The Poetics and Politics of Narrative Mourning

The publication of Nouri Gana’s Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning brings to fruition the ensemble of Gana’s decade-long reflections on literature and modern theories of mourning. While animated by a powerful impetus toward psychoanalytic (Freudian) and deconstructive (Derridean) analyses, Signifying Loss registers a noteworthy intervention in the intersecting fields of literary criticism and mourning studies by offering a close examination of the tropological configurations of “the work of mourning” (Trauerarbeit or travail du deuil) within a diverse body of modernist and postcolonial narratives ranging from James Joyce’s Dubliners and Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother to Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend and Elias Khoury’s City Gates. By choosing to focus on prose fiction instead of poetry, Gana goes against the critical grain and challenges the predominant assumption in mourning theory that poetic language (especially insofar as elegy is concerned) lends itself more readily to approximating the paradoxical and intricate demands of signifying loss. Moreover, Gana’s analysis of these texts is original in that it focuses less on themes per se than on tropes as entry points into discussions of literary and affective politics. Modalities of mourning in these works are shown to operate in terms of three major narrative tropes, with each relating to a particular affective response to the experience of loss: prosopopoeia is accordingly the figure of mourning, catachresis the figure of melancholia, and chiasmus the figure of trauma. It is to such “poetics of narrative mourning” that Gana devotes the six chapters of Signifying Loss after a short but incisive preface on the stakes involved in the poetics of narrative mourning he elaborates throughout the book.

In the introductory chapter (“Thresholds of Mourning: Freud and After”), Gana begins by acknowledging both his indebtedness to and departure from “the early Freudian model of therapeutic mourning” (9), particularly as propounded in Freud’s famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which melancholia is defined primarily as a pathological deviation from normal mourning. If Freud maintains that the restorative work of mourning requires the gradual withdrawal of the libido from the lost object of love, Gana suggests, following much recent work in mourning theory, that such withdrawal is not always possible, since “the locus of the lost object of love is not always external but becomes exceedingly internal to the structure of the ego” (31). Gana’s reading of Freud seeks to foreground the idea of narcissistic desire as the quintessential psycho-affective “motor force” of the work of mourning. The ultimate goal here is to place mourning and melancholia along an affective continuum rather than in a binary opposition in which mourning is associated with cure and melancholia with pathology.

This line of thought is elaborated in more detail in the second chapter (“Horizons of Desire, Horizons of Mourning: Joyce’s Dubliners”), which is devoted to a reading of Joyce’s “The Dead,” in particular. Gana insists that affective closure by way of cathectic withdrawal from the lost object and cathectic reinvestment in an alternative love object does not really mark the end of mourning but rather the onset of a new cycle of desire that will eventually result in “another outbreak of mourning” (26). Focusing on prosopopoeia as “the master trope of narrative mourning” in Joyce’s Dubliners, Gana deftly illustrates the ways in which eros and mourning frequently unfold within the psycho-affective horizons of each other. What this means is that the trope of prosopopoeia, while it may be said to set in motion the work of mourning, does not always guarantee its successful accomplishment, and this is precisely because of the immediate resurgence of desire at the very moment when mourning is required. Ultimately, the prosopopoeic configurations of mourning in Joyce’s work come to signify the ways in which the modernist subject is not so much one who refuses to mourn as one for whom the experience of mourning itself remains...