The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (review)

For readers unfamiliar with elegiac concepts and figures, R. Clifton Spargo's The Ethics of Mourning provides a fascinating introduction to rhetorical and literary aspects of this tradition. Spargo's book on the phenomenon and expression of inconsolable grief joins a growing collection of texts, including Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead (2003) and Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory (2002), that explore the meaning and consequences of missed, delayed, or unfinished mourning within social norms bent on ending mourning. For those readers not versed in the language and trajectories of post-psychoanalytical and deconstructive paradigms or concepts, Spargo's book may be a challenge. Spargo explores the multiple forms that mourning takes in elegiac works and instills even the most complex rhetorical devices with the urgency of historical reference. He suggests that the acknowledgment of our own implication in the production and extension of mourning the dead may provide us with the intuition to read (and act) ethically in respect to the Other. Anti-elegiac poetry, for example, does not simply mimic, but rather embodies an ethics of mourning that refuses to provide redemption or comfort. Instead, the acknowledgement of our own implication in the production and extension of the pain of others may provide us with the intuition to read (and act) ethically in respect to the Other.

Spargo questions the common expectation of elegy to bring mourning to a close, suggesting that unfinished bereavement acknowledges "the radical alterity of the Other whom one mourns" (p. 13). Spargo reconsiders the ethical significance of inconsolable mourning by literary figures such as Niobe, Antigone, and Hamlet; in elegies by Milton, Shelley, Emily Dickinson and others; and, last, through a reconfiguring of elegiac address, blame, reciprocity, and pathetic fallacy in poetry by Thomas Hardy, Randall Jarrell, and Sylvia Plath. Spargo draws from the philosophical insights of Bernard Williams, Paul Ricoeur, and, most prominently, Emmanuel Levinas. Spargo reviews trans-historical and trans-cultural notions of grief and their meaning in Peter Sacks's and Jahan Ramazani's seminal works on elegy, and explores the rhetorical patterns of ethics. In defining a particular approach to ethics as action, Spargo draws heavily from Levinas's definition of ethics as a responsibility to the Other that emerges before rational thought.

Consequently, Spargo expands romanticized notions of elegy into a fluid form wavering between the seeking of solace and the repetitive despairing over the loss of a loved one. His book explores how elegy, by refusing to let the lost Other become memorialized and thus take on social meaning, becomes a possibility for a renewed responsibility toward the Other even before the mourner's own interests. This is the crux of an ethics that allows for a "non-coincidence that always characterizes responsibility [and] a refusal of the Other to enter into the time and history of the self's intention, [an] ethics [that] always signifies prior to the cultural definitions of morality and what is pragmatically conceived as possible"(p. 274).

The allure of Spargo's writing lies in its elegiac tone and simultaneous refusal to succumb to the closure that elegy usually produces. He is cautious about conflating literary tropes with actual political economies of justice. Instead, he reminds us that reading literature, especially poetry, guides us to recognize the limits of representations in light of the ethics of an inconsolable grief. Such mourning, as long as it takes place and does not incorporate the dead, as Freudian models suggest, may be at the core of an ethics that demands attention to the injustices that cause death in the first place. Spargo suggests that texts ranging from Greek mythology to Renaissance and Modernist poetry, and, finally, to controversial representations of the Holocaust's afterimage, share an ethics of mourning.

In Chapter One, "Toward an Ethics of Mourning," Spargo traces the development of an ethics of mourning in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Levinas, and Williams, among...