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  • On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature
  • Patricia Rae
On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature. William Watkin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp. 245. $99.00 (cloth).

William Watkin's On Mourning is the latest in a series of studies of mourning in modern literature that began with Jahan Ramazani's Poetry of Mourning (1994). Fine recent studies include books by R. Clifton Spargo and Alessia Ricciardi and a brilliant essay collection edited by David Eng and David Kazanjian, and essays from Sandra Gilbert, Michael Moon, Tammy Clewell, Tanya Dalziell, and Nouri Gana, among others. Like these critics, Watkin recognizes the ethical responsibility attending the project of assessing the literature of mourning. His guiding lights in this effort are a number of "post-humanist" philosophers (specifically, Blanchot, Lacou-Labarthe, Lacan, Levinas, Lyotard, Kristeva, Nancy, Badiou, Klein, Bowlby, and Derrida) who have committed time to answering the question "How to Lose Responsibly" (3). The perspectives these theorists offer on subjectivity, melancholia, and language, he says, enable us to penetrate the central paradox of mourning, or the "consolation conundrum" (71): the fact that reconciling ourselves to the loss of loved ones means denying their "singularity," effectively "losing" them for a second time.

Interpreters of the literature of mourning invariably bring to the task their own ethics of loss. Until Ramazani, most critics shared the basic expectations set out by Freud in his famous 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia." They expected elegy, that is, to "cure" the mourner of the "pathology" of melancholia produced by grief. Recently it has become commonplace to contest Freud, andWatkin is no exception, making the now familiar argument that Freud's notion of "success" in mourning, which requires the severing and transference of the libidinal ties binding the mourner to the lost beloved, amounts to a betrayal. The key thing that needs to change, Watkin contends, is that the mourner begin to "take full responsibility for the other person before [he] considers them in relation to [him]self" (19). From a critical perspective, this means abandoning the position that the goal of the literature of mourning is a cure.

Watkin's "post-elegy theory of literature" (143) is especially indebted to two different branches of post-humanist theory. The first is the work of Julia Kristeva, which describes both the ineffability of melancholic depression and some of its linguistic manifestations: stuttering rhythms, broken logical sequences, parataxis and hypotaxis. The other is the "object-relations theory" of Melanie Klein and her successor John Bowlby. This theory asks us to imagine loss, not just as a "dialectic scene between subject and object" (177), as Freud does, but as a change in an entire environment: it is something that "happens dynamically between subjects, other subjects, lost object and present objects in a living, metonynmic environment of proximity and distance" (177). Re-conceiving loss thus enables us, says Watkin, to re-conceive the mourner as someone with [End Page 405] the potential to understand himself as a thing among things; the ideal writer, in turn, charts the effects of loss not just on the mourner but on his whole environment.

Watkin's greatest contribution is in foregrounding the work of contemporary writers that realizes his vision of "ethical" mourning. The poems of Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Ashbery, Alan Ginsberg, and Rachel Blau duPlessis receive significant attention, as do the novels of Ian McEwan, Douglas Coupland, and Dave Eggers. In charting these writers' Kristevan language, Watkin notes, quite rightly, that it is "both shocking and intriguing" to find the "origins of the avant-garde" in a "dead speech" that fails in any way to "connect with the subject's actual feelings" (134), but insists that these writings can be newly appreciated as ethical responses to loss. He also has high praise for McEwan's parables of mourning, which work out their characters' fates according to a Kleinian "amorality of spacing" (181). Watkin's readings of contemporary writers may well inspire scholars to apply the lessons of Kristeva and Klein to modernist poetry and fiction. The poems of Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot, for example, would seem to be replete with Kristevan "dead speech," while the...

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