosive irony at work here produces the kind of textual ambiguity that has led many to regard A Handful of Dust as Waugh’s greatest novelistic achievement, an irony that has clearly stood up well to the all- encompassing skepticisms of the twentieth century. If A Handful of Dust ended here, with the protagonist’s symbolic burial in the outback, we could indeed conclude that this satirical novel stages and restages ambiguous conflicts between the civilized and primitive, conflicts where the social practices of civilization no longer appear to be superior to those of primitive culture and where clinging to the English past is shown to be just as vacuous as subscribing to the modernized present. However, the novel does not end here and in its brief concluding section Waugh fashions a position that is far from ambiguous. In the last chapter, “English Gothic—III,” Waugh’s novel raises an image of decay that signifies a past more distant than the period of Gothic imitation that situates Tony and his Victorian ancestors. The text gives expression, that is, to an authentically meaningful English past, a past that is never properly named or explicitly defined but invoked in the manner of critical nostalgia: as an already lost time that cannot return and from which the present slips evermore decisively away. The invocation of this lost past takes a commemorative form; Waugh’s writing seeks to elicit respect for this loss and compel the reader to mourn its passing. By narrating loss in these terms, A Handful of Dust represents mourning as the final chapter in the illustrious story of a uniquely English way of being in the world. The novel’s performance of mourning offers a final means of displaying Englishness that is based, paradoxically, on the bereaved knowledge of its loss. “English Gothic—III,” the concluding chapter, begins with a satirical account of the mourning and memorialization of the protagonist, presumed by all to have died in the outback. The final chapter returns to Hetton and offers a brief glimpse of a formerly impoverished branch of the Last family, which is headed by Tony’s brother Richard, inheritor of the estate. The memorial service they organize for Tony conveys their indifference toward the past; this indifference, I suggest, operates in complicity with what Waugh sees as the failure of the twentieth century to generate meaningful forms of social life, as well as meaningful relations to loss. The chapter articulates how the modern pursuit of personal pleasure and financial profit has destroyed any space for mourning and remembrance. One

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of the Last daughters mistakenly refers to Tony’s memorial service as a “Jamboree”; a son hopes it will be brief so he can return to work (304, 305). In fact, all in the family are relieved to discover that the service will be short since the vicar plans to forgo a sermon (305). Most importantly, the memorial they erect for Tony is represented as reflecting the ascendency of unbridled materialism that began to make inroads at Hetton during Tony’s ownership of the house. Richard unwittingly exposes the profit motive when he remarks that the idea to dedicate a memorial to his brother came from Mrs. Beaver. He ridiculously describes her as “one of Tony’s closest friends” and she no doubt received a commission for overseeing the work of contractors, even if the family rejected her initial and more expensive plan to redecorate the chapel as a chantry (307). Waugh’s point in satirizing the family’s memorializing efforts is to demonstrate that the country house has been fully transformed, indeed essentially killed off, by the soulless materialism of the age. The way the family commemorates their relative and his ownership of the house has less to do with acknowledging the loss of the past than with constructing a new future for the country house; Waugh rejects this future on the basis that it follows the logic of a modern market economy. If the novel represents country house England as lost, the new Lasts, like Tony before them, utterly fail to recognize this loss. They construct a recuperative version of the past, one where tradition is thought to persist in the modern present. The description of the actual memorial for Tony bears out this point: “a plain monolith of local stone, inscribed: / ANTHONY LAST OF HETTON / EXPLORER / Born at Hetton, 1902 / Died in Brazil, 1934” (306). Richard comments on the local character of the memorial, remarking that the stone “comes from one of our own quarries and was cut by the estate workmen” (307). Over and against his contention that Tony would have preferred this indigenous memorial to other options, the text demonstrates how the protagonist dies a symbolic death precisely because he has fetishized local life at Hetton. Similarly, Tony’s explorations in South America have yielded nothing but a consciousness of dissolution and death, exposing the ridiculousness of the epitaph “Explorer.” The owners plan, as Richard’s son puts it, “to restore Hetton to the glory that it had enjoyed in the days of his Cousin Tony” (308), a plan they base on the profitability of a newly established fox farm. If the novel’s opening section


already represented the fox hunt in Tony’s day as an inane social gathering responsible for the death of Hetton’s legitimate heir, the closing chapter demonstrates how the new owners inhabit a house wholly determined by the materialism of the age. Most of the ageold traditions Tony observed out of habit rather than conviction have been abandoned; in raising foxes for the prospect of financial gain, the new Lasts reveal that traditional customs are now sustained only when they promise to yield a profit. Though the family plans to restore Hetton to its past grandeur, Waugh represents the commercial reorganization of the rural estate as a modern- day Gothic horror made possible by, yet even more terrifying than, his protagonist’s sentimental nostalgia. The unambiguous way to neutralize this horror, as “English Gothic—III” conveys, is to acknowledge the loss of country house England and mourn the passing of this tradition. Toward this end, Waugh raises an image of decay that highlights loss and lays blame for it on the dominant cultural currents of modernity. This image, as pedestrian as it is fitting, is that of a broken clock on Hetton’s main tower, a clock the new Lasts plan to repair when “the silver foxes began to show a profit” (303), but that Waugh holds up as a sign of the past’s terminus, its irrecoverable passing. The clock’s irregular chiming marks a time out of joint; Waugh’s aim, as I argued throughout, in no way seeks to set it right. Rather, Hetton’s broken clock sounds the death knell for a uniquely English tradition. In rallying the reader around the image of a broken clock, Waugh’s novel mourns the passing of a way of life incurably diseased by empty Victorian sentimentality and decisively buried by heartless modern materialism. Insofar as this mourning conveys the meaningless of the modern present, it represents English identity as a community joined in grief, a community that still manages to display a national form of belonging at the very moment this belonging is represented as lost. By showing us the Gothic horrors of the modern world, Waugh’s novel fosters nostalgia for the past; by insisting that the past cannot redeem the present, the text infuses a critical element into this nostalgia. If the lost country house tradition cannot be recovered, however, it can still be viewed as the conclusion of a heroic tradition of Englishness, a conclusion about which Waugh sets himself the task of writing. By developing an aesthetics of decay, Waugh promotes

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an identification with Englishness insofar as he writes an elegy to its passing. This textual performance of mourning does give rise to a critique of the ascendency of materialism and commercialization especially important in the opening decades of the century, but it also follows a more covert itinerary. Mourning in Waugh’s novel offers an interpretation of the past prompted by disdain for the contemporaneous changing socioeconomic landscape, one characterized by the discontents of women, demands of the working classes, and growing unrest of the colonized. Insofar as Waugh’s lament fosters an identification with a tradition of Englishness prior to the rise of modernity, it yokes the work of mourning to the aristocratic privilege and imperial dominance of the past. A Handful of Dust constructs social memory by asking us to remember a national way of life prior to the commercialization of modern culture; the text also constructs social memory by asking us to forget the local and global economies of privilege that structured the country house from the very beginning.

Consolation and heritage in Brideshead Revisited If A Handful of Dust, as I have argued, represents mourning as a response to the inevitable disappearance of English identity, as a final means, that is, of displaying an ongoing identification with a traditional form of Englishness, Brideshead Revisited, which appeared a decade later, promotes a religious source of consolation to bring this mourning to an end and represent a new vision for the future. Charles Ryder, the novel’s first-person narrator, recounts his life through the 1920s and 1930s retrospectively, telling the story of his personal history from the bleak perspective of his military service in 1943. In situating the reader in wartime Britain, the novel’s frame-tale depicts the widespread practice of requisitioning country houses by the British military.20 When Ryder finds himself stationed at Brideshead, an opulent stately home he visited during his love affair with the owner’s son, Sebastian Flyte, then nearly came to own through his later engagement to Sebastian’s sister, Julia, he sees the destruction caused by the careless vandalism of military personnel as confirmation of the annihilation of the country house tradition. The house’s conversion to a military barracks and its advanced state of architectural decay compel Ryder to raise a lament for the


desecration of the house and the disintegration of a way of life he regards as the pinnacle of English cultural achievement. At the same time that Ryder expresses nostalgia for the past, however, his recollections of the interwar period repeatedly characterize his upper-middleclass family and aristocratic friends as suffering from nearly pathological forms of grief. These myriad forms of melancholic despair contribute to what he sees as the feminization of British culture, the weakening of its society.21 Ryder’s mother died as a medical worker in the Great War and his father, who “has been rather odd in the head ever since,” continues decades later to wear the same style of suit “as though it were court mourning” (40, 69). Similarly, Sebastian, Ryder’s lover from his Oxford years, writes letters on “heavy late-Victorian mourning paper,” a practice the narrator associates with Sebastian’s inability to countenance the loss of youthful innocence and sees as leading to a life wrecked by alcoholism (72). Finally, Ryder recalls an early meeting of Julia Flyte and remembers a debutante at her coming out party who sought “a man a little subdued by earlier grief,” a man whose own experience of loss promised to yield a less virile and more companionable husband (182). From his vantage point in the 1940s, Ryder describes the melancholic dispositions of those around him as symptomatic of a more general social disease, a widespread sense of bereavement on the cultural plane caused by the experience of two world wars, the decline of the aristocracy, and the rise of the middle classes. He not only attributes this melancholy to the disappearance of “the august, masculine spirit of a better age,” the disappearance of an English past viewed as manly and powerful (138); Waugh’s narrator also responds to this personal and collective experience of loss by advocating a return to God; only the renewal of religious faith, as he concludes by the novel’s end, furnishes both unassailable meaning and consolation in an otherwise meaningless modern world. Waugh’s novel, as I discuss in what follows, describes the way in which the narrator comes to accept God and end mourning; the text, moreover, constructs a narrative of the past that reflects a socially conservative vision of the present, one that seeks, more specifically, to thwart “the advance of Hooper,” Waugh’s derogatory phrase for the burgeoning social clout of the middle classes. The text raises God as a means of healing private and public loss, but it also performs another kind of work as well; Brideshead

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Revisited raises an elegy for the country house that represents the stately home as part of a cultural heritage, rather than a living tradition. Country house England was indeed laid low by World War II, as was the aristocracy in the midst of wartime financial crisis, but neither the country house nor the aristocracy vanished in the years following the war. Waugh himself acknowledged how shortsighted the novel’s prediction of the destruction of the country house and disappearance of aristocratic owners like the fictional Lord Marchmain actually turned out to be. In the 1959 “Preface” to the revised edition of Brideshead Revisited (1944), he raised the often- cited description of his novel as a “panegyric preached over an empty coffin”: It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain. And the English aristocracy has maintained its identity to a degree that then seemed impossible. The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points.22 The hindsight of nearly fifteen years allows Waugh to venture a critical assessment of his novel; the majority of country houses were not, as his novel predicted, abandoned and leveled after the war. What the conciliatory tone of Waugh’s “Preface” does not address, however, is the extent to which the novel itself worked against this leveling. Brideshead Revisited mourns the loss of country house England by representing these grand structures as removed from the rhythms of rural life and, to a certain extent, even from their aristocratic owners; the novel represents the country house not as the social category it was long taken to be but as an aesthetic category, as a work of art that merits attention as both England’s greatest cultural achievement and the nation’s unique artistic contribution to Western civilization. Even if these places were privately owned, they increasingly came to be seen by the British public in the years after 1944 in precisely the terms that Waugh’s novel lays out: as art


objects that reflect the height of English culture.23 The wartime setting of Brideshead Revisited produces nostalgia for the loss of the country house, as virtually every reader has recognized, but this is a peculiar kind of nostalgia, I argue, since what Ryder recounts when he describes Brideshead—since what Waugh’s novel represents in depicting the loss of this living tradition, is a new and, indeed, fundamentally conservative idea of English heritage and the place of the stately home in it. Waugh’s novel describes the way the narrator comes to accept God and resolve grief by critiquing the familiar logic of conventional mourning: the logic of substitution. Like the work of Woolf and Faulkner, in fact, Brideshead Revisited represents bereaved substitution as a consolatory evasion of the event of loss. Ryder invests himself in a series of love objects, each one of which functions as a replacement for the loss of a prior emotional investment. However, even as Waugh’s text critiques this substitutive logic, it follows an itinerary entirely different from the modernist narration of loss. His novel demonstrates how Ryder’s substitute objects are themselves substitutes for God, inferior replacements for the perfection and meaning that only divine love can offer. Ryder’s earliest recollections harken back to his youthful Oxford days when he begins a love affair with Sebastian, second son to Lord Marchmain; he regards this sexual relation as fulfilling a holy mission. Given Waugh’s aim to define all earthly forms as inadequate substitutes for God, it is not surprising that when Ryder recalls his relationship to Sebastian, he repeatedly appropriates religious language. “So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian” (60), as Ryder remembers a Sunday morning visit to his lover’s place. The intensity of this relationship is heightened for Ryder because Sebastian permits him access to Brideshead, a country house the narrator greatly admires for the aesthetic value of its architecture, art collections, and furnishings. From the very start, Waugh’s novel conflates Ryder’s love for Sebastian and his love for the country house: both are figured as a compensatory substitute for God. Ryder recalls his first visit with Sebastian to Brideshead in exactly this way: Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly

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experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead. (79) Ryder represents his first love, and a socially illicit love at that, and the “mansions of limbo” as a consoling substitute for religion.24 If the hero no longer enjoys a relationship to God, at least he enjoys the pleasures of sexual love and the stately house. But Ryder does not simply regard his relationship to Sebastian and Brideshead as an adequate substitute for religion. He suggests, more significantly, that both bear an enduring relationship to the “Beatific Vision.” Sebastian and his family’s house begin to provide Ryder with what he sees as evidence of God’s existence in the world, evidence that will prove increasingly impossible for the narrator to ignore as he loses one after another of his earthly love objects. The novel’s critique of the logic of substitution is consistent throughout: Ryder accepts a replacement for a prior loss and this replacement turns out to be a consoling substitute for God. Ryder loses Sebastian, due to the aristocratic son’s rebellious rejection of his family and his alcoholism. In response, the narrator comes to invest himself more fully in his artistic mission; Ryder attributes his success as an architectural painter to a force emanating from an otherworldly realm. This sense of divine inspiration becomes particularly pronounced when Ryder, a mature painter in his mid-thirties, completes a series of canvases for the Marchmains nearly a decade after his relationship to Sebastian has ended. Responding to the extensive debt incurred by the aristocracy during the financial crisis of the interwar years, the family is forced to raise money by selling their London residence, Marchmain House, and they commission four paintings before the house is torn down and replaced by an apartment building. Ryder’s art, like Waugh’s own, is made possible by modernity’s assault on the houses of the aristocracy. When he recalls painting these canvases, moreover, he defines himself as a conduit for a transcendent power: I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s Renaissance. I had seen the stars through Galileo’s tub, spurned the friars with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hairsplitting speech. (222)


Ryder sees his art as taking over the vacated space of the sacred. The references to Browning and Galileo are telling in this regard; he identifies himself as a Renaissance artist without religion. Ryder repeats the rejection of God in Browning’s poetry and Galileo’s astronomy, both of which challenged Church teachings. In claiming superiority over the antiquated religiosity of the friars, the narrator appropriates the power traditionally ascribed to God for his own artistic achievements. At the very moment Marchmain House faces destruction, Ryder’s painting assumes a religious function. His art consoles for the loss of the house by granting the residence an immortality achieved on his canvases. Waugh’s narrative dismantles the logic of substitution to demonstrate how these substitutes fail to console for the disappearance of what the novel defines as a genuine form of consolation, the “varied solace” that religion has to offer (85). It is in no way surprising, then, that Ryder soon enough regards his own artistic work as a bleak presentiment of thwarted longing and lost possibilities. He recalls that while popular audiences continued to value his architectural paintings, the critics began to express “an unmistakable note of weariness” and one declared a particular canvas “facile” (268). Ryder uses the criticism as an occasion to confess a nagging despair about the absence of purposeful design: “But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawingroom of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand—in a word, the inspiration” (227). Waugh’s novel insists upon the failure of finding religious meaning in the secular form of art; it goes so far as to expose Ryder’s painting as a sentimental and nostalgic rendering of the vanishing architectural splendor of the aristocracy. Much like the protagonist in A Handful of Dust, Ryder attempts to renew his sense of artistic mission by traveling to Central America and painting primitive ruins. But these paintings also constitute a failure, at least according to the character Anthony Blanche, who views Ryder’s work from the viewpoint of a “nomad of no nationality,” from a perspective, that is, removed from English upper- class social conventions (46). Having assessed Ryder’s Marchmain paintings as contaminated by “English snobbery” (271) and his village paintings as “too English” (272), Blanche regards the primitive landscapes as a repetition of the same: “It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy

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English charm, playing tigers” (273). Ryder comes to realize he has projected both a sentimental form of nostalgia for the past and his own class aspirations onto his canvases. One step closer to accepting what Waugh’s novel figures as the only real consolation, the consolation of religion, Ryder loses a sense of divine inspiration that he believed informed his painting from the start. Waugh’s dismantling of the logic of bereaved substitution takes its most explicit form when Ryder installs Julia as a replacement for what has been lost. It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect substitute for Sebastian and for his painting; Julia both resembles her brother and renews Ryder’s access to Brideshead. But she recognizes, significantly, the role of substitute she plays in Ryder’s life. Julia expresses concern that Ryder seems to have so completely “forgotten Sebastian” at the point he takes up with her (302). In a statement that clarifies the extent to which the substitutive logic of mourning serves to efface the actual object of loss, Ryder claims of Sebastian, “it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days” (303). Julia not only realizes Sebastian was “the forerunner” to her, but also ventures that she herself may be “only a forerunner, too” (303), a precursor to Ryder’s next investment. The narrator, moreover, recalls his first sexual encounter with Julia in terms that conflate his attachment to her and his attachment to Brideshead, a conflation that already existed with Sebastian and is now made more intense when Julia’s dying father promised to bequeath the house to her and Ryder. The narrator remembers taking “formal possession of her as a lover” and claims that this “act of possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning” (216). Ryder’s linguistic choices in recalling sex with Julia reflect the trafficking of women in a long patriarchal tradition. Marriage to Julia offers Ryder an opportunity to surmount his upper-middle-class origins and secure a position in the aristocracy. However, more is at stake than Ryder’s material aspirations. What the narrator hopes to possess in marrying Julia, as already suggested in his description of their sexual union, is a sense of divine inspiration that he has to this point repeatedly imagined but been unable to sustain. In what should by now be his familiar rhetoric, the narrator describes his attachment to Julia as partaking of the sacred. Perhaps you and I are types [Ryder tells Julia] and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment


in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us. (303) Human love, Ryder contends, fails to guarantee permanent happiness; it registers an imperfection he experiences as the “sadness” that intrudes in their relationship. However, love accomplishes something even more valuable; it offers a “glimpse” of the divine and Ryder, who now must face the loss of Julia, is on the threshold of embracing this vision. Waugh’s novel, it is interesting to note, represents human love in terms that Henry Staten has addressed as fundamental to Western idealism: as intimately related to, but ultimately an inferior substitute for, divine love.25 As a divorced woman on the verge of marrying a divorced man, Julia ends their engagement to live a Catholic life. She chooses God over Ryder, as she tells the narrator: “You know I’m not one for a life of mourning” (340). Rather than accept the loss of divine consolation in her life and perhaps enter into the kind of endless substitutions for God that Ryder appears to have done, Julia sets an example for the narrator when she chooses divine love over mortal love. Waugh’s narrator has lost Sebastian, his first marriage, a relationship to his children, and Julia. But the most devastating loss the protagonist suffers turns out to be that of Brideshead Castle. The novel, in fact, represents the wartime destruction of country houses as a loss that towers over all others. Brideshead, an eighteenth- century house built in the classical style, emerges in the novel as a cultural achievement that comes closer than even human love or art to embodying the spirit of the divine. Ryder insists on this sanctified appraisal when he defines the large stately home, like English country houses more generally, as “the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means” (226). In Ryder’s account, Brideshead derives from a transcendent source of majestic vision. What inspires him most is the thought that generation after generation added to and enriched the place. By emphasizing the house’s development over the course of 150 years, which he regards as a rich palimpsest of achievement that the productions of modernity cannot begin to replicate, Ryder attributes Brideshead’s perfection not to humans but to a spiritual conception of the passing


of time. This temporality, he claims, “curbed the artist’s pride and the Philistine’s vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman” (226). Ryder views Brideshead as the material manifestation of the divine, a view that figures the house as a shelter from the transience of twentieth- century social life. If Brideshead embodies this transcendent perfection, it also stands in Ryder’s account as a defense against the ascendency of a middleclass sensibility; however, he regards this defense as having collapsed during the war years and views the middleclass platoon commander Hooper as evidence of the decline of the aristocracy and the vulgarization of society by the middle classes. In an often- cited passage, Ryder expresses outrage when observing that the aristocracy had to “die to make a world for Hooper; they [the aristocrats] were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures” (139). Ryder’s unrestrained loathing for the social emergence of the middle classes obviously informs his exalted view of Brideshead. So intense is his need to ward off the advance of Hooper and reassure himself of his own social refinement that Ryder places the house in a position historically reserved for God. Consequently, when wartime destruction to the house appears to have dealt the place a fatal blow from which it cannot recover, when Ryder believes, in other words, that the house has been decisively lost, he finally comes to accept God and the religious consolation toward which the entire novel has been leading. What Ryder discovers in the advanced state of the house’s decay is “something quite remote from anything the builders intended” (351). He discovers that the religious “flame burns again” (351).26 Waugh’s novel concludes, then, by representing the transformation of social loss into spiritual gain, showing how the narrator finds God in the decaying ruins of the country house and comes, finally, to accept the consolation of religion once all his objects of earthly love have been lost. The acceptance of God that Waugh identifies as Ryder’s response to loss and strives to make the reader’s is raised to generate a meaningful future for British society once the country house tradition has been lost. The novel’s last sentence concludes with Ryder “looking unusually cheerful today” because he has accepted religious consolation and finished his mourning for the loss of country house


England (351). In this light, the novel’s resolution of grief constitutes an act of acceptance, an acceptance that the culture of modernity has killed off the country house tradition and nothing can reanimate it. But if Brideshead Revisited constitutes a surrender to this loss, this surrender is by no means unconditional. The novel responds to the death of a living tradition by raising religion as the only source of meaning able to withstand modern meaninglessness and the increasing democratization of British culture. Waugh’s representation of religious renewal, it is important to understand, emerges in relation to other available social options. In fact, English novelists responded to the cultural crisis of the 1930s and the 1940s—to the lingering devastation wrought by the Great War, the economic Slump, the twilight of empire, the rise of fascism, and the outbreak of World War II—in a variety of ways. Some seized the moment to advance the claims of the working classes, others engaged in diverse projects of social emancipation, and still others fostered support for the emerging independence movements of colonized nations.27 In contrast, Brideshead Revisited concludes by raising religion as a system of meaning that consoles in the wake of the collapsing house and emerging triumph of Hooper, a system of meaning based on an identification with history’s old social privileges. Waugh certainly overplayed his hand in the novel, as he acknowledged in his 1959 “Preface,” by projecting the postwar disappearance of the country house from the English landscape. Perhaps more interesting from our vantage point today, however, is that the novel represents Brideshead as the crowning achievement of a distinctly English heritage. This view of the country house as an unparalleled contribution to the nation’s historic identity, as well as to Western civilization, proved to be crucial to the survival of the stately home after 1944. The postwar history of how the country houses owned by the nation’s aristocracy managed to surmount the public indifference to their future that persisted through the 1930s, as well as survive the vastly changing socioeconomic realities that followed the war, is a complex one, as told, perhaps best, in Peter Mandley’s The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home.28 There is a one constant, however, that runs through this complexity. The key to garnering support for the country house—and allocating significant amounts of public money for the preservation of these privately owned houses— depended on a recognition of the nation’s stately homes less as the

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private residences of a privileged few and more as prized possessions in a national heritage that benefitted all. It depended, more precisely, on transforming the country house that was long understood as a social category into an aesthetic one. The wartime setting of Waugh’s novel produces nostalgia for the country house at the very moment these places appeared to be destined for demolition, but this nostalgia does not entail a longing to return to the rural traditions of England. Rather, the nostalgic vision of Waugh’s novel constitutes a kind of proleptic nostalgia; his text represents these houses not as part of a living tradition regulated by aristocratic culture but as unique artistic treasures that came to emblematize a national heritage.29 By fostering a specifically aesthetic kind of appreciation for the stately home, an appreciation for its architecture and fine art collections, Brideshead Revisited participates in the establishment of an emerging postwar narrative of English heritage and places the country house at its center. Public discussion of the fate of the country house had already started in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the financial crisis of the period prompted owners to sell off land and thus open the door to urban development of rural England. Many Britons already recognized the need to protect the countryside from further incursion; aristocratic and cultural enthusiasts of the country house sought to extend this commitment to the rural landscape to encompass the actual houses themselves. These enthusiasts also attempted to widen the already existing interest in the preservation of Tudor manor houses and cottages to the stately homes built in the classical style, typically in the eighteenth century. The Tudor architecture of old England, valued as a uniquely English vernacular style and related in proximity to village life, was widely recognized as an indigenous tradition worth preserving. However, the classical country house was construed as foreign to the English tradition; it typically stood at some distance from the village, drew on cosmopolitan influences, and reflected a taste for the lavish and massive that appeared to many as antithetical to the spirit of English restraint. Vita Sackville-West, for one, attacked the classical country house as alien to the English countryside when, in 1941, she claimed that such places stood as little more than objectionable displays of wealth that served to “gratify the ostentation of some rich men.”30 Conversely, Brideshead Revisited seeks to combat this lingering disdain by describing the country


house built in the classical tradition as a religiously inspired architecture. Waugh’s narrator begins by admitting that his architectural “sentiments at heart were insular and medieval” (82); his admiration tended toward the nation’s earliest vernacular style. But Ryder comes to abandon the national and side with the cosmopolitan style when he claims of the classical house, “This was my conversion to the baroque”: Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring. (82) Ryder pitches the cosmopolitanism of the classical house against the nationalism of medieval architecture. Although there is nothing of the homey cottage feel so beloved by many country house aficionados about the “high and insolent dome” or the “tricky ceilings,” Ryder appeals to the reader to reassess the aloofness and enormity of the classical interior. In combating the overpowering sense of the excessiveness of the place, Waugh’s narrator claims the house, and particularly the Italian fountain, brought to life a “new system of nerves” that he equates with the rejuvenating properties and quasireligious symbolism of water. Ryder regards the classical style not as an exception to but the crowning achievement of English domestic architecture. Waugh began to make this argument for the classical house years earlier in “A Young Novelist’s Heaven,” a newspaper piece published in 1930, the same year as his conversion to Catholicism. Waugh engages his talent as a comic writer to state his preferences about English domestic architecture. Informing these preferences, it seems here as well, is a certain religious motivation. The article describes the afterlife in an audaciously ludicrous manner: as a realm of timeless perfection where only worthy architectural styles are granted immortality. In Waugh’s version of heaven, as he puts it, “There are no Tudor mansions or cottages with half-timbered fronts, but there


are many examples of Italian seventeenth-century and English eighteenth- century domestic architecture; there are some very comic Gothic revival castles and a few genuine Gothic cathedrals.”31 Much is condensed in this short passage about Waugh’s attitude toward English architecture. Grand Tudor structures, as well as more humble cottages, are barred altogether from heaven. The vernacular architecture of what has arguably been the most valued period of English history reflects what Waugh saw as a loathsome national insularity; it also recalls the Reformation and the end of Catholicism as England’s national religion. When Waugh turns his attention to the Gothic, he does not completely bar all examples, but permits some revival castles and cathedrals. That he does so in the space of a single sentence calls attention to the relation the former bears to the latter; the nineteenthcentury Gothic revival house was modeled on the medieval church. However, by distinguishing the “comic” castle from the “genuine” cathedral, Waugh suggests here, as he did in A Handful of Dust, that the Victorian attempt to establish a spiritual style of national building must be understood as a failure. Because he values the spiritual impulse behind it but condemns the final product, Waugh grants Gothic Revivalism a measure of immortality so that this religious impulse will not be forgotten. It is for the Italian seventeenth- and English eighteenth- century stately home, however, that Waugh reserves his highest admiration; he permits by far the most examples of the classical house in his version of an architectural heaven. Waugh places supreme value on this cosmopolitan style, a style typified by the massive and opulent Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. It is a style that Waugh regards as combating English isolation from continental ideas and, as we have seen in his depiction of Brideshead, attributes to nothing less than divine inspiration. Beyond making a special case for the classical stately home, Waugh’s novel offers a defense of the country house that does not depend, strictly speaking, on a defense of the landed elite. In this regard, Brideshead Revisited might be read as an attempt to dissolve popular apathy toward the fate of the country house by establishing a distance between these structures and their aristocratic owners, a strategy that proved to be crucial in fostering national support for country house preservation in the postwar years. Even as Ryder launches his diatribe against what he regards as the ascendent banalities of the middle classes responsible for killing off the aristocracy,


his own recollections of the Flytes and Marchmains repeatedly expose the anachronistic status, as well as the eccentricities, of this elite family. Ryder enters into intimate relations with the owners of Brideshead, but he views the family with a certain degree of detachment; when their conduct does not elicit Ryder’s overtly critical commentary, as it frequently does, their dealings with others and the world typically appear to the narrator as evidence of their outmoded and self-undermining conduct. Ryder unequivocally blames Sebastian’s life-threatening alcoholism on his mother’s handling of her son’s drinking, her insistence on subjecting him to the surveillance of her appointed bodyguards. Moreover, although Waugh’s narrator detests all talk of the realities of securing and maintaining wealth, he is forced to consider the family’s inept management of finances, their keeping up a lavish lifestyle replete with two houses and an extensive service staff while being substantially in debt. The marriages the Flyte children enter into, Julia’s to Rex Mottram, a Canadian depicted as a crass materialist, and the eldest son Bridey’s to the widow Beryl Muspratt, a money-seeking female whose age probably prohibits her from producing an heir to the historic family, also appear to Ryder as destructive incursions on the aristocratic family inflicted from within. Finally, when Lord Marchmain returns from his Italian exile to die at Brideshead, he displays the idiosyncrasies of a very rich man; Ryder believes Marchmain “derive[s] comfort from the consequences of his whim” when he demands his bedroom be moved to a room described as an “uninhabitable museum” (316). For all his identification with the owners of Brideshead, Ryder tells a story of the family’s unhappiness and dissolution, often laying blame on their own behavior for their social decline and perhaps exploiting a certain Schadenfreude among readers in recalling the domestic tragedies of this segment of the English aristocracy. If Waugh’s narrator manages to neutralize popular resentment toward the landed elite by telling the tale of the family’s misfortune, he also pitches his authority to assess the value of the country house over and against owners like Lord Marchmain and his family. Studied in the art and architecture of Western culture, Ryder portrays himself as uniquely equipped to recognize the country house as a national treasure that far exceeds the claims of private ownership. According to Mandler, aristocratic owners during the late 1930s and early 1940s typically rejected any suggestion that their houses

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constituted a vital part of an English heritage; they saw themselves as guardians for subsequent generations of their families and not the nation, often opposing or at least resenting the requirement to open their houses to the public in exchange for improvement grants or tax relief.32 It is interesting in this light that Ryder repeatedly calls attention to the fact that the family regards their town and country residences as their privately owned property rather than places of national interest. Julia displays little regard for the public value of her family’s London place, one of about six remaining historic houses still standing in the city; she tells Ryder she would rather see Marchmain House torn down and replaced by an apartment building than endure the thought of another family living there (219). Similarly, Lord Marchmain views his ownership of Brideshead strictly as a form of personal wealth to be passed down to his heirs. He claims to “abominate the English countryside” and acknowledges his utter disdain for the aristocratic culture of rural England: “I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them” (99). His chief concern, he informs Ryder, is to bequeath Brideshead to one of his children, even as he doubts that there will be “anything to inherit” since stringent tax laws that made country house ownership extremely difficult to maintain and pass on in the interwar period (99). Waugh’s novel redefines the relationship between the country house and the aristocracy in prescient terms; it describes the link between houses and owners in the idioms of cultural stewardship, rather than private ownership. Ryder, in fact, describes Brideshead in precisely these terms: “I regarded men,” he states, “as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes” (226). Ryder elevates the house itself above the family that has built and owns it. He defines the aristocracy as temporary overseers of the houses they financed and developed over time, as well as regarding these places as “the highest achievement of man,” as cultural works of art whose importance exceeds their status as private properties (226). While Waugh’s novel figures the aristocracy less as owners than stewards of the country house, Ryder defines himself as a knowledgeable connoisseur uniquely equipped to appreciate the value of a stately home. Ryder makes a case for the house itself as a work of art. On his very first visit to the place, in


fact, the narrator claims it was “an aesthetic education to live within those walls” and names the litany of styles of individual rooms along with their furnishings and art collections—the Soanesque library, Chinese drawing-room with Chippendale fret-work, and Pompeian parlour (80). When he turns his attention to the different architectural styles of the house and asks Sebastian if the dome was designed by Inigo Jones, the youngest son of the owner replies, “Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?” (80). In the logic of Waugh’s novel, however, it is precisely the kind of aesthetic appreciation displayed by the narrator, as well as the role that country house tourism played in garnering recognition of the public stake in these places during the postwar years, that would come to define the special value of the house as part of a national heritage.33 Ryder’s appreciation of the house as an aesthetic achievement establishes the terms with which places like Brideshead would come to be construed from the late 1940s to early 1970s as important works of art in a uniquely English heritage. The concept of heritage in Britain is, of course, a contemporary invention, less an inherited set of practices and traditions and more a reinvention of the past by the present generation. In most contemporary accounts, English heritage, institutionalized in the 1980s through the establishment of conservative organizations and economic legislation, entails what Peter Childs has described as “a profound nostalgia for a bygone imperial England.”34 Heritage, as critics have argued, is a socially regressive and deeply nostalgic idea, an investment of public monies and cultural capital in a concept of English identity that is rooted in the aristocratic culture of the past.35 This backward-looking notion of national identity, it is crucial to recognize, emerges at the very moment when patterns of immigration in the postimperial period and the democratization of British society along multicultural lines have already dismantled a traditional notion of Englishness restricted to upper- class, white privilege. While there is clearly a nostalgic animus that drives Waugh’s novel, this nostalgia, as I have argued, does not seek to redeem the present by returning to the living traditions of the past. Rather, Brideshead Revisited represents the irrecoverable loss of country house England, raises a lament for its passing, and rediscovers in religious faith a source of meaning able to bring this mourning to an end. However, even as the novel describes the tradition of the country house as lost,


it represents Brideshead in prescient terms: as an aesthetic achievement that would find a privileged place in a newly constructed and socially conservative view of English heritage. By the novel’s end when Ryder finds himself stationed at Brideshead, he raises the question of the future of the country house. This question centers on the appropriate use of the house. Faced with the military requisitioning of Brideshead, Ryder acknowledges that setting up the place as a barracks is not what the builders intended. Waugh’s narrator blames the destruction of the country house on “the age of Hooper” (351), but he also recognizes that modernity’s assault on these places “is not the last word” about the fate of the country house (351): “Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building,” Ryder claims, “like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up” (350). The English country house, as it has evolved in the decades since the publication of Brideshead Revisited, constitutes a publically supported yet privately owned heritage. These houses continued to stand in the years after the war because they enjoyed the allocation of tax revenues, public monies that might have been spent on a myriad of social projects in an increasingly multicultural landscape. The novel, despite its proclamations about the disappearance of the country house, constructs a narrative of the past where the massive and most grand of the country houses of the nation come to signify a shared sense of belonging and national pride. If the novel can be said to mourn over an empty coffin, as Waugh put it, it also animates a concept of heritage based on an ongoing identification with the aristocracy and a retrospective notion of Englishness.

4 The Sexual Politics of Mourning

I couldn’t have it both ways, I supposed, couldn’t have my closet and bitch about it. (Emma Donoghue, Hood) Just as the burns victim reaches a plateau of pain, so do the emotionally wretched find grief is a high ground from which they may survey themselves for a time. (Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body) I began Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism by challenging Lyotard’s influential account of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. For Lyotard, as we have seen, a concept of finishable mourning drives his analysis of both. The failure to mourn successfully the master narratives of emancipation, he argues, renders literary modernism a nostalgic discourse. The apparent consistency of modernist form, in his view, offers a consoling substitute for the loss of truth, transcendence, and certainty in the culture of modernity; modernism imposes a unified form on these ruptures, reflecting its inability to abandon fully the epistemological foundations and transcendental securities that it otherwise seeks to challenge. In contrast to modernism, postmodern texts succeed in severing all attachments to the discourses of the past. Postmodernism, in Lyotard’s account, successfully mourns the loss of metanarrative by deflating the truth claims of all discourse, including its own formal constructions. The completion of the work of mourning, he claims, not only enables the postmodern novel to dismantle the main premises of significant form; 129


this successful mourning also manages to reveal new but undefinable gaps in our understanding of the world. These gaps, Lyotard concludes, liberate us from the restrictive conformities of consensus and communal identifications, giving rise to what he sees as radically new social possibilities for the future. I have suggested, however, that while the nostalgic clinging to lost ideals characterizes Waugh’s late-modernist work, neither the modernist nor postmodernist novel can be fully assimilated to Lyotard’s account of the aesthetic. Woolf and Faulkner, as I demonstrated, take as an object of critical scrutiny their own aestheticizing impulses. Both writers collapse the capacity of the aesthetic to obscure the event of loss, showing how ongoing mourning yields alternative meanings of the past and alternative identifications with the socially marginalized. Similarly, postmodernism cannot be reduced to either a purely technical mastery of the contingency of meaning or a position beyond mourning.1 A strain of postmodern fiction, as I now intend to show, represents the ongoing mourning of loss to promote a definable social agenda. This fiction not only counters the waning of affect, commercial impulses, and ahistoricism that describes postmodern culture; it also places a quintessentially modernist focus on issues of loss, memory, and duration in the service of representing a new kind of sexual politics. I oppose Lyotard’s account of successful mourning as constituting the postmodern break with modernism, then, to show how postmodernism both rejects the social conservatism of late-modernist mourning and reanimates the main strictures of the modernist narration of loss. This is not to suggest that postmodern fiction simply repeats the achievements of modernism. Indeed, postmodern mourning novels, as I address below, blur the distinction between “high” and “popular” culture; they rewrite the textual difficulty of modernist form as an accessible literary mode made newly available to a wide range of readers.2 The novels I discuss also shift away from the modernist emphasis on interiority and the dynamics of bereaved consciousness to address possibilities for intersubjective, public, and shared modes of mourning. Nevertheless, as significant as these reformulations are, the postmodern novel of loss, I argue, sustains the modernist rejection of aesthetic consolation and the aim of closure to reinvigorate mourning for a contemporary sexual politics. Donoghue’s Hood and Winterson’s Written on the Body bring to the representation of mourning a range of pressing social concerns

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associated with lesbian subjectivity and sexual identity.3 Their formulations of mourning inhere in the aesthetic structures of their texts, but they also shift the practice of postmodern aesthetics from the purely auto-referential and toward the political. Hood and Written on the Body share a similar thematic focus; both novels depict the painful process during which first-person narrators confront love relationships brought to premature ends by accidental death and terminal illness. Donoghue defines the narrator as a lesbian, negotiating between private and public dimensions of grief, challenging essentialized forms of lesbian identity, and mobilizing sympathy among both gay and straight readers. Winterson, a celebrated lesbian novelist, deliberately withholds the name and gender of her narrator, compelling us to reexamine stereotypical distinctions between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as imagine a culture where such distinctions have become innocuous, as significant as, say, hair or eye color. In contrast to the successful mourning of the political project of emancipation that Lyotard holds up as a hallmark of postmodernism, these novels, I argue, highlight their status as fictional inventions and frame the question of loss to represent new social constellations for sexual subjects in postmodern culture.

Grief, the closet, and Donoghue’s Hood Writing in the early 1960s, social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was among the first to recognize that the disappearance of public mourning rituals in the opening decades of the twentieth century did more than simply rid bereavement of its prior Victorian excess. The decline of nineteenth- century mourning practices, he argued, gave rise to the “maladaptive and neurotic behavior” among those who experienced a loss.4 Based on an ethnographic study of more than 1,600 British men and women from all classes and geographical regions, Gorer’s work demonstrated that bereaved depression and the mental maladjustments wrought by grief had become a Western norm in the postwar period. If the erosion of Victorian mourning customs had brought to an end the financial burden of the lavish funeral, it also ushered in a modern suspicion toward any public displays or shared customs of loss. No longer practiced was the kind of social rituals that had regulated the ceremonial disposal of the


body, the gathering together of mourners, and the withdrawal from and return to social life. Although public displays of loss continued for social dignitaries including royalty and heads of state, they were generally devalued in ordinary life, seen as little more than a practice for the self-indulgent or a crutch for the emotionally weak. By midcentury, then, mourners experienced grief in insolation. The subjects in Gorer’s study thus epitomize a conception of mourning that had become commonplace by the 1960s, a conception of mourning as a solitary undertaking that occurs in the private domain of the psyche.5 In contrast to this dominant privatization of grief, Gorer found that a minority of mourners were able to display grief in public, ritualizing the loss through religious, social, or familial practices and receiving sympathy from a community of friends and relatives. Such mourners, he convincingly argued, “were well integrated and happy in their communities and their work, and were mourning deeply, but without either ostentation or embarrassment” (60). Gorer concluded that “those who can accept sympathy in their grief are better adjusted socially and psychologically than those who cannot” (60). Mourners best positioned to resist the detrimental effects of privatized grief were those who experienced a strong sense of communal belonging and displayed their loss in public. Gorer’s assessment of shared rituals of grief continues to have relevance for postmodern culture; his work highlights the importance of public displays and communal practices of mourning, as well as suggests, conversely, the unique difficulties that loss poses to the socially marginalized, to those who have been excluded from the mainstream. For gay men and lesbians, in particular, mourning the loss of partners, lovers, friends, and acquaintances has been a particularly fraught endeavor, sometimes hidden or complicated by the closet and at other times devalued by a predominantly heterosexual culture that fails to acknowledge or accord full importance to the loss. Queer theorists and cultural critics have recently addressed how heteronormative societies create obstacles to mourning same-sex loss. The work of Judith Butler has been foundational in this regard, particularly her analysis of “gay melancholia,” a form of bereaved depression caused by the cultural silencing of gay male and lesbian grief. Experiences of loss, Butler points out, characteristically produce emotions of anger and aggression. Mourners may feel this rage for a variety of reasons, including ordinary feelings of abandonment,


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actual complaints about the lost other, or grievances against the social conditions that contributed to or even caused the loss. In the absence of social rituals, physical spaces, and discursive practices for grieving same-sex loss, mourners cannot direct this hostility outward; they are compelled to sequester bereaved anger in the psyche and unleash hostility within the self. As Butler puts it, “Insofar as the grief remains unspeakable, the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that rage is publically proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions.”6 To combat gay melancholia, Butler advocates the creation of collective institutions for grieving, social sites of mourning and memory like the AIDS Names Project Quilt that publicize and politicize loss, foster the formation of alternative communities and kinship groups, and contest the erasure of same-sex attachments from the cultural landscape. The work of Gorer and Butler has made us aware of the importance of communal mourning practices, especially for those who have been denied full access to representation, history, and culture. However, the shift away from the individual and psychic aspects of grieving, which, as we have seen, characterize modernist mourning, and toward an emphasis on the communal and public dimensions of mourning in the contemporary period has given rise to a new set of questions, one that has not as yet been adequately addressed. How do social displays of loss and shared mourning rituals, even those practices fashioned from positions of cultural exclusion, replicate heterosexual society’s harmful interpellations of homosexuality? If alternative public mourning practices have succeeded in constructing communities crucial to the social survival of gay men and lesbians, how have these same practices articulated homogenous identity positions that exclude some of the very subjects they mean to represent? How, finally, might we conceive of collective grief practices without succumbing to the essentialization of lesbian identity and denial of individual difference? These are some of the most compelling questions raised in Donoghue’s Hood, a novel of lesbian mourning in which the question of loss is raised within the context of an ever- expanding consumerist society, a society, as Robyn Weigman has addressed, that advances the cultural visibility of lesbians through marketing strategies, while at the same time reducing this visibility to the homogenizing logic of a commodity aesthetic.7


Passions between Women, Donoghue’s study of lesbian culture from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century, reflects her commitment to a discourse of lesbian identity as distinct from other forms of sexuality. Donoghue makes the historical silence about lesbians speak in a clear and discernable language; her study demonstrates how the silencing of lesbianism perpetuated in contemporary scholarship needs to be understood as a willful dismissal of sexual and nonsexual passions between women. In making this argument, she confronts a pervasive issue in the early history of female same-sex relations: the problem of anachronism. Because the word “lesbianism” did not enter the English language until 1870, Donoghue points out that many historians and critics have argued that to address women as lesbians before the late-Victorian era constitutes an anachronistic discourse. According to this argument, women who experienced erotic attachments to other women prior to the invention of a language for female homosexuality did not understand themselves as a distinct sexual or social group, and were not understood in this way by others. For Donoghue, such claims of anachronism render the historical existence of women’s relationships to women invisible and inaudible. While acknowledging the socio-linguistic difficulty of discussing female same-sex relations in terms of lesbianism, she defines the aim of her book as contributing to just such a discussion: “Silences can be interesting and significant, but this book is not about silence.”8 Consequently, her study of medical, religious, journalistic, and literary texts not only isolates a language of same-sex love centered around words including “sapphic,” “tribade,” and “tom,” as well as phrases such as “lovers of their own sex” and “feminine congression”; her book also argues that a distinct language for lesbian relations existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, evidencing that some women who experienced sexual attachments to other women understood themselves in terms of what today we call lesbianism—that is, as engaged in a type of erotic love clearly distinguished from other types. While Donoghue’s historical study of “the long eighteenth century” discerns an early language in which lesbianism spoke, her novel Hood turns to the “interesting” and “significant” aspects of silence in the context of contemporary Irish society. Hood, in fact, offers a subtle evaluation of the social silencing of lesbian grief, depicting the experience of a first-person narrator, Penelope O’Grady, over the


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course of the first seven days that follows the death of her long-term partner, Cara Walls. Set in Dublin in 1992, the text intersperses this sequential account of the everyday events of Pen’s first week of bereavement—a week that includes learning of the fatal car accident, arranging and attending the funeral, and returning to work and social life—with both a series of bereaved remembrances that span the 13-year relationship and numerous portrayals of the internal workings of her grief. As a lesbian who has not come out to her family or co-workers, Pen realizes the extent to which the closet renders her grief invisible to others. The narrator sees herself as a “grieving widow,” but she cannot publically display bereavement or receive the sympathy typically accorded to heterosexuals who have lost a spouse. Because Pen’s grief is publicly silenced, it has the potential to unleash the kind of emotionally devastating consequences addressed by Butler. However, while Donoghue’s novel clearly endorses the social expression of lesbian grief, it does not simply accept the therapeutic function of collective institutions for grieving, even those countercultural institutions established by lesbian communities. Rather, Donoghue’s narrator revisits the question of the closet and offers a provocative evaluation of the cultural possibilities for living and grieving as a lesbian that emerge from a socially policed silence. Pen clearly rails against the closet and the presumption of heterosexuality in her society for producing a situation where her grief cannot be socially recognized; however, she also values the privacy of her mourning, a privacy the silence about her sexuality affords. Pen’s disdain for bereavement conventions, for rituals and languages that seek to impose normative standards on mourning, extends beyond religious customs. Her rejection of accepted social protocols includes countercultural grief practices, as when she responds to a popular bereavement book aimed at lesbians and gay men given to her by Robbie, a married male and the only co-worker to whom she has come out. In a passage from which my first epigraph is drawn, Pen states: Oh look, there was the section Robbie had promised me: “Homosexuals mourning their partners often carry a burden exacerbated by invisibility and prejudice,” and several other sensible statements I didn’t need to read. Somehow, what galled me most was


that if it had been a husband, Sister Dominic [Pen’s boss] would have given me two weeks off. On the other hand, it occurred to me now, watching the widow-type opposite ... losing a husband would have been horribly public. I couldn’t have it both ways, I supposed, couldn’t have my closet and bitch about it. (248) Pen’s bereavement raises a contradiction: lesbian cultural visibility and its potential for promoting social equality entails the publicizing of a bereavement she regards as wholly private, while the closet and its perpetuation of inequality offers her a private space where she can mourn in unique ways. Donoghue pursues this contradiction throughout the novel, raising the question of how the silent workings of her narrator’s bereavement might be brought into collective institutions and social discourses without creating a new set of restrictive conventions for lesbian identity, conventions that threaten to impose ordering systems that silence and exclude those whose experiences of same-sex love do not conform to these conventions. Wendy Brown’s critique of the assumption that breaking a socially enforced silence necessarily constitutes an act of emancipation offers an interpretative approach to Donoghue’s ambivalent representation of the closet. Brown addresses a prevalent discursive mode of confession and testimonial through which Holocaust survivors, immigrants, women, people of color, homosexuals, and the unpropertied have made public their hidden suffering. On the one hand, this discourse succeeds in laying claim to the status of “liberal personhood” for those historically excluded from speech and civic life. On the other, this social discourse, in Brown’s words, “converges with unemancipatory tendencies in contemporary culture, establishes regulatory norms, coincides with the disciplinary power of ubiquitous confessional practices; in short, feeds the powers it meant to starve.”9 Brown takes care not to valorize silence; she defines it as a “strategy for negotiating domination” (324). At the same time, however, she demonstrates how the silences fabricated and structured by social discourse contain possibilities for privacy, autonomy, and a space for individual creativity free from the policing effects of the public eye. Brown makes the salient point that “compulsory discursivity” puts the pain of trauma or loss into language by establishing a social identification between the sufferer and suffering, an identification that condemns those who have experienced persecution, violence, or


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exclusion to an identity that has been determined by past injustice. Insofar as one emerges in socio-linguistic life as a subject of historical victimization, as Brown points out, the “possibilities of overcoming it, of living beyond it, of identifying as something other than it” are extremely difficult to imagine and realize (321). Donoghue’s novel offers a response to the paradox of silence; Hood distinguishes between the private and public life of its protagonist, while seeking a new way of relating the two. By narrating the internal and private aspects of the narrator’s mourning, the novel depicts a work of grieving liberated from both mainstream and counterculture conventions, a work that enables Pen to engage what the novel represents as the heightened eroticism and anger of her bereavement. Admittedly, Donoghue seems to undercut this liberatory gesture by bringing Pen’s private mourning into the social discourse of the novel, a move that threatens to establish Hood itself as creating new norms for lesbian identity and mourning. However, Donoghue’s text seeks to mitigate this problem. The novel attempts to thwart any conventionalizing interpretation of lesbian love and loss by representing the narrator’s mourning as radically individual and unmistakably personal. While depicting a zone of privacy for the narrator’s mourning, the novel represents the content of Pen’s bereaved consciousness to initiate the possibility for thinking differently about the communally shared activity of mourning. Donoghue’s characterization of her narrator plays on the contradictions of the closet, showing how a culturally dictated silence manages to exempt Pen from social regulation. “Nowadays,” Pen remarks, “ ‘invisibility’ was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself” (60). Clearly, Pen’s refusal to publicly disclose her sexuality emerges in response to heterosexism and homophobia. And yet, one character describes her as a “cradle dyke,” a lesbian who began acting on her attraction to other females at a young age and who never experienced guilt or self- doubt in the process. Pen’s invisibility grants her a power to inhabit social institutions without succumbing to harmful interpellations. She has long since come to regard the Catholic Church, with its equating of homosexuality and sin, as a set of beliefs and values irrelevant to her life. She recalls taking confession as a girl attracted to other girls. When a priest sets the terms for the confessional exchange by asking her questions about cigarettes, alcohol, and boys, Pen realizes that


her “story just didn’t show up in their terms” (189). Donoghue’s narrator continues to participate in the religious institutions of her culture; she attends mass throughout her life, works as a teacher at an all-girls convent school, and organizes Cara’s memorial service in the church. But Pen’s irreverent and irreligious attitude places her as an outsider within these religious institutions, an outsider on the inside who does not allow the values of Christian spirituality to injure her self-perception as a lesbian. Even Pen’s domestic life partakes of the closet; she and Cara have lived together for the past five years with Cara’s father, obscuring their love under the banner of friendship. Pen has developed what she calls “a taste for discretion,” a “concept” she regards as “outmoded,” but that nonetheless grants her more of “a sense of privacy and control than some blaringly ‘open’ relationship would have” (216). In Donoghue’s characterization, Pen’s reluctance to speak and aversion to visibility cannot be simply diagnosed as a repressive symptom of external regulation. Indeed, the narrator activates silence and exploits invisibility as a strategy to pursue her experience of lesbian identity and love. To claim that Hood gestures toward the creative and productive potential of social invisibility does not mean that Donoghue’s text fails to assess the myriad ways in which a predominantly heterosexual society consigns her narrator to the status of apparitional mourner.10 The novel, in fact, critiques the social repression of lesbian grief. Returning to the issue of bereavement leave, Pen informs the headmistress at school that her “housemate” has died and receives three days off, knowing full well that heterosexual spouses would be granted two-week leaves. The narrator suffers a social injury as a consequence of a mandated silence, but an injury, it is worth noting, that she regards as mild when compared to coming out at work, losing her job as a result, and forfeiting the potentially positive influence she may have on her students. Donoghue’s assessment of the cultural ghosting of the lesbian continues when Pen arranges an obituary in the local newspaper and has to settle for the nondescript phrase of “family circle” when including herself among the bereaved. Similarly, Pen notices the memorial plaques that adorn the church pews, plaques that acknowledge the kinship of parents and relatives, while understanding her own memorialization would take the misleading form of “beloved housemate, friends, schoolmate, pal” (134). Dressing for Cara’s funeral also takes on added anxiety


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for a closeted lesbian. Pen opts against donning the sartorial codes of mourning because such a public display would result in “outing Cara posthumously to her entire clan” (130). The church’s exclusion of lesbianism becomes especially loathsome during Cara’s funeral service. Because the 29-year- old Cara died as an unmarried woman, the church presumes her virginity; the white flowers surrounding her coffin symbolize sexual innocence, a symbol particularly insulting to a lesbian partner who knew about Cara “the important fact of her being what in lighter moments she called a pussyeater” (135). The silencing of the narrator’s grief clearly follows from constraining heterosexual norms, from socio-linguistic forms of power that marshal her bereavement inward and closet her mourning within the hidden domain of the psyche. Pen responds to being silenced, however, not by pressing her claim to speech but by exploiting the ambivalent freedom of her invisibility in order to give self- expression to the erotic dimensions of her bereavement. Echoing the eroticization of homosexual grief addressed by Michael Moon,11 Pen engages an intensely sexualized form of mourning that enables her to sustain same-sex eroticism even when the aim of her erotic attachment has been lost. She remembers religious instruction when Cara asked her whether they will “be allowed to have sex in heaven,” a question that casts the irreverent demand of a lesbian libido against sacred notions of the afterlife and immortality (188). Similarly, in attending Cara’s funeral, Pen participates in a congregational reading of “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” by substituting “Cara” for “Christ,” a substitution she regards as accurate, not blasphemous: “Cara within me / Cara behind me / ... / Cara beneath me / ... / Cara above me” (140). In addition to raising a number of highly erotic reminiscences of her partner, mournful remembrances that depict lesbian sex in explicit terms, Pen experiences bereaved arousal in response to other women she sees in passing. The narrator, who has lived monogamously and had no sexual partner prior to Cara, sometimes scolds herself for these flights of sexual imagination: “Would you just look at me: my lover one day in the grave and I was fancying others already” (191). And yet, she understands the erotics of her grief as a mode of self-preservation and a way of imagining the possibility of a sexual life after Cara. “I am only thirty. I will not spend the rest of my life mourning you,” Pen desperately declares in an attempt to make room for the idea of future relationships within

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a bereaved consciousness dominated by the absent other (302). In one of the most emotionally wrenching scenes of her private mourning, Pen struggles to find a reprieve from grief through masturbatory pleasure. After several failed attempts to reach a “blessed lull,” Pen finally achieves orgasm by remembering a particular experience of clitoral sex with Cara. She describes a sexual climax prompted by recalling her menstruating lover having once marked the bereaved narrator as her own: “Keeping time with my own memory, I came to meet myself” (259). Through these sexualized acts of mourning, acts she privately regards as “only natural, mother earth’s rhythms” (192), Donoghue’s narrator finds in silence a pleasurable exemption from social legislation and regulatory norms, from cultural conventions that threaten to stigmatize her bereavement as a form of guilty pleasure. In one of the most interesting aspects of the novel, Donoghue represents Pen’s grief as a challenge to the single most widely circulated conception of mourning within consumerist pop culture: the theory of the stages of grief. In fact, no other understanding of the grieving process has been as insidiously enshrined in the popular imagination as the “Five Stages of Grief.” The theory, adapted from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 1969 study of patients who discover they are terminally ill, defines five stages of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.12 Donoghue’s novel parodies the stage theory, suggesting the painful anguish of loss should not be construed as a neatly codifiable or mechanical process.13 When Pen discovers that her car will not start, she responds by engaging the stages of mourning. She initially denies that a problem exists, repeatedly turning the ignition until she floods the engine. “Damn you anyway, rotten little banger,” Pen scolds in anger (172). She then enters into the bargaining stage, wanting to kick the wheel, but resisting and continuing to hope she will arrive at work on time. Depression sets in, as “mechanics” make her “feel so powerless” (172). Finally, Pen accepts her situation, “giving up” on the car and calling a taxi. The five stages of grief may well illuminate Pen’s response to an unfortunate circumstance; what they in no way clarify, however, are the dynamics of her bereavement. Donoghue’s narrator explicitly rejects the stage approach to mourning, even one geared toward and marketed to gay men and lesbians, casting aspersions on the notion that grieving can be organized or


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legislated in these terms. Pen reads a chapter on mourning stages in her progressive bereavement book, asking herself whether she has been “a good girl” as far as “bereaved people went” (223). In assessing her emotions, she credits feeling numb and considers her inability to cry over the loss as a form of denial; Pen guesses that she has applied some “bandage,” as she calls it, “to slow the bleeding” (224). She also acknowledges anger, the rage she feels toward the presumably drunk driver of the taxi in which Cara died, as well as hostility toward her lover’s “rackety lifestyle” and infidelities. “But then again,” she remarks, “I was often angry with her when she was alive, so that couldn’t be a symptom of mourning” (224). The lessons of the self-help bereavement manual suggest to Pen that she “was getting the stages all wrong,” engaging them simultaneously, confusing the emotions of absence and presence, and introducing additional feelings including “terror” into the mix (224). And yet, she refuses to evaluate her performance of mourning in relation to conventional models; she refuses to be socially defined as a failed mourner. By reflecting on the complexity and uniqueness of her own grief, Pen is able to reject “the experts and their stages and their emotional clocks” for attempting to “impose order” on the “mess” of her bereavement (224). In its rejection of the popular wisdom about grief, the novel figures mourning as an open- ended labor, a response to loss whose dimensions assume highly personal forms and cannot be predicted in advance. In the interstices of official discourses and public practices, Pen creates a private space to engage not only the erotic aspects of grief but also her anger and hostility; she criticizes the lost partner who committed to a long-term relationship but unapologetically refused monogamy and subscribed to countercultural practices that idealize lesbian identity. Pen and Cara became “sort of girlfriends” in their late teens while at the convent school where Pen now teaches; Pen fell for her in the context of Cara’s infatuation for a female teacher, establishing a pattern to their relationship where Pen’s nurturing and fidelity emerged in opposition to Cara’s capriciousness and openness to other sexual encounters. The freedom to pursue recreational sex and casual affairs that Cara insisted on as part of the terms of their commitment contributes to the difficulty of Pen’s mourning. But the bereaved dialogue with herself enables Pen to express anger, as well as refuse self-blame for a relationship her partner sometimes

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experienced as stifling and claustrophobic. “Monogamy’s not natural” (121), Pen recalls her partner having pronounced, a partner who saw herself as a “serious feminist” committed to fighting the “topos of phallogocentrism” (207). In contrast, Pen, the stay-at-home individualist, does not see monogamy as a patriarchal myth deployed to dominate women but a commitment difficult to sustain given desire and its temptations. Pen never recants her criticism of her dead partner or forgives Cara her sexual escapades, though she does come to value the role her lover’s affairs played in keeping their own sex life active and satisfying. Cara’s other relationships motivated the couple to avoid routinized complacency in the bedroom. In an idiom of grief formulated in private, Pen accommodates “the occasional bloodletting of Cara’s infidelities” as a force “that has kept us pulling each other’s clothes off, on and off, for thirteen years, when according to so many of her books, lesbians are meant to hit bed death after two” (274). Pen does not allow her ideas about monogamy to be legislated by either dominant or countercultural values. Instead, she discovers in the privacy of her mourning the possibility to engage conflicting emotions, raising a secret language of loss that resists any unified discourse or singular truth about her love and grief. The insistence on personal difference that informs Pen’s resistance to mainstream mourning conventions also influences her attitude toward other lesbians; in the wake of Cara’s death, she refuses to identify with lesbians or form communal bonds. Donoghue’s novel offers a sympathetic portrayal of this refusal by addressing the way countercultural practices emerge in consumerist pop culture through a process that idealizes and unifies lesbian identity, a process by which alternative discourse, in turn, becomes part of a newly expanded though still restrictive form of social governance.14 Pen recalls the popular lesbian fiction Cara bought in Britain and the United States as an example of an oppositional discourse that circumscribes the possibilities for lesbian self-realization. Cara’s books often told stories of “urban dykes in trench- coats solving capitalist mysteries, or rural bare-breasted ones tending wounded deer” (60). What these narratives market is an idealized identity of the lesbian at war with a world that has injured her, a war waged either by living a cosmopolitan life and curing socioeconomic ills or residing in the country and reclaiming the devalued terms of an altruistic and caregiving female nature. Pen’s rejection of this idealization derives from


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her own experience, for most of the lesbians she knew were “quietly rebellious products of the suburbs” (60). Pen also criticizes Cara’s collection of political T-shirts as a commercialized fashion that casts lesbian identity as a homogenous group of leftists, just as she ridicules Cara’s ever- changing activist causes as a replacement for the religion she had long since renounced. From Pen’s point of view, these countercultural values establish a link between lesbian sexuality and injurious history, a link she sees as producing triumphal narratives that fetishize the terms of social injury. This critique of countercultural practices extends to a grief ritual organized by Cara’s friends, a group of lesbians who share a house called The Attic and urge the narrator to attend. The novel shows how this lesbian community, to repeat Brown’s formulation, unwittingly feeds the very powers it means to starve. Because dominant social practices exclude lesbians, the women invent an alternative ritual where they lavish unadulterated praise on their departed friend; they offer a host of mournful testimonials that represent Cara as an accomplished cook, tireless advocate for the oppressed, emotionally sensitive woman, and complex materialist. This ritual emerges in opposition to heterosexism and homophobia; the women give voice to the untainted value they place on one of their own. And yet, Donoghue demonstrates how the attic women engage an alternative grief ritual that silences the very figure they intend to engage in speech. Pen says next to nothing during the ceremony. She regards these bereaved speech acts as overly idealized and downright false renderings of her partner. In Donoghue’s description of the scene, Pen wages a silent dissent to what she perceives as a countercultural norm for the expression of grief, a norm that can brook no difference of opinion or conflicting forms in the memorialization of a lost one. In pitching the narrator’s silence against a countercultural practice too strongly formulated in opposition to the mainstream, Donoghue invites her readers to consider how a community comes to exclude one who might identify as an insider but whose private experience of grief keeps her out. If Donoghue creates sympathy for Pen’s reluctance to identify with other lesbians, she does so not to reject the importance of collectivities but to initiate new ways of thinking about both lesbian identities and communal formations.15 This thinking, Donoghue’s novel suggests, involves exploiting the resources of silence, the

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silence that may be socially mandated by the closet but that still has the potential to inform models for coming together in ways that recognize commonalities without denying differences, without imposing normative restrictions. The novel’s meditation on the word “hood” teases out the productive potential of silence by relating the narrator’s private mourning to the possibility of a lesbian community founded less in reaction to a world that continues to unleash homophobic inequities and violence and more on affirmative experiences of same-sex love. “Funny word, that; why did ‘hood’ added to nouns make them into states of being?” (113). Prompted by her own experience of widowhood, Pen runs through a litany of such states: sisterhood, maidenhood, spinsterhood, wifehood, motherhood. When Pen remembers the “bad girls” at the convent school, the girls who removed the button- on hoods from their overcoats to attract boys, she comes to an important realization. Pen realizes that all socially constructed identities are “detachable”; she comes to recognize human identity as a culturally defined construct that can be removed, or at least revised, through private resistance and public redefinition. Hood employs a model of postmodernist self-reflexivity that begins with the assumption of the subject’s radical embeddedness in society and history, even as the text promotes new cultural spaces where lesbian identity and mourning may be figured differently. Donoghue’s narrator, aptly called Pen, suggests a narrating presence who has been written by her culture, but who, in turn, is shown to be capable of rewriting it. Pen does not simply lament the fact that no social discourse has as yet attached the word “hood” to “lesbian,” using instead the “ism” that sounds “like a digestive disease” (114); she goes further, creating a textual web of interconnections that sexualizes the word “hood” and promotes a novel discourse on lesbianhood, an identity that is embodied privately, shared communally, and recognized publically. Pen raises an image of the folds covering the clitoris, “not a hood to take off, but to push back” (257); the image echoes the Olga Broumas poem that serves as the novel’s epigraph by conveying the special significance of social invisibility and silence for lesbians. From its opening page, Hood foregrounds how silence and invisibility might be placed in the service of imagining an open future for a lesbian narrator in the wake of loss, as well as establishing lesbian communities that do not replicate the exclusionary practices of heterosexist society.


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If the focus on mourning in Donoghue’s text makes a strong case for the merits of private grieving, it also demonstrates that the social forces of marginalization and hostility directed at lesbians are still very much in circulation. It is for this reason, in fact, that the novel draws to a close by describing how the closet might liberate but it also constrains the narrator’s mourning. Silence threatens to isolate Pen in her bereavement, intensifying the conflicted emotions of grief and rendering her visible to herself only as a bereaved subject of loss. Pen has not cried since Cara’s death because, in her words, “[i]f I broke down there would be no one to look after me” (116). What this suppression of bereaved tears suggests is the importance of establishing communal bonds and collective institutions for the expression of same-sex loss. In the narrator’s budding friendship with a lesbian from The Attic, Hood suggests that the private workings of lesbian grief might inform the creation of new kinship groups and collectivities in which loss can be externalized and shared, made public without the imposition of restrictive moralizing standards. The novel’s structure, moreover, its focus on the first seven days of a bereavement, freezes a period of intense and endless sorrow. Donoghue’s novel in no way seeks to decisively work through this loss, if by workingthrough we mean severing attachments, cutting ties with the past, and simply moving on. Rather, the text concludes by alluding to the deluge of tears Pen promises to shed when coming out to her mother and telling her story of lost lesbian love. The novel gestures toward a way of accommodating loss that might be discovered in the interstices of official and countercultural practices, representing, finally, the possibility for a new communal politics of mourning founded on the embodied remains of lesbian identity and love.

Desire and the lost object in Winterson’s Written on the Body If Donoghue’s novel depicts lesbian characters as recognizing individual differences while nevertheless forming collectives to combat heterosexism and homophobic violence, Winterson takes an entirely different tack. She writes Written on the Body, indeed most of her novels, from an imagined perspective where lesbians have achieved full integration in cultural life, a strategy Winterson employs not only to demonstrate that issues of sexuality in no way exhaust the story of lesbian lives, but also to resist what she calls the “ghettoization”

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of lesbian fiction from the cultural mainstream.16 Of all her novels, Written on the Body most defiantly challenges our ability to segregate homosexual and heterosexual concerns. The text resists any easy identification as a lesbian novel by withholding the gender of its first-person narrator, a deliberately unnamed figure who mourns the loss of a female lover. Most critics, however, have read the narrator as a woman and defined the novel’s gender ambiguity as a device that raises a lesbian character to the status of universal subject, a universality historically patterned on the heterosexual white male.17 But Winterson’s refusal to specify the gender of her narrator ought to guide interpretations of the novel since her strategy compels readers to question their own assumptions about the differences between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as imagine a contemporary culture where the gendering of the love object is less important than the mode in which we relate to the other. In refusing to clarify whether the lost love relationship is heterosexual or homosexual, the novel focuses attention on what Winterson figures as a common concern that characterizes both: the idea of desire and its dependence on the absence of the object. Desire in Winterson’s novel, as I discuss in what follows, is shown to be in complicity with postmodern consumer culture, with a culture that banks on the insatiability of desire and the replaceability of the objects of this desire. My reading thus maintains the novel’s gender ambiguity to account for the way Winterson assesses the reduction of mourning to the metonymies of desire and represents a new kind of embodied knowledge for sexual subjects in postmodern culture. Written on the Body resists the mass-marketed wisdom about mourning, the wisdom found in “grief- counselling and books on loss” that insist, “You’ll get over it” (154, 155). In rejecting the aim of closure, the novel, instead, reinterprets the incorporative impulse of melancholia, long understood as a pathological failure to sever attachments to loss. In Winterson’s description, this reinterpretation recalls classical humoral theory and the association between melancholia and philosophical or artistic temperament. Indeed, the narrator’s melancholic devotion to the lost object conditions his or her emergence as a writer internal to the text; this sustained attachment to loss marks “I” ’s transition from a translator who ekes out a living to an inspired elegist. When the narrator discovers his or her lover Louise has leukemia, “I” secretly leaves her and moves from London


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to a northern town, writing a goodbye letter and urging Louise to reconcile with her husband, a cancer specialist who promises the narrator to care for his wife and work toward a cure, but only on condition that Louise returns to him. In response, “I” takes shelter in anonymity and isolation, mourning the loss of Louise by writing a series of elegiac prose pieces addressed to her in absentia. Moreover, “I” finds inspiration for this elegiac project by reading bereavement manuals, studying medical and anatomy texts, and revisiting the poetry and literature of lost love. But this is a peculiar kind of elegy, as we shall see, since the need to stave off loss, in a certain sense, drives the narrator’s writing. If Winterson’s narrator has lost Louise in reality, “I” feels compelled to create an alternative one, a psychic and aesthetic reality in which the lover’s image is preserved: As I embalm you in memory, the first thing I shall do is hook out your brain through your accommodating orifices. Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem. You must be rid of life, as I am rid of life. (119) More than a reflection of personal grief, the compulsion to transform Louise into a photographic image immune to time, change, and bodily decay suggests the degree to which the narrator’s response to loss takes the form of a melancholic incorporation, a response that has specific personal and social consequences. Giorgio Agamben has offered a provocative interpretation of medieval melancholia; he defines the melancholic temperament as a negotiation between the individual and the social, a mode of sustaining attachments to loss that points less to an actual object that has disappeared than a wish for a reality yet to be realized. Discussing the association between melancholy, eros, and artistic activity in the context of the troubadour lyric, Agamben argues that melancholic writers do not respond to a loss that has already taken place but actually produce it, displaying “the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object.”18 An object of desire that cannot be possessed in reality is made to appear as lost. This staging of loss enables the melancholic writer to withdraw from external reality, incorporate the object, and invest the internalized phantasm with a psychic reality. Agamben defines melancholia as “a process in which what is real loses its reality so that what is unreal

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may become real” (25). Put differently, melancholic incorporation offers a means by which to negotiate private desire and a world of brute and indifferent materiality. The melancholic negotiation between desire and reality, as Agamben explains, produces symbolic and discursive forms “through which man enters in contact with a world that is nearer to him than any other and from which depend, more directly than from physical nature, his happiness and his misfortune” (25). Understood in these terms, the incorporative impulse of melancholia gestures toward the establishment of new psychic and social practices. Like Agamben’s early modern poets, Winterson’s narrator precipitates the loss of Louise, hastening her absence and covering her with the funereal trappings of mourning before she has actually died. On the one hand, “I” ’s decision to leave Louise so she might benefit from her husband’s care reflects an act of selflessness and personal sacrifice. The narrator puts Louise’s life and the prospect of her husband’s discovery of a cure before his or her own needs. On the other hand, precipitating Louise’s loss suggests a self-serving desire to possess the other beyond the threat of loss. This desire to render the object immune to loss, however, ushers in a positive engagement with the world and its objects; the narrator’s melancholic writing, as we shall see, not only serves to dismantle the conventional sources through which “I” sought inspiration—bereavement discourses, medical texts, and lost love literature; it also enables the narrator, as I discuss below, to give expression to a motivating wish for a new form of erotic intimacy. The series of four elegiac prose pieces at the novel’s center, “The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body,” “The Skin,” “The Skeleton,” and “The Special Senses,” reflect the melancholic strategy that governs the narrator’s writing. “I” turns from the outside and withdraws inward in order to represent his or her own desire. Facilitated by the melancholic retreat into the self, the narrator manages to challenge social conventions that at least since Aristotle have construed the female body as a passive container for an actively penetrating male subject. With relevance for lesbian as well as heterosexual concerns, “I” employs the language of sexual activity to elegize Louise. The narrator raises the tabooed terms of women’s bodies as resources for mournful poetizing. Louise’s smell, that of


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“iron” during menstruation, recalls a female lover “cocked and ready to fire” (136). Her skeleton reveals an active sexual partner like “the winged horse Pegasus who would not be saddled” (131). Even when Louise’s body becomes an object of sexual penetration, she cannot be elegized in the erotic language of the conventional bedroom. The narrator recalls pressing an index finger and thumb into the flesh behind Louise’s collarbone, an association that reminds “I” that Louise offered her body “not just in the obvious ways but in so many indentations” (129). By inscribing and revising the male/ active, female/passive opposition in portrayals of gender difference, Winterson’s narrator brings the representation of loss to bear on present social concerns. “I” advances a form of erotic intimacy, one that is “lodged in the body more than held in the mind” (82), by representing desire for the other as a corporeal reality. The productive effects of melancholic incorporation continue to emerge in the narrator’s writing when the elegy describes the relationship between “I” and the lost Louise by emphasizing the similarity of their bodies. Insofar as this bodily similarity names the very source of the narrator’s desire for Louise, the elegy raises the issue of narcissism, a narcissistic love of self typically construed as the reduction of the uniqueness of the other, one that enables the subject to see its own image in another and contract its own abundance. Narcissism, it should be noted as well, has particular relevance for lesbian concerns since it has been used to pathologize homosexuality. In social and psychoanalytic traditions, women who love women, like men who love men, have been understood as merely loving mirror images of themselves. The cultural deployment of this mirror metaphor, as Gillian Spraggs has addressed, perpetuates a view of homosexuals as narcissistic personalities, personalities incapable of moving beyond an early stage of maturation and attending to the emotional or erotic needs of anyone but themselves.19 Whether the relationship is one of same-sex love or not, Winterson’s narrator does not shy away from representing desire for the other as a form of desiring the self. In raising the mirror metaphor, “I” calls herself Louise’s “twin,” seeing a reflection of the self in Louise’s body: “Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s walls” (120). Even more pointedly, the narrator represents desire for the other as a way of


erotically touching him- or herself: I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual attraction but there are so many things about us that are the same. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. To remember you it’s my body that I touch. (129) Winterson’s narrator explores the narcissistic components of human love in order to advance an alternative meaning. “I” does not represent narcissism as a either an inability to love the other as uniquely other or a homosexual pathology, but as the very condition of subjectivity. In the “written on the body” passage, “I” powerfully describes how the desire to be a subject proceeds by way of a circuitous path through the other, a description that calls attention to the permeable boundaries that join self and other, mourner and mourned: Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book. (89) The narrator describes a relation where one body relates to another by relinquishing its own boundaries, the boundaries typically constructed to fortify a self sufficient unto itself. “I” figures his or her body as a text upon which the world has written its own meanings, but a text that Louise is able to translate into new significance rather than passively read. Louise’s “reading hands” do not discern a stable or self-contained meaning in the palimpsest inscribed on “I” ’s body. Rather, her intimacy translates the encoded levels of the narrator’s accumulated history into nothing less than new meaning, a meaning where “I,” read by the other, sees him- or herself as subject. Winterson’s engagement with narcissism demonstrates how the path through the other shatters the notion of a self-generating and strongly bounded subject.20 By knowing him- or herself through another’s reading, by claiming of Louise, “[y]ou are what I know” (120), the narrator represents desire for the other as a condition of subjectivity. In fact, so embedded is Louise in the narrator’s self-understanding that “I” seems


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to stop at nothing, including the threat of self-loss, to preserve the lover’s image. The narrator conveys a wish to follow the other into death. “I” sees him- or herself mirrored by a funereal object, “broken” as the other is broken, “rid of life” as the other is “rid of life” (125, 119). “I” ’s representation of loss reflects the strength of the attachment to the object, the intensity of love. The narrator incorporates the other in the self, indeed risks the self, so that “I” can continue to court the object. “Why is the measure of love loss?” (9). The question the novel begins with and repeatedly raises both distills the achievements of the narrator’s elegy and poses the central problem that Winterson’s text seeks to resolve. The narrator’s elegiac writing gives new expression to the loss of a female object. Loss measures love, to begin with, by showing how erotic attachments persist long after the other departs. The narrator makes explicit this experience of sustained grief and ongoing mourning: The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no- one else can fit. (155) By engaging bereavement as a sustained attachment to loss, the narrator’s elegy succeeds in creating a new textual artifact in the discourse of love, an artifact where narcissistic self-love gestures toward a new openness to the other. But, as the narrator understands, there are limits to this success. Loss also measures love in the fashion of a tradition of romantic tragedies that spans, say, Romeo and Juliet and The End of the Affair. This tradition does not simply describe how an indifferent world of circumstance destroys love; it elevates a relationship that cannot be lived in actuality to the status of what one of Winterson’s characters calls a “perfect romance,” a doomed relationship that achieves perfection by exempting the lovers from all blame for love’s undoing (187). How, then, does the narrator’s own writing, what “I” describes as a “necrophiliac obsession,” escape the logic of tragic impossibility? How, in other words, are we to understand the social relevance of “I” ’s private courting of the lost object, a courting so intense that the conventional self risks itself? To pose the question in yet another way, how do we transform one of the lessons of the narrator’s elegiac writing, the lesson that only what is lost can


be truly desired, into a different economy of desire: a desire not to want but to have, a desire not to desire but to love? Why, indeed, is the measure of love loss? Winterson’s novel responds to these questions by showing how her narrator mourns the lost object of desire as a strategy to reinvent bereavement, embodiment, and lost love writing. In drawing on conventional grief, medical, and elegiac discourses, the narrator creates a textual substitute for Louise, but a substitute that compels “I” to sabotage and undermine his or her authority to elegize the other. “I” ’s elegy calls attention to the myriad ways in which it fails to represent the lost object’s uniqueness. To successfully render the object, as the narrator’s writing suggests, entails possessing it, a possession that would cancel desire through fulfillment and satisfaction. Consequently, “I” ’s text employs a logic of self-undermining; the narrator’s elegy reflects a self- deconstructing aesthetic. As a thoroughly postmodern elegist, the narrator uses the writing to turn the elegy back upon itself. When “I” reflexively considers the medical terminology employed in the elegy, words like “maxilla, vomer, inferior conchae, mandible,” the narrator acknowledges that these words fail to capture the object: “Those are my shields, those are my blankets, those words don’t remind me of your face” (132). Similarly, the narrator’s writing posits a special auditory mode where sound connects “I” to the lost object, only to short- circuit the connection: “I wish I could hear your voice again” (135). These instances of authorial selfundermining suggest more than the impossibility of capturing the singularity of the desired object, more than the potential destruction entailed in aesthetizing the lost other. What they demonstrate is how the narrator’s borrowing from conventional discourses produces an object that has been rendered inaccessible and unrepresentable. If drawing on these discourses ensures “I” ’s capacity to desire, it also entails an object of desire that is represented as unobtainable. Winterson’s novel, I want to suggest, offers an allegory of the move from Freudian loss to Lacanian lack. In Freud’s psychoanalysis of grief, as we have seen, mourning emerges in response to the loss of an actual other or ideal; this emotional labor culminates in a transformation of the psyche based on sustained attachments to loss. For Lacan, however, mourning is disassociated from an actual object and from any sense of history; it comes to name, instead, a metaphysical fact of subjectivity. Emptied of its potential to relate us to lost others


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or the past, mourning in the Lacanian argument defines the condition of a subject that has been founded on its own desire. Alessia Ricciardi has argued, with insight and force, that Lacan “does not truly believe in mourning”: “Mourning for Lacan intervenes at the level of a desire that is sustained by the inherent lack of an object and hence by the erasure or flattening of history from the point of view of the subject.”21 On this view, the desiring subject acquires an attitude of skeptical knowingness about the world, understanding that a central lack both structures the symbolic order and invalidates any narrative of redemption. But this same desiring subject, characterized by a certain depthlessness of feeling and severed from the claims of historical consciousness, finds itself moved along a metonymic chain of substitutions where desire is ceaselessly displaced from one object to another and even intensified by a commercial culture that exploits our propensity for the ceaseless consumption of discardable commodities. In telling the story of how the narrator precipitates the disappearance of Louise, Winterson’s novel not only evaluates how loss becomes lack in postmodern culture; the text also pitches the work of mourning against the fetishization of grief and metonymies of desire. The narrator’s mourning of the lost object poses a challenge to any writing practice that grounds desire in the absence of the object. “I” ’s desire for an object that he or she has rendered lost does not suggest a metaphysical fact of human existence or displaced affect for lost Lacanian origins. Rather, the protagonist’s insatiable longing for the lost object emerges as a consequence of specific sociolinguistic forms, textual and cultural practices that have failed to mediate adequately the relationship to Louise, in both her presence and absence. To state the obvious, when “I” elegizes Louise, it is an aesthetic substitute for the other that is represented and not the actual other. What this substitute consists of is nothing but a contestation of various social discourses; the lost object has been evoked through and against material languages that produce an absent figure whose features can only be approximated. The self- consciousness of the narrator’s writing enables us to discern that when “I” incorporates the conventional languages of mourning, medicine, and elegy in his or her elegy, these discourses now appear as lost. Mourning conventions teach us to sever ties to the lost object; medical conventions regard the body, in the narrator’s words, as “a series of bits

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to be isolated and treated as necessary” (175); and elegiac conventions promise consolation for the painful task of letting go. When the narrator incorporates these languages in writing the elegy, they lose their habitual significance. This incorporative strategy shows how bereavement, medicine, and elegy lose their external meaning by becoming internal; the new meaning they accrue points to the textual space produced by weaving them together. To return to Agamben, if the narrator has incorporated the real to make it unreal and courted the unreal in an effort to make it real, it is because “I” wants to externalize and share desire; Winterson’s narrator seeks to transform desire for an unattainable object of tragic impossibility into a new form of erotic intimacy, a form that depends on radically different psychic dispositions and social practices regarding love and loss, illness and death, grief and writing. In acting upon the lessons of “I” ’s own melancholic elegizing, the narrator returns to London in an attempt to refind the lover, only to discover that Louise has not reconciled with her husband. Louise vowed resolutely that her marriage ended when she fell in love with the narrator, a vow she kept by rejecting her husband’s assistance even after “I” ’s departure. The narrator searches exhaustively for Louise, not knowing whether she has died or actually lives. What “I” initially finds, however, are yet more conventional bereavement practices that detach mourners from the mourned, more practices in a commercialized pop culture that have devalued mourning by preaching the severing of ties and moving on to replacement objects. A sojourn in a cemetery produces a series of hyperbolic observations intended to provoke thought about the way we care for the dead. Winterson’s narrator attempts to wrest the deceased from the professionalization of death, from the funeral directors and mortuary workers whose commerce with the dead arises less from emotional than financial concerns. “I” recalls a time prior to the establishment of the modern funeral home and sees “more friendlier pictures” of the burial, pictures where the dead are not passed “into the hands of strangers,” but “washed, disinfected, drained, plugged, and made-up” by those most intimate with the body (178, 177).22 The narrator also wonders why the British obsession with “DIY,” the “do it yourself” practices sometimes motivated by economic necessity but mostly by an interest in creativity and self-expression, has not pervaded the coffin industry. “You can buy boat kits, house kits, garden furniture kits, but not coffin kits,”


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a travesty since such coffin-making might well constitute what the narrator calls “the tenderest thing to do for the beloved” (176). When “I” focuses attention on the burial site, the “hole” or “dizzy chasm of loss,” the narrator tells a story of nineteenth-century grave diggers who often worked in cold and wet conditions, falling ill and dying as a result. “Digging your own grave,” the narrator remarks, “wasn’t a figure of speech then” (177). In seeking to revitalize the meaning of this metaphor, the narrator suggests that, by doing the “hard work” of digging a lover’s grave, mourners succeed in digging their own. That is, they confront their own mortality and inevitable self-loss in a way that productively relates them to both the dead and living. The dissatisfaction the narrator expresses with prevailing death and mourning customs points to a need for a recovery—and revision—of the Freudian Trauerarbeit, a work of grieving that is not only psychic and private, but also physical and social. The narrator’s writing empties the conventional languages of mourning, medicine, and lost-love literature of their ordinary meanings. “I” ’s elegy produces a new reality in the representation of love, while also challenging our ability to identify the sexual orientation of this love. But because this reality continues to exist in the wholly private realm of the psyche, it is one that “I” regards as limited. Consequently, the narrator seeks to make the lessons of his or her elegizing a social reality, even if this reality entails the extreme emotional cost of caring for a dying loved one. The narrator highlights his or her effort to reinvest loss in the social when reflecting upon the intensity of bereavement that prompted him or her to write: The previous months had been wild with despair and cushioned by shock. I had been mad, if madness is to be on the fringes of the real world. In August I felt blank and sick. I had sobered up, come round to the facts of what I had done. I was no longer drunk on grief. Body and mind know how to hide from what is too sore to handle. Just as the burns victim reaches a plateau of pain, so do the emotionally wretched find grief is a high ground from which they may survey themselves for a time. Such detachment was no longer mine. (156) Winterson’s narrator has sought to achieve a level of detachment from the painful extremity of loss by abandoning Louise. “I,” in fact,

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has turned to both memory and a text as a desperate measure to possess the other beyond the threat of loss, beyond the threat of losing Louise to death, as well as to another or the contingencies of love, as suggested by the numerous stories “I” tells about a personal history of previously failed relationships. But because the narrator’s elegy has dismantled this desire for an impossible mode of possession, “I” resolves to end her detachment from the social and seeks an embodied form of erotic intimacy that begins with the recognition of Louise’s unique otherness. As “I” puts it: “To think of Louise in her own right, not as my lover, not as my grief. It helped me to forget myself and that was a great blessing” (153). What the narrator has come to realize is that the permeable boundaries that join mourner and mourned also separate them, a separation that acknowledges a relation, but not an identity, between self and other, life and death, corporeality and noncorporeality. Winterson’s novel invites us to read the narrator’s melancholic elegizing not as a retreat into the self but an encounter with the world; the text invites us to define mourning not as a discourse of the private but an approach to the social. In depicting the productive effects of melancholic incorporation, the narrator’s search to find the lost Louise ends in neither success nor failure; it ends by reiterating the possibilities produced in his or her elegy. Failing to find Louise in London, the narrator returns to Yorkshire; “I” sees—or imagines seeing—Louise’s face in the kitchen door. Winterson herself has commented on the way the concluding scene confounds the distinction between between fantasy and reality. She describes the novel as a story of “love found, love lost, love found again—maybe.”23 What, finally, does “maybe” mean as a description of erotic intimacy articulated in melancholy’s wake, one whose motivating ideal is to disrupt the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality? The unresolved ending of Winterson’s novel may be understood as a strategy to transfer the narrator’s desire for a “happy ending” onto the reader, inviting the desiring fantasy for new socio-linguistic practices involving bodies and medicine, loss and mourning, sexual identity and love to take hold outside the confines of the aesthetic. In creating a textual substitute for the lost object, “I” ’s elegizing has incorporated bereavement conventions geared toward letting go to lose the convention of letting go. The narrator’s elegy has incorporated the medical view of the body as a composite of discrete organs


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to lose the view of corporeality as a dispassionate machine of working parts. The narrator’s writing has incorporated the idea of an unattainable love object to lose the idea that we are constitutively barred from embracing the bodies of our desire. “I” has incorporated the elegiac conventions of a male tradition to lose the idea that only men represent their own desire for an absent female love object. Perhaps most importantly, the narrator has incorporated the elegiac practice of consoling through an aestheticization of loss to lose the practice of consolation. As Winterson puts it in an essay, “I do not think of art as Consolation. I think of it as Creation. I think of it as an energetic space that begets energetic space.”24 As this formulation clarifies, Winterson’s particular practice of postmodern fiction runs against the current of a dominant postmodernism, one that contends that all truths are fictions and that the novel is a language game that has no bearing on other language games in a fractured contemporary culture. Winterson raises the idea of aesthetic consolation only to reject and promote a view of the postmodern novel as fostering new social constellations for identity and culture. This progressive aim, as Written on the Body suggests, hinges on a performance of grief that is shown to provoke different understandings of sexuality, different public discourses, and different modes of intersubjectivity and intimacy. Instead of advocating our detachment from the lost object, a detachment the novel represents as consorting with the metonymies of desire in consumer society, Winterson, like other modernist and postmodernist writers, invests loss with the potential to promote a progressive politics and ethical mode of being in the world.

Notes Introduction: Rethinking Loss; Remapping the Novel 1. Critics attribute the decline of nineteenth-century mourning practices to a number of causes. Philippe Ariès links the disappearance of traditional funerary rituals to the social changes that followed World War One. See Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), 583. Geoffrey Gorer relates this decline to the increased emphasis on a “fun-morality” and “duty to enjoy oneself” characteristic of twentieth-century culture. See Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning (New York: Arno Press, 1977), xiii. David Cannadine argues that both a decrease in death rates and growing disdain for the commercialization and financially exploitative practices of Victorian mourning customs resulted in the demise. See Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,”in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 187–242, 193, 191. 2. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 28. 3. Ibhab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of SelfConscious Fiction (London and New York: Methuen, 1984). 4. See David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), “Mourning Remains,” introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. 6. Although Peter Nicholls similarly recognizes the importance of the issue of mourning in Lyotard’s work, he argues that Lyotard conceives of the postmodern in a way that expresses “the need constantly to ‘work through’ the meaning of the modern in order to disrupt it by multiple, conflicting narratives” (15). See Peter Nicholls, “Divergences: Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard,” Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 1–18. My reading of Lyotard’s conception of mourning is more in line with John Rajchman’s critique of the “unpresentable” in his work. See Rajchman, “Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics,” October 86 (1998): 3–18. 7. Critics have raised the issue of Lyotard’s own failure to lay to rest metanarrative authority. Judith Roof argues, quite cogently, that his “analysis of this loss of metanarrative relies upon an unrecognized legitimating 158

Notes, pp. 5–10

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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metanarrative that establishes the ‘truth value’ of no truth.” See Roof, “Lesbians and Lyotard: Legitimation and the Politics of the Name,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbian University Press, 1994), 47–66, 59. The reduction of postmodern literature to a critical and debunking function inheres in Linda Hutcheon’s account of historiographic metafiction, her exemplar of postmodernism. As she argues, “When conjoined with historical references to actual events and personages, this demystifying auto-representation engages a problematizing of historical knowledge and of the borders between fact and fiction, conducted within the powers and limits of narrativization.” See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 227. My analysis of a strand of postmodern fiction that puts forward affirmative social content is indebted to the recent work of Patricia Waugh, who locates in a type of postmodern literature an “attempt to sustain collectivist or even transcendent modes of representation whilst trying to reconcile them with a sense of identity as perspectival and radically situated in specific bodies.” See Waugh, “Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945–2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 65–82, 75. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 61–138, 80. Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 2. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 248–63; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 89–97. For critiques of Williams’s failure to address issues of empire, see Said, Culture, 82–4; and Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 44–50. Dominick LaCapra, “Reflections on Trauma, Absence, and Loss,” in Whose Freud?, ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 178–204, 179. Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 68. Jahan Ramazani, “Afterword: ‘When There Are So Many We Shall Have to Mourn,’ ” in Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Rae (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 286–95, 290. See also his influential account of the rejection of consolation in modern poetry in Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8. Seth Moglen, Mourning Modernity: Literary Modernism and the Injuries of American Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), xiv. Patricia Rae, Introduction to Modernism and Mourning (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 22. Despite his devaluation of literature in the postmodern period—“the architecture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much worse”—Fredric Jameson offers, of course, an indispensable summation

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

Notes, pp. 10–12

of the characteristics of the culture of postmodernity. See Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 299. In accounting for the rejection of traditional consolatory memorials, James E. Young writes, “once we assign monumental form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember.” See Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 273. Geoffrey Hartman makes a similar point when he argues that conventional memorializing practices may not be aimed at remembering the past as much as to “give it a decent burial.” See Hartman, “Public Memory and Modern Experience,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6, no. 2 (1993): 239–48, 242. Rita Felski isolates political formalism as one of three main methodological approaches to modernist texts. In contrast to both cultural studies and what she terms “the sociology of literature,” political formalism, Felski defines, “insists on the primacy and preeminence of aesthetic form, which it strives to decipher with a formidable array of analytical devices. It calls for a patient poring over poetic conventions, a scrutiny of figurative language, a neverending labor of reading between the lines. This textual hypervigilance is understood as not just aesthetic work, but also as political work.” See Felski, “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 501–17, 510. The first epigraph is from a 1929 letter to Ludwig Binswanger, where Freud reflects on his daughter’s death that took place nine years earlier by emphasizing the endlessness of mourning and rejecting the notion of consolatory substitution. See Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 386. Kathleen Woodward was one of the first literary critics to offer an extended critique of Freud’s early mourning theory, but she treats “Mourning and Melancholia” as Freud’s last word on the subject of grief. See Woodward, “Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief,” Discourse 13, no. 1 (1990–91): 93–110, 96. More recent critics, however, find in Freud’s own work an articulation of anti-consolatory and interminable grief. See G. H. Pollock, The Mourning-Liberation Process, vol. 1 (Madison: International Universities Press, 1989), 31; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 167–98; Gregg M. Horowitz, Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 153; and Eng and Kazanjian, “Mourning Remains,” in Loss, 4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 245. Freud returned to the question of consolation in “On Transience” (1916), a transitional text in the development of his mourning theory that

Notes, pp. 12–14 161

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

reexamines loss in the context of World War One and begins to express his skepticism about the possibility of finishable mourning. Written 15 months after the outbreak of the war, the essay begins by repeating Freud’s early account of mourning where the task is to “replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.” However, when confronted with the catastrophic suffering caused by the war, Freud now recognizes that “libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready at hand” and thereby acknowledges the failure of consolatory substitution to explain the dynamics of mourning. See Freud, “On Transience,” Standard Edition, 14: 307, 306. Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (New York: Routledge, 1993), 94. I engage in a more extensive discussion of the development of Freud’s mourning theory in Clewell, “Mourning beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52, no. 1 (2004): 43–67. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), Standard Edition, 19: 29. See Butler, Psychic Life, 196. See Ariès, Hour, 595. For a critique of Ariès’s claim that the twentieth century saw death vanish and mourning disappear from the sphere of the social exchange, see Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 3. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1982), 78; William Faulkner, Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (New York: Vintage, 1995), 273. Jacques Derrida’s work on mourning divides into two strands, individual mourning and cultural mourning, though both share the quality of radical otherness, an alterity that resists assimilation by either the mourning subject or social present. In the case of individual loss, Derrida’s account may be understood as emphasizing what we might call an ethics of mourning. Rather than reduce the lost other to an object for the mourner, he argues for a conception of “impossible” mourning. This unfinishable labor of grieving obliges us, according to Derrida, to accept the “being-in-us” of the lost other as an absolute excess, a radical otherness residing in a space that is neither properly inside nor strictly outside the psyche; impossible mourning thus reflects an ethical condition for intersubjectivity, one that cannot be reduced to a narcissistic desire to master the other. See Derrida, “By Force of Mourning,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 139–64, 161. For insightful discussions of Derrida’s mourning theory, see Anselm Haverkamp, Leaves of Mourning: Hölderlin’s Late Work – With an Essay on Keats and Melancholy, trans. Vernon Chadwick (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 20; Mary Rawlinson, “Levers, Signatures, and Secrets: Derrida’s Use of Woman,” in Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69–86; and David Farrell Krell, The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning, Art, and Affirmation in the

162

Notes, pp. 14–27

Thought of Jacques Derrida (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 19–21. 31. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6. 32. For interesting applications of Derrida’s notion of spectral history, see Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 125; and Mark Sanders, “Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Loss, 77–98, 90. 33. The second epigraph is from Derrida, Specters, xix.

1 Woolf and the Great War 1. Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), 159. 2. See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) 1: 40, 44; Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 75, 77; and Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1990), 166. 3. Mark Spilka, Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 7, 11. For other readings of Woolf’s unresolved grief as a symptom of her mental illness, see Jean O. Love, Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 214–16; and Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 111. 4. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 264. 5. Critics have addressed Woolf’s defiance of traditional mourning from a variety of perspectives. For a biographical account that disputes grief as the cause of Woolf’s mental illness, see Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic Depressive Illness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2. On Woolf’s specifically feminist challenge to Victorian grief practices, see Susan Bennett Smith, “Reinventing Grief Work: Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Representations of Mourning in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 4 (1995): 310–27. For an account that links the development of Woolf’s aesthetics to her critique of traditional mourning, see John Mepham, “Mourning and Modernism,” in Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (Totowa: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), 137–56. 6. Vincent Sherry argues that the Great War collapsed the tradition of rational liberalism and thus resulted in “the cultural crisis in Britain”; he reads the work of modernist writers including Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a response to this collapse. See Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9. 7. Citations in what follows are from Jacob’s Room (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950); and To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981).

Notes, pp. 28–32 163

8. The matter of Woolf’s attitude toward class division and her own privileged social status has recently been addressed. Shawn Latham argues that Woolf and her circle “were not adamant defenders of the English class system, but they could not envision any sort of systematic change that would also preserve its tastes in art, music, and philosophy.” See Latham, Am I a Snob?: Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 66–7. In challenging the image of Woolf as an elitist, as well as an “aesthetic capitalist” who marketed herself to achieve prestige and fame, Melba Cuddy-Keane focuses on Woolf’s BBC broadcasts, among other public ventures, and argues that Woolf sought to recast highbrowism as a radical social practice that fostered a classless, democratic, and intellectually informed reading public. See Cuddy-Keane, Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193. 9. David Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 187–242, 189. 10. For studies of nineteenth-century mourning practices in Britain, see John Morley, Death, Heaven, and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); and Julian Litten, The English Way of Death (London: Robert Hale, 1991). 11. For an excellent study of working-class anxiety about the pauper grave, see Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 12. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), 314–15. 13. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 536. See also J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 179. 14. See Margaret Higonnet and Patrice Higonnet, “The Double Helix,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and Two World Wars, ed. Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel, and Margaret Collins Weitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 31–47. For studies of the way women viewed and wrote about the Great War, see Jean Gallagher, World Wars through the Female Gaze (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); and Sandra Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War,” in Behind the Lines, 197–226. 15. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 141. 16. Virginia Woolf, “A Cambridge V.A.D.,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (London: Hogarth Press, 1987–88), 2: 112–13. 17. Woolf criticizes Edward Marsh’s memoir of Brooke for being “inevitably incomplete” and for the overt romanticism of a writer from an older generation: “No undergraduate of Rupert Brooke’s own age would have seen ‘his radiant youthful figure in gold and vivid red and blue, like a page in the Riccardi Chapel.’ ” See Woolf, “Rupert Brooke,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 2: 277, 278.

164

Notes, pp. 32–7

18. Virginia Woolf, “The New Crusade,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 2: 203. 19. For studies of the Victorian feminization of grief on both sides of the Atlantic, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 200–26; John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 63; and Jeffrey Steele, “The Gender and Racial Politics of Mourning in Antebellum America,” in An Emotional History of the United States, ed. Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 91–108, 92. 20. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch,” in Moments of Being, 123. 21. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. 22. Winter’s argument that the Great War solidified traditional rather than modernist practices has come under critical scrutiny. Peter Jelavich argues that Winter is “attacking a straw man; inasmuch as his conception of modernism as something radically new, forged by the Great War, is a view that few experts on modernism share these days.” See Jelavich, “Book Reviews,” Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 128–30, 129. Vincent Sherry, in making a similar argument, writes, “Winter’s assertion turns upon a construction of tradition that takes little stock of what this charged and valorized word actually means.” See Sherry, The Great War , 9. 23. Susan Kingsley Kent, “Remembering the Great War,” Journal of British Studies 37, no. 1 (1998): 105–110, 106–7. 24. Jacques Derrida, “By Force,” 173. 25. Derrida as well as Judith Butler have challenged the account of mourning offered by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, who argue that the internalizing strategy of “introjection,” in opposition to the melancholic fantasies of “incorporation,” establishes “an empty space” from which speech and the meaningfulness of language emerge. When confronted with the loss of the maternal breast, itself a consoling substitute for the loss of the intrauterine mother-child union, the infant mourns, as they put it, by learning “to fill the void of the mouth with words” (6). The successful detachment from the object takes place, then, through a process of “vocal self-fulfillment.” The child verbalizes the painful separation, replaces the satisfactions received at the breast “with the satisfactions of the mouth devoid of that object but filled with words addressed to the subject,” and hence quite literally comes to terms with the loss. See Abraham and Torok, “Introjection–Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia,” in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widlöcher (New York: International University Press, 1980), 3–16, 6. For critiques of the failure of their theory to confront the difference, uniqueness, and otherness of the lost object, see Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi–l; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 86–7.

Notes, pp. 37–40 165

26. Jacques Derrida, ‘By Force of Mourning’, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 139–164. 27. Alex Zwerdling, “Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy,” ELH 48.4 (1981): 894–913, 909. 28. In the only book-length study to date of the impact of World War One on Woolf’s writing, Karen Levenback recognizes the centrality of bereavement in Woolf’s fiction: “Mourning is itself a key, Woolf will suggest in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, not only to acknowledging the reality of death but also to gauging what would be called the ‘public mood.’ ” However, Levenback employs a progressive narrative of Woolf’s developing “war-consciousness” and argues, unconvincingly in my estimation, that Jacob’s Room does not offer us a full reckoning of the protagonist’s death and thus reflects “that the implications of the war have not yet been either felt or recognized.” See Levenback, Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 43. 29. Christine Froula argues that the closing gesture of the novel, when Betty Flanders asks what to do with her son’s shoes, conveys neither “despair or even grief” since Woolf’s narrator “has put mourning behind her and writes a ‘disconnected rhapsody’ for those who are still here—the war’s survivors, from whom life is a narrow pavement over an abyss.” In contrast, I locate Woolf’s effort to promote the kinds of social changes that Froula also discusses in the novel’s anti-consolatory and ongoing mourning. See Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 81. 30. Woolf thematizes the potential for mourning to lead to personal and social transformation in Mrs. Dalloway, the text that not only follows the publication of Jacob’s Room, but also begins in some sense where the earlier novel leaves off. The novel expands Woolf’s mourning less in describing a postwar society wracked by loss, both the literal losses resulting from the war and the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 and the symbolic losses stemming from disintegrating cultural traditions and a declining empire. For an excellent reading of mourning in the novel, see Susan Bennett Smith, “Reinventing Grief,” 310–27. 31. Critics have pointed out that Woolf intentionally refrained from rereading family documents when writing To the Lighthouse in order to explore the workings of her own memory. See Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 181. 32. Woolf also criticized “the angel in the house,” the Victorian ideal of domestic femininity in her famous essay “Professions for Women.” See Woolf, “Professions,” in Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1974), 235–42. 33. See Alan Bell, Introduction to Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ix–xxxiii, x. 34. See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 258.

166

Notes, pp. 42–55

35. On the anxiety that the expression of grief posed to male writers in the nineteenth century, see Neal Tolchin, Mourning, Gender and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 118. 36. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 42. 37. Virginia Woolf, “Reminiscences,” Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. and intro. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 41. 38. For an interesting account of the relationship between Leslie Stephen’s philosophical writings on Hume and Woolf’s elegiac novel, see Gillian Beer, “Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse,” Essays in Criticism 34, no. 1 (1984): 33–55. 39. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 45. 40. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 45. 41. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 114. 42. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 143, 114. 43. Woolf, “Reminiscences,” 114. 44. Isaac Rosenberg, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 110. 45. Robert Graves, Collected Poems, 1959 (London: Cassell & Company, 1959), 121. 46. Nancy Topping Bazin and Jane Hamovit Lauter, “Virginia Woolf’s Keen Sensitivity to War: Its Roots and Its Impact on Her Novels,” in Virginia Woolf and War, 14–39, 19. 47. James Haule, “To the Lighthouse and the Great War: The Evidence of Virginia Woolf’s Revisions of ‘Time Passes,’ ” in Virginia Woolf and War, 164–79, 167. 48. Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 196. 49. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), 1036. 50. Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (New York: Knopf, 1918), 29. 51. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1978), 10. 52. James Naremore, The World without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 242. 53. In the scholarship on maternal mourning in To the Lighthouse, critics have argued that writing the novel enabled Woolf to terminate her protracted grief for her own mother. Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” is typically cited as evidence for this view, given that Woolf acknowledges that writing the novel helped her accomplish “what psycho-analysts do for their patients”: “I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.” The passage clearly draws a connection between finishing the novel and finishing mourning; however, Woolf immediately goes on in the passage to dedicate her writing to an exploration of the “invisible presences” that loss leaves behind. See Woolf, “A Sketch,” 80. For accounts of maternal mourning,

Notes, pp. 55–63 167

see Jane Lilienfeld, “ ‘The Deceptiveness of Beauty:’ Mother Love and Mother Hate in To the Lighthouse,” Twentieth Century Literature 23, no. 3 (1977): 345–76; and Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 79. 54. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch,” 80. 55. Woodward, “Freud and Barthes,” 96.

2


1. On the autobiographical sources Faulkner drew on in writing “Beyond,” see Thomas L. McHaney, “ ‘Beyond’ and BEYOND and beyond: Faulkner and the Threshold of Human Knowledge,” in William Faulkner’s Short Fiction, ed. Hans H. Skei (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1997), 299–305. 2. William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Erroll McDonald (New York: Vintage, 1950), 796. 3. Citations in what follows are from As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); and Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). 4. William Styron, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief,” Life 53, no. 3 (1962): 39–42, 40. 5. On the modernization of American funerary practices, see James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death: 1830–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 146–83; Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited (New York: Knopf, 1998), 14–19, 54–69; and Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–44. 6. Laderman notes that while the modernization of funerary customs had taken place by the early twentieth century in most regions of the United States, it “occurred more slowly in the South and in rural areas generally.” See Laderman, Rest, 1. 7. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., n. “grief.” 8. Derrida uses the trope of “eating well” to express the incorporative logic of conventional mourning. In a move that relates mourning dynamics to the politics of both animal rights and world hunger, Derrida argues that to eat well implies an ethical responsibility to the other, an affirmation of a value that is separate from the self. See Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well’: An Interview,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Conner, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 87–119, 107. 9. For an interesting discussion of Cash’s coffin-making as a metaphor for Faulkner’s own writing in an age of consumerism, see J. T. Matthews, “Faulkner and the Reproduction of History,” in Faulkner and History, ed. Javier Coy and Michel Gresset (Falmananica: Ediciones Universidad de sel, 1986), 63–76, 73. 10. André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner’s Novels from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 182.

168

Notes, pp. 64–5

11. Farrell, Thomas Lynch, and Laderman have defended the modernization and professionalization of the American funeral and this defense has taken a remarkably similar form: a critique of Jessica Mitford’s muckraking classic The American Way of Death. Farrell, who distinguishes his own study from Mitford’s, challenges her main premise: “Unlike Jessica Mitford’s book, which implies the centrality of the profit motive, this work emphasizes the complexity of cultural change.” See Farrell, Inventing, 213. Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director, points out that Mitford herself profited handsomely from her New York Times best-selling list book by exposing the profit-making impulse of the funeral industry; he also offers a rejoinder to Mitford’s idea of funeral pre-planning that on the one hand acknowledges, with Mitford, that “[w]hen you’ve got a dead body on your hands it’s hard to shop around” and raises, on the other, the issue of bereaved affect that her study does not address: “There’s this hopeful fantasy that by prearranging the funeral, one might be able to pre-feel the feelings, you know, get a jump on the anger and the fear and the helplessness. It’s as modern as planned parenthood, and prenuptial agreements and as useless, however tidy it may be about the finances, when it comes to the feelings involved.” See Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York: Penguin, 1997), 186. Laderman, in a less-polemic tone, suggests that “Mitford’s book exploited popular American obsessions with death, money, and scandal, and reinforced clear cultural trends in the evolution of a funeral director stereotype.” Of particular interest in this context, Laderman uncovers that funeral industry workers responded at mid-century to Mitford’s damaging portrayal of its profiteering motive by including “grief specialist” in the profession, a claim that did counter the post-World War Two silencing of grief, though it was “propounded by funeral men and women who had no training in psychology.” See Laderman, Rest, 83, 100. 12. Faulkner viewed funerary tradition, particularly the tombstone, not as a private or domestic matter but as a part of the historical record, what he called “the record of a community.” In arranging for his mother’s burial, Faulkner expressed concerns about the accurate inscription of her birth and death dates, as well as about the confusion that might arise in the omission of the “u” in earlier spellings of the family’s surname. Faulkner wrote, “If such factual information as dates etc. are to be kept secret, the tombstone is no longer a part of the record of a place or a family, but a private memento of grief, and should be kept in a private home.” See Faulkner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977), 454. On Faulkner’s wish for a simple funeral for himself, see Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1974), 1849. 13. Fredric Jameson argues that modernist art “does not consist in the reinvention of the autonomous work of art, or in the achievement of major or significant form, or any of those other things that, as we have been told, characterize those masterworks of the high modern we have been taught to consider classics.” Rather, Jameson puts forth that modernist

Notes, pp. 65–73 169

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

works display a “longing for such monadic closure,” while at same time they highlight their failure to achieve this formal unity, a failure that embeds them in the social and unleashes the capacity for critique. See Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 163. Darl’s protean self, what Calvin Bedient calls his “vacuum of identity” and Doreen Fowler his “unbounded” selfhood, emerges in response to Addie’s rejection of her second-born son, which she regards as Anse’s fault, an intrusion of paternal authority in the realm of mothering. Addie does, in fact, elicit her husband’s promise for a Jefferson burial after Darl’s birth, a kind of feminist revenge, Fowler argues, that she takes on her husband for fathering the child. See Bedient, “Pride and Nakedness in As I Lay Dying,” in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: A Critical Casebook, ed. Diana L. Cox (New York: Garland, 1985), 95–110, 101; and Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 59. In an insightful account of personification, Paul de Man addresses how assertions of eternity or immortality based on anthropomorphic tropes call attention to their own metaphoricity and produce self-conscious articulations of the inescapably temporal character of the human. See de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 262. Eric J. Sundquist articulates an analogy between the novel’s thematic content and its modernist technique, particularly its break with the realist convention of omniscient narration: “The expressions of grief that work out their own disembodiment from a lost, decomposing object by the insistent desire for analogous experience find analogy in the novel’s form, which, like the action of grief, relocates the limits and power of that object in the stories of which it is now composed.” I agree with Sundquist that Faulkner portrays “a confusion of identity” heightened by the event of Addie’s death, but my reading of ongoing mourning and the rejection of the logic of bereaved substitution challenges Sundquist’s view that the novel’s representation of grief entails “the possibility of relocating the lost integrity of one object in another as a way of expressing the maintenance of emotional connections that are threatening to disappear.” See Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 40, 39. Richard C. Moreland, “Faulkner and Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner , ed. Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17–30, 26. J. T. Matthews reads the gramophone as an emblem of a modern commodity culture to which the Bundrens fully belong. I offer as an important point, however, that Cash’s recalling of Darl at the very moment he acquires the gramophone suggests that Faulkner represents bereaved memory as a mode of resistance to the forces of commercialization. See Matthews, “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (1992): 69–94, 76.

170 Notes, pp. 74–80

19. William Faulkner, “Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950,” in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), 120. 20. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957), 93. Critics disagree about the significance of Woolf’s notion of the androgynous mind as a successful move beyond conventional designations of masculinity and femininity. For negative appraisals of Woolf’s articulation of androgyny, see Elaine Showalter, Literature of Their Own, 264–5; sympathetic studies include Carolyn Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Knopf, 1973), 118; and Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 13. 21. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition 18: 29. 22. Noel Polk, “Afterword,” Sanctuary: The Original Text, ed. Noel Polk (New York: Random House), 293–306, 302. 23. On Faulkner’s ambivalent response to the popular success of Sanctuary, see Philip Cohen, “ ‘A Cheap Idea ... Deliberately Conceived to Make Money’: The Biographical Context of William Faulkner’s Introduction to Sanctuary,” The Faulkner Journal 3, no. 2 (1988): 54–66. 24. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 84. 25. Andrew J. Wilson locates a pervasive voyeurism that characterizes upperas well as lower-class figures, but he reduces Temple Drake to the stereotype of the seductive college debutante, one who may not be “entirely pleased at the moment of her rape” but whose wish to live an “underworld” existence explains her failure to flee the scene of her violation and the Memphis whorehouse. See Wilson, “The Corruption in Looking: William Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a Detective Novel,” Mississippi Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1994): 441–60, 456. I argue, in contrast, that Faulkner’s novel characterizes Temple as a traumatized subject and attributes her inability to flee the brothel to her traumatic rape. 26. Citations from Sanctuary (New York: Vintage, 1993). 27. See Florence Dore, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68, 72. 28. Ann Cvetkovich argues for the importance of recognizing and establishing different kinds of archives for documenting traumas suffered by gays and lesbians. “In the face of institutional neglect, along with erased and invisible histories, gay and lesbian archives have been formed through grassroots efforts, just as cultural and political movements have demanded attention to other suppressed and traumatic histories, ranging from the Holocaust, to labor and civil rights activism, to slavery and genocide.” See Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 29. Barbara Izard and Clara Hieronymus suggest that Faulkner initially conceived of the text as a novel written in dramatic form and only came later, on the prompting of Ruth Ford, to regard it as a play. Izard and

Notes, pp. 80–4 171

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

Hieronymus point out as well that the text was released by Random House and later republished as a novel in the United States. See Izard and Hieronymus, Requiem for a Nun: Onstage and Off (Nashville: Aurora Publishers, 1970), 5. Polk acknowledges that Faulkner’s text “has long been considered one of the idiot siblings in the Faulkner canon.” He attributes the genesis of the disdain for Requiem for a Nun to racial tensions in the 1950s, which foreclosed the possibility of any critique of the African American character Nancy, as well as to the assumption that the idealistic Gavin Stevens embodies Faulkner’s own voice. See Polk, Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: A Critical Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), xii–xiii. For a comprehensive account of Faulkner’s development of Yoknapatawpha County and its history, see Michael Millgate, “ ‘A Cosmos of My Own’: The Evolution of Yoknapatawpha,” in Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Of Mississippi, 1980), 23–43. Richard Moreland draws on Lacan to argue that the men attempt “to escape their newly frightening marginality, to heal the scene of their social wound, to fill this newfound lack, as if with the phallic shape, sound, and systematic power of a courthouse.” See Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 203. Dominick LaCapra distinguishes between historical loss and the kind of constitutive absence he finds in the work of Judith Butler. In contrast to what he views as poststructuralism’s fetishizing of absence, he argues, “Historical loss can conceivably be avoided or, when they occur, at least in part compensated for, worked through, and even to some extent overcome.” See LaCapra, “Reflections,” 187. In a similar vein, Gillian Rose challenges Derrida’s work for promulgating “a process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own argument, were none such” and proposes, instead, a conception of completed mourning based on a return to reason. See Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11. My analysis, in contrast, rejects the clear-cut distinction between mourning and melancholia assumed by LaCapra and Rose and suggests that sustained attachments to loss make possible a progressive politics and ethics of ongoing mourning. For a reading of Nancy as a female victim of “a male desire to disempower the mother,” see Doreen Fowler, “Reading for the ‘Other Side’: Beloved and Requiem for a Nun,” in Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, ed. Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg (Jackson: Universtiy Press of Mississippi, 1997), 139–51, 142. Anne Cubilié and Carl Good, in their introductory essay to a special issue on testimony, challenge the progressivist assumptions about testifying to trauma; they focus, more specifically, on the social responses and effects

172

36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

Notes, pp. 84–8

that follow testimonial acts. See Cubilié and Good, “Introduction: The Future of Testimony,” Discourse 25, no. 1 (2004): 4–18. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11. Caruth’s claim that traumatic memories entail literal repetitions of historical events has recently come under attack, most notably by Ruth Leys. For Leys, Caruth’s theory “is designed to preserve the truth of the trauma as the failure of representation—thereby permitting it to be passed on to others who can not only imaginatively identify with it but literally share in the communion of suffering.” See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 253. Caruth’s trauma theory implies, problematically to be sure, a notion of the historical truth of a traumatic event that is unmediated by the subjective perspective of an always situated observer. In suggesting that traumatized subjects perform rather than represent trauma, a performance that has the effect of traumatizing the witness, Caruth’s theory does not distinguish between the traumatized sufferer and the witness. Leys’s critique has made us aware of the need to differentiate the two; however, her own argument for maintaining a critical distance between the subject of trauma and the witness, as well as her notion of traumatic reality, does not account for the internal and external pressures that may prevent traumatized persons from speaking about their suffering. For an excellent critique of Leys, see Murray M. Schwartz, “Locating Trauma: A Commentary of Ruth Leys’s Trauma: A Genealogy,” American Imago 59, no. 3 (2002): 367–84, 381. Noel Polk has drawn an important distinction between Stevens and the governor in relation to Temple’s confession. Stevens attempts to control Temple’s confession in order “to assure himself of his own moral character,” but the governor displays a willingness “to hear her on her own terms.” Polk highlights the governor’s sensitivity to Temple, but he overlooks the fact that the governor also schemes with Stevens to manipulate her testimony by arranging to have Gowan secretly listen in on his wife’s story. See Polk, Faulkner’s Requiem, 123, 117. Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz argues, unconvincingly in my estimation, that Temple’s self-condemnation reflects Faulkner’s own misogyny, his failure as a writer to represent positions for women apart from those narrowly defined by patriarchal culture. See Díaz-Diocaretz, “Faulkner’s Hen-House: Woman as Bounded Text,” in Faulkner and Women/Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1985, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 235–69. For a reading of Popeye that critiques the distinction between the pathological and the moral, see Sundquist, Faulkner, 49. The notion of spectral history has been central to Jean-Michel Rabaté’s study of transatlantic modernism, where he shows how the texts of Joyce, Beckett, and others are haunted by history and cannot be assimilated to the ahistoricism or pure aestheticism that some postmodern theorists have charged. See Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 1–14.

Notes, pp. 93–100

173

3 Waugh’s Nostalgia Revisited 1. I am indebted for my understanding of the relationship between physical locations and the construction of English identity to Ian Baucom’s Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 176–87. 2. The citation is taken from Waugh, “Lucy Simmonds,” Chapter 2 of the unfinished novel Work Suspended,” in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 253. 3. See Peter Kalliney, Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 65. 4. Waugh’s autobiographical writing similarly represents architectural decay as the unavoidable and even in some sense unregrettable passing of country house England. In describing the country house of his paternal aunts, he not only highlights an advanced stage of deterioration of the place; he also claims, “But none of this decay troubled me. I rather relished it.” See Waugh, A Little Learning: An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), 48. 5. Citations that follow are taken from A Handful of Dust (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962); and Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973). 6. For studies of the early twentieth-century decline of the country house tradition, see David Littlejohn, The Fate of the English Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39–56; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 299–318; and Roy Strong, Marcus Binney, and John Harris, The Destruction of the Country House: 1875–1975 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 11–14. 7. Vita Sackville-West, English Country Houses (London: Clarke & Sherwell, 1941), 7. 8. Said argues that colonial possessions abroad and imperial ideologies in Britain played an economic as well as symbolic role in “maintaining a particular style of life in England.” See Said, Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 66. 9. Waugh claims “the post-war Corbusier plague” rendered “the face of England scarred and pitted.” See Waugh, “A Call to the Orders,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 216. 10. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1928), 159. 11. On the British disdain for Gothic Revivalism, see Megan Aldrich, Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1994), 21; and John Summerson, Architecture in Britain: 1530–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 483–4. 12. Waugh’s representation of the Gothic Revival both perpetuates and departs from the views of John Ruskin, the most widely read nineteenthcentury advocate of building in the Gothic style. Ruskin advocated Gothic Revivalism, with its dependence on old-style craftsmanship and

174

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

Notes, pp. 100–16

associations with spirituality, as a means to renew a traditional notion of English identity threatened by industrialized machine-age culture. See Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 1903–12), 16: 252. For a superb reading of Ruskin’s notion of the Gothic as a nationally redemptive practice, see Baucom, Out of Place, 62–7; and Kristine Ottesen Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thought and Influence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 148–51. Waugh’s representation of Gothic Revivalism, I argue, foregrounds the extent to which this national salvation has failed to take place, in addition to calling special attention to the fact that industrial labor by the opening decades of the century had thoroughly eclipsed craftsmanship. Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death: An Examination of Californian Burial Customs,” in Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 331. George McCartney, Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), 40. Michael Gorra, The English Novel at Mid-Century: From the Leaning Tower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 18. Baucom, Out of Place, 175. Bernard Schweizer examines Waugh’s travel writings and confirms the writer’s support for British imperialism, highlighting both his proimperialist attitudes and racist remarks. See Schweizer, Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 37–60. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 166. Evelyn Waugh, Ninety-two Days: A Journey through British Guiana and Part of Brazil (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934). On the impact of World War Two on the landed gentry and the country house, see David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 637–60. Ann Douglas argues that the rise of modern culture was regarded as a weakening of society and equated, at least by advocates of tradition, with feminized and sentimental social practices, including those practices concerned with mourning. See Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 200–26. Evelyn Waugh, “Preface,” Brideshead Revisited (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 2. In British Architects and Craftsmen, Sacheverell Sitwell typifies a shift in emphasis that begins in the 1940s when describing the nation’s country houses as artistic achievements comparable to English poetry and narrative art, rather than sites of a living aristocratic culture. See Sitwell, British Architects and Craftsmen: A Survey of Taste, Design, and Style during Three Centuries, 1600 to 1830 (London: B. T. Batesford, 1948), 190. Responding to the homosexual/heterosexual debate regarding the relationship between Ryder and Sebastian, Tison Pugh argues, convincingly

Notes, pp. 116–22 175

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

in my estimation, that “romantic friendship,” which was seen through the early twentieth century “as part of a young man’s maturation,” best characterizes their bond. Over and against critics who have argued one side or the other in the debate, Pugh foregrounds the difficulty of applying modern categories of sexual identification to earlier practices: “Prior to the medicalization of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century, performing acts of same-sex sexuality did not necessarily indicate that one was a homosexual in the modern sense of a person who sees their identity as implicated by his/her non-heteronormative sex acts.” See Pugh, “Romantic Friendship, Homosexuality, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited,” English Language Notes 38, no. 1 (2001): 64–72, 66, 65. Henry Staten provides a fascinating account of the relationship between Western idealism and what he calls “mortal eros,” an emotional investment in a human other. Western idealism, he argues, both depends on and devalues mortal eros, representing it as imperfect and impermanent, a mere stepping stone to a figure of transcendence, including divine love. See Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7–11. Not all critics agree Ryder converts to Catholicism by the novel’s end. Donald Greene argues that the text offers no evidence that Ryder formally converts. See Greene, “Charles Ryder’s Conversion?,” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 22, no. 3 (Winter 1988): 5–7. More persuasive, however, is John W. Mahon, who locates Ryder’s conversion as taking place between his breakup with Julia and the time of his narration of events. See Mahon, “Charles Ryder’s Catholicism,” Evelyn Waugh Newsletter 23, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 5–7. For accounts of the diverse interests and social investments of British literature in the 1930s, see John Baxendale and Chris Pawling, Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 1–16. In his excellent historical study, Peter Mandler cites the rural conservationist movement starting in the 1930s, country house tourism and governmental support in the1950s, and the soaring market value of land and economic revival of the aristocracy beginning in the 1960s as social factors that proved to be crucial to the survival of the country house in the decades after World War Two. See Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 265–77, 388–400. Laura Coffey claims Brideshead Revisited engages Waugh’s opposition to the “museumisation of country houses,” by which she means the transformation of the country house as the center of a living tradition into a broader view of the houses themselves as national artistic treasures. See Coffey, “Evelyn Waugh’s Country House Trinity: Memory, History and Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited,” Literature and History 15, no. 1 (2006): 59–73, 63. I agree with Coffey that Waugh’s novel aligns itself with the vanishing aristocratic culture of the past to

176

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

Notes, pp. 122–30

oppose post-war social change, but I also discuss the numerous ways that Charles Ryder’s appreciation for Brideshead establishes a critical distance from its aristocratic owners and rural traditions to redefine the value of the house as an unparalleled achievement in the art of a national heritage. Sackville-West, English Country Houses, 8. Evelyn Waugh, “A Young Novelist’s Heaven,” Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 65. See Mandler, Fall, 303–4. For an engaging account of the historical origins of country house tourism, see Adrian Tinniswood, The Polite Tourist: Four Centuries of Country House Visiting (London: National Trust, 1998). On twentieth-century tourism to the stately home, see Littlejohn, Fate, 163–200. See Peter Childs, “The English Heritage Industry and Other Trends in the Novel at the Millennium,” in A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945–2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 210–24, 212. On the Heritage Industry as a nostalgic formation with socially conservative implications, see Childs, “English Heritage,” 212; Martin J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 64; Robert Hewison, Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987), 181; and Patrick Wright, On Living in the Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), 87. For challenges to the notion of heritage as “a right-wing project or strategy,” see Howard L. Malchow, “Nostalgia, ‘Heritage,’ and the London Antiques Trade,” in Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture, ed. George K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 196–216, 198. See also Raphael Samuel, Theaters of Memory, Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), 243. These critiques of the heritage industry as necessarily fueling a conservative social agenda have called attention to the multiplicity of ways that Britons of various classes and ethnic backgrounds engage the past. However, even these democratizing approaches to history, I would argue, may converge unwittingly or not with culturally regressive visions and policies.

4 The Sexual Politics of Mourning 1. For accounts of the postmodern novel’s shifting emphasis from the auto-referential and toward its social and political function, see Patricia Waugh, “Postmodern Fiction,” 75–6; and Nicholls, “Divergences,” 14–15. 2. The foundational account of the modernism/postmodernism, high/low distinction belongs, of course, to Huyssen, who sees modernism as constituted by “an anxiety of contamination by its others: an increasing

Notes, pp. 130–40

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

177

consuming and engulfing mass culture.” See Huyssen, Divide, 1. For a recent challenge to the association between modernism and literary highbrowism, see David E. Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4–5, 81–2. Citations in what follows are taken from Donoghue, Hood (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1995); and Winterson, Written on the Body (New York: Vintage, 1994). See Gorer, Death, xiii. For interesting analyses of the multiple intersections between private grief and social relations, see the essays in Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture, and the Performance of Grief, ed. Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (London: Routledge, 1999). See Butler, Psychic, 148. Michael Moon and José Esteban Muñoz also suggest that homophobia and cultural invisibility pose unique difficulties to gay male and lesbian mourners. Moon challenges notions of Freudian mourning that regard the end of the grieving process as “a return to ‘normalcy,’ ” pointing out gay men and lesbians “have been categorically excluded from ‘normalcy’ at critical junctures” in life; he advocates, instead, a gay and lesbian mourning practice that sustains sexual and erotic attachments to loss. See Moon, “Memorial Rags,” in Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 233–40, 235. Muñoz promotes a concept of “disidentification,” which he defines as “a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” and locates in mourning rituals and grief performances aimed toward affirming the persistence of same-sex love attachments. See Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Cultural Studies of the Americas Series, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11. For an excellent analysis of the commodification of lesbian identity, see Robyn Weigman, “Introduction: Mapping the Lesbian Postmodern,” in The Lesbian Postmodern, 1–24. Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 3. Wendy Brown, “Freedom’s Silences,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 313–27, 314. For an account of the “ghosting” and “recessive, indeterminate, misted over space” in which lesbians have both appeared and failed to appear in literature since the eighteenth century, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30. See Moon, “Memorial Rags,” 236. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Scribner, 1997). For a critique of the stage theory of mourning as an inadequate description of the experience of grief, see John Archer, The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (London: Routledge, 1999), 66–91.

178 Notes, pp. 142–6

14. In an otherwise perceptive reading, Antoinette Quinn interprets the novel’s description of Pen’s critical attacks on Cara’s countercultural values as advocating “lesbian integration in heterosexual familial society.” See Quinn, “New Noises from the Woodshed: The Novels of Emma Donoghue,” in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte and Michael Parker (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 145–67, 164. I argue, in contrast, that to equate Pen’s scorn for social protest with lesbian integration in mainstream society, even a society that has come to tolerate or value sexual difference, overlooks a fundamental aspect of Donoghue’s characterization: Pen resists all social practices, dominant as well as countercultural, that seek to limit the way she mourns and defines herself as a lesbian. 15. Bonnie Zimmerman addresses the difficulty of promoting plural lesbian identities and still maintaining the possibility for a collective lesbian politics. In responding to this difficulty, she argues for a model of lesbian criticism that approaches “lesbian history and literary tradition as a shifting matrix of behaviors, choices, subjectivities, textualities and selfrepresentations that is always situated in a specific historical context.” See Zimmerman, “Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties,” in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1–16, 9. For accounts of lesbian communities based on individual differences, see Marilyn Frye, “Lesbian Community: Heterodox Congregation,” in Feminism and Community, ed. Penny A. Weiss and Marilyn Friedman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 155–60; Caroline Gonda, “Lesbian Theory,” in Contemporary Feminist Theories, ed. Stevi Jackson and Jackie Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 113–30; and Trisha Franzen, “Difference and Identities: Feminism and the Albuquerque Lesbian Community,” in Rethinking the Political: Gender, Resistance, and the State, ed. Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim Arat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 61–76. 16. In “The Semiotics of Sex,” Winterson takes issue with the sexual bias that inheres in the cultural reception of art, arguing that discussions of writing by gays and lesbians typically foreground the writer’s sexuality, while evaluations of work by heterosexuals seldom raise the issue. Against what she regards as an overemphasis on the biographical at the expense of the textual, an overemphasis that tends to ghettoize lesbian fiction, Winterson describes herself as “a writer who happens to love women,” rather than “a lesbian who happens to write.” See Winterson, “The Semiotics of Sex,” in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 104. 17. Andrea L. Harris follows the lead of earlier critics when she suggests that Winterson’s “novel offers many hints that ‘it’ is in fact a she.” See Harris, Other Sexes: Rewriting Difference from Woolf to Winterson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 137. For other readings of the narrator as a woman, see Carolyn Allen, Following Djuna: Women Lovers and

Notes, pp. 147–57 179

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

the Erotics of Loss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 49; and Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, 104. For an excellent account that both recognizes the novel’s gender ambiguity and places it within the context of Monique Wittig’s erotic lesbian writing, see Christy L. Burns, “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson’s Recovery of the Postmodern Word,” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 2 (1996): 278–306, 297. Giorgio Agamben, “The Lost Object,” in Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20. See Gillian Spraggs, “Hell and the Mirror: A Reading of Desert of the Heart,” in New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 115–32, 123. In a deconstructive reading of Freud’s work on narcissism, Mikkel BorchJacobsen articulates “an ethical beyond of the subject,” which he defines as a priority granted to the other and locates in the very failure of the ego “to represent itself—and thus inevitably, to represent itself—in the specular mirror-image reflection in which it loves and desires itself.” See Borch-Jacobsen, “The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics,” in Who Comes after the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 61–78, 68. Ricciardi offers an astute analysis of the way the devaluation of mourning in the work of Lacan consorts with the commodification of postmodern culture. See Ricciardi, Ends, 39. For a recent account of the emergence of the home funeral, as well as the “greening” of contemporary funerary practices, see Mark Harris, Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial (New York: Scribner, 2007), 7–27. Jeanette Winterson: The Official Site, 2 June 2008 . Winterson, “Semiotics,” 114.


Index Abraham, Nicolas, 17, 37, 59 Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 147–8, 154 A Handful of Dust (Waugh), 19, 96–103 aesthetics of modern culture, 99, 108 colonial/imperialist attitudes, 105–7, 108 conservative social agenda, 112 critical nostalgia, 111 English country house identity, 19, 105, 107–8, 111, 112 Hetton Abbey modernized, 109, 110–11 past and present indicted, 101–4 performance of mourning, 104, 109, 110, 111, 112 ridicule of Gothic Revivalism, 99–100 threats to tradition, 98–9 Arad, Michael, “Reflecting Absence”, 10 Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, 13, 29, 30 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 17–18, 57, 58, 59–61, 63, 72 challenge to commodity culture, 67–8, 73–4 commodification of loss, 64–6 compensatory substitution, 59–64, 65–7, 71, 73–4 grief and social determinants, 65, 72–3 modernist aesthetic structure, 69–70 Auerbach, Erich, 31

Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 19–20, 96, 115–19, 123–4 aristocracy in decline, 113, 120, 124 Brideshead Castle: house as work of art, 127, 128; manifestation of the Divine, 119–20, 124; in war time, 128 country house: annihilation of tradition, 112, 121; aristocratic owners, 125–6; “English” national heritage, 121–2, 125, 128; religiously inspired architecture, 122–4; survival of, 114–15; in war time, 112–13, 128; as work of art, 114–15, 126–7 Gothic revival, 124 Hooper, middle class epitome, 20, 113, 120, 121, 128 human and divine love, 118–19 logic of bereaved substitution, 115–18 middle-class ascendency, 20, 113, 120, 124, 128 “Preface” to revised edition (1959), 114, 121 religion as consolation, 7, 19–20, 112, 113, 119, 120–1, 127 socially conservative vision, 113, 115, 127 Brooke, Rupert, 32 Broumas, Olga, 144 Brown, Wendy, 20, 136–7, 143 Butler, Judith, 13, 20, 132–3, 135 Cannadine, David, 29 Caruth, Cathy, 18, 84 Caughie, Pamela, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism, 50–1 Childs, Peter, 127

Baucom, Ian, Out of Place, 19, 105 Bazin, Nancy Topping, 48 Bersani, Leo, 2, 4 Bleikasten, André, 63 181

182

Index

Conrad, Joseph, 106 consolation and closure rejected, 2, 3, 5–6, 9, 10–11, 26–7, 49–55, 130, 146 Derrida, Jacques, 14–15, 17, 88 “By Force of Mourning”, 36–7 Spectres of Marx, 1, 14 Donoghue, Emma, Passions between Women, 134 postmodern mourning, 2, 3, 8, 15, 20, 145 see also Hood Duckworth, Stella, 41–2 Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 10 Eng, David, 3, 7 Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom!, 75 “Beyond”, 56–7 conception of historical trauma, 82–3 grief and social determinants, 57, 65, 72–3 loss and commodity culture, 58, 64–5 modernist writing, 74–5, 82, 95–6, 130 mourning, 1–2, 7, 13–14, 82–3, 84, 88: as ongoing convalescence, 18–19, 82–3, 84, 88 Nobel Prize speech, 74 temporality of trauma, 81 The Sound and the Fury, 58 unresolved grief, 56–8 see also As I Lay Dying; Requiem for a Nun; Sanctuary Felman, Shoshana, 76 Felski, Rita, 11 Foucault, Michel, 11 Freud, Sigmund, on loss, 21, 152–3 “Mourning and Melancholia”, 1–12

mourning theory, 1, 11–13, 59 The Ego and the Id, 12 Trauerarbeit, 155 on trauma, 75–6 Fukuyama, Francis, 14 Fussell, Paul, 35 “gay melancholia”, 20, 132 Gikandi, Simon, 19, 106 Gorer, Geoffrey, 131–3 Gorra, Michael, 104 Graves, Robert, “Recalling War”, 47 “When I’m Killed”, 52 the Great War (1914–18), 26, 31, 121 postwar mourning practices, 35–7 Greene, Graham, 106 grief, 56, 57, 58–9 privatization of, 132 Handley, William, 38 Hassan, Ibhab, 3 Haule, James, 48 Holtby, Winifred, 25 homosexuality and narcissism, 149–50 homosexual loss and mourning, 132–3, 140–1 Hood (Donoghue), 20, 130–1, 133, 134–5, 138–43 anger and hostility, 141 Catholic Church, 137–8 closet privacy of grieving, 135–6, 137–9, 141, 145 counter-cultural practices, 143–4 eroticization of homosexual grief, 139–40 “Five Stages of Grief”, 20, 140–1 “hood”, meanings of, 144 lesbian identity and mourning, 15, 137, 138–9, 142–4, 145 mourning, new communal politics of, 20, 145

Index

Hood (Donoghue)—Continued post-modernist self-reflexivity, 144 socially enforced silence, 136–7, 138–9, 144, 145 Huyssen, Andreas, 3 Jacob’s Room (Woolf), 16–17 consolation refused, 26, 27 consolatory mourning rituals, 28–31, 51 death and mourning, 29–30 ethics of mourning, 36–7 female grief and feminist grievance, 17, 27–39 the Great War, 16, 31–3 inheritance and cultural traditions, 34–5 lost other/unknown quantity, 37–9 postwar gender reform, 31–5 Jay, Martin, 12 Kalliney, Peter, 94 Kazanjian, David, 3, 7 Kent, Susan Kingsley, 36 Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 140 Lacan, Jacques, on loss and mourning, 21, 152–3 LaCapra, Dominic, 9, 18, 82 late modernist writing, 2, 7–8, 19, 106, 130 see also Waugh, Evelyn Laub, Dori, 76 Lauter, Jane Hamovit, 48 lesbian, identity, 8, 131, 134 loss, 132–3 see also Hood Lin, Maya, Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, 10 Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition, 4–5, 14, 129–30, 131

183

McCartney, George, 104 McCrae, John, “In Flanders Fields”, 28 Maitland, F. W., 44 Mandler, Peter, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, 121, 125–6 Marsh, Edward, The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: with a Memoir, 32 Matthews, J. T., 67 modernist aesthetics, 2–3, 4, 5 modernist writing, 11, 109, 129 on mourning and loss, 2, 6–7, 9–10, 130 Moglan, Seth, 9 Moon, Michael, 20, 139 Moreland, Richard, 72, 81 mourning devaluation of, 154–5 in modernism, 2, 3, 10, 128–30 politically and ethically progressive, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 157 public rituals, 131–2 Naremore, James, 54 Olsen, Tillie, 53 Polk, Noel, 76 postmodern writing on mourning, 10, 20, 129, 130, 157: consolation rejected, 3, 4, 7, 10, 157; identity and social change, 2, 4; “on–going mourning”, 3, 10; politics and ethics of mourning, 3, 157 see also Hood; Written on the Body Rae, Patricia, 9 Ramazani, Jahan, 9 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 18–19, 57, 58, 75–6, 78–80, 84–7 abjection of women and blacks, 83, 85–6, 88, 89 bearing witness to trauma, 84–5, 89

184

Index

Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner)—Continued Chickasaw and slave losses, 81 Jefferson town, 80–2 Mohataha, 81, 82 present and past, 79, 80, 85, 88 private and public memory, 83 study of trauma, 80 traumatic repetition, 18, 79, 80–2, 86, 87–9 Ricciardi, Alessia, 9, 153 Rose, Gillian, 18, 82 Rosenberg, Isaac, “Dead Man’s Dump”, 45 Sackville-West, Vita, 122 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 58, 75–8, 85–7 Schiesari, Juliana, 43 Showalter, Elaine, 25–6 Spearing, E. M., From Cambridge to Camiers under the Red Cross, 32 Spilka, Mark, 25 Spraggs, Gillian, 149 Staten, Henry, 119 Stephen, Julia, 39–44 Stephen, Leslie, The Mausoleum Book, 17, 39–44 Styron, William, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief”, 56, 57 Sundquist, Eric, 70 Tennyson, Alfred, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, 52 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 17, 46–7 art as consolation, 51–5 consolation refused, 17, 25, 26, 27, 49–50, 51–5 legacy of war, 26, 48–9 mourning art, 39–55 past and present, 54 pathetic fallacy, 44–7, 48–9 women’s art, 53 Torok, Maria, 17, 37, 59

trauma, study of, 18, 75–6, 80 Waugh, Evelyn classic architecture, 123–4 conservative social agenda, 7–8, 16, 96, 112 conversion to Catholicism, 123–4 country house tradition, 93–6 “critical” nostalgia, 8, 19, 94, 96, 109, 111, 130 Decline and Fall, 98 on mourning and loss, 2, 7–8, 19, 95–6 Ninety-two Days, 108 Work Suspended, 94 see also A Handful of Dust; Brideshead Revisited Waugh, Patricia, 3 Winter, Jay, 35–6 Winterson, Jeanette art as creation, not consolation, 157 “ghettoization” of lesbian fiction, 145–6 ongoing mourning of loss, 3, 20–1 practice of postmodern fiction, 2, 8, 15, 157 see also Written on the Body Woodward, Kathleen, 55 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, 53 art as consolation, 51–5 “A Sketch of the Past”, 25, 33 consolation resisted, 7, 55 critical account of Great War, 16, 31–3, 47–8 elegiac dimension, 13, 25–7 failed artists, 50–1 gender and feminist aims, 55 loss of her mother, 44 modernist writing, 51, 74–5, 95–6 on mourning, 1–2, 13, 28–31, 36, 37, 95, 130

Index

Woolf, Virginia —Continued “Reminiscences”, 44 Three Guineas, 32, 48 women’s writing, 74–5 see also Jacob’s Room; To the Lighthouse World War Two, 121 Written on the Body (Winterson), 20–1, 130–1, 145 closure rejected, 146 desire and postmodern consumer culture, 146, 153 devaluation of mourning, 21, 154–5 elegy and the language of sexual activity, 148–9 erotic intimacy, 154, 156 Freudian loss to Lacanian lack, 21, 152–3 gender ambiguity, 20–1, 146

185

loss: as measure of love, 151–2; reinvestment in the social, 4, 21, 155, 156, 157 melancholic incorporation of lost object, 146, 147–8, 149–50, 154, 156 narcissism, 149–50 ongoing mourning, 151 postmodern reflexive elegy, 152 professionalization of death, 154–5 sexual orientation of love, 15, 155, 156, 157 unobtainable object of desire, 21, 152, 153–4, 157 Young, James E., 10 Zwerdling, Alex, 38

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