Writing Grief: Margaret Laurence and the Work of Mourning (review)

In his study of the Manawaka cycle, Christian Riegel argues that for all of the Canadian characteristics of Laurence's fiction, 'it can also be placed within the larger tradition of writing that explores and figures death and mourning.' He continues, 'In focussing specifically on the significance of the emotional responses to death and serious loss, generally termed mourning, I theorize the psychic responses to death as "work," and I do so in two central ways: work that needs doing, as in the psychological, social, and cultural processes of mourning themselves; and work that results from mourning, as in the creatively articulated texts that result from grief.' He adds, 'For Laurence's protagonists, the struggle is to address the loss and thus attempt redress, and to actively and forcefully engage the depths of grief in the work, the labour of mourning.'

Riegel deals briefly with the psychological context of mourning and works from Freud and from the German term for mourning - Trauerarbeit - to the recasting of this concept by the theorist Jacques Derrida, the psychologist John Bowlby, and the literary critic Neal Tolchin. From the last two, Riegel draws the concept of 'liminality' which is '"the condition of being betwixt and between" periods of a life.' His thesis, broadly put, is that Laurence's protagonists all cope with an immense sense of loss during a critically transitional period. The events of their lives reach a crisis point that becomes a crucible of change that allows them actively (the Arbeit) to confront their grief and work their way towards hope. The first three Manawaka works - The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, and The Fire-Dwellers - all involve the protagonist's psychological and emotional energy, which is one aspect of the work invoked by Riegel's title. The last two - Bird in the House and The Diviners - trace the same trajectory, but are distinguished by the second aspect of Riegel's definition. This is the creative work of the protagonist, who, as writer, fashions out of her grief the literary artefact that is the story she is telling. While we infer a measure of hope from the action and reflection of first three novels, the protagonist as writer emerges in A Bird in the House. The truly self-conscious making of narrative is the culmination of hope and the ultimate expression of affirmation in The Diviners, and combines loss and creativity. As the summa of the Manawaka cycle, the last novel is called by Riegel a thanatosroman.

Writing Grief is clearly and systematically structured. It begins with a general introduction, one chapter devoted to each of the Manawaka works, and a conclusion that invokes the elegiac tradition. Each chapter addresses issues of novelistic structure and examines how the protagonist moves through an estranging or estranged state to some kind of acceptance of loss and consequent affirmation of self. It may end at the moment of death as with Hagar or at the moment of self-completing possibility as with Morag. The common trajectory, however, is consistent in all Laurence's works.

The risk of a single-minded thesis like Riegel's is that the work is reduced to an idea, and there is a certain amount of that propensity in Writing Grief. There is also a solemnity and even stolidity in the sheer number of times that the term 'mourning' or 'work of mourning' is repeated in the text. Such an approach elides much of the humour and wry wit of the writing - two elements that are key in allowing us to encounter characters whose sense of irony is at least indicative of a detachment that can make change possible. It is important to remember, and I expect that Christian Riegel has taken this as a given, that the large and important themes and patterns which he underscores in the fiction cannot have an impact without the details of technique that anchor the fiction in a particular idiom, attitude, and time.

Riegel's accomplishment in his...