Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust by Jennifer Rushworth (review)

Poetry, it may be safe to say, begins in mourning. Loss and absence, exile and emigration, growing up and growing apart—all generate the need to speak about what has once been and what is gone. This sense of searching for a voice to fill a void fills literary texts of all times, from Homer's paeans to the heroic dead through Virgil's Aeneadic underworld to the range of sonnets, odes, and elegies that makeup volumes from Shakespeare to Berryman. Petrarch claimed to keep at it in the face of fracture: Scripsi multa et scribo, "I have written much and am still writing." His line stands as the epigraph to Jennifer Rushworth's Epilogue, and her brief, thought-provoking study asks us how the commitment to keep writing in the face of loss and melancholy shapes much of the Western lyric, epic, and novelistic self.

Rushworth brings Dante, Petrarch, and Proust together in an argument that is both archetypal and archaeological. On the one hand, she illustrates, generally, how mourning moves from an emotion to a discourse. Freud, Barthes, and Derrida are Rushworth's Virgils on this pilgrimage through theory, and one of the implications of her book is that mourning and melancholia constitute the axes for any emergent writer. On the other hand, she claims, specifically, that Proust can be reread through his own medievalist attentions, and that Dante and Petrarch can stand in a dialogue with each other and with Proust to help us understand how modernism has its legs in the medieval. Her book, therefore, sets out to make a case for theory as a whole and for the place of medieval writing in the critical (as well as creative) discourses of memory and the imagination.

There are many moments of local excitement here. At its best, the book exposes how Proust clearly read and understood medieval writers such as Dante. It understands both authors as journey-men (in the physical and the figurative sense). It offers an original interpretation of the myth of Orpheus in both medieval and modern tales of mourning and artistic creation. I was struck, in particular, at the brilliant moment in Proust's Guermantes' Way when the young boy, on the telephone, calls out for his Grandmother "like the abandoned Orpheus repeating the name of his dead wife" (109). Just placing this scene in the context of medieval and postmodern mythography is, itself, an act of critical imagination, and Rushworth's reading of the passage goes a long way to inviting readers to go back and reconceive of Proust's work in this powerfully mythic sense.

I was also fascinated by Rushworth's excavation of Roland Barthes' unfinished work, his own Vita Nova. She explains this strange text as "a promise of writing and as a desire to write," a text not simply incomplete but, perhaps, incompletable. Like Proust, Barthes engages with memories of maternal loss; like Dante, he sets out to emerge from sorrow to "choose … my new life." "This unwritten work," Rushworth suggests, "grants Barthes's corpus—and his memories of his mother—an ideal openness and unpredictability" (145).

These are, at least for me, the new things in the book. But for any American academic of the second decade of the twenty-first century, much of its theoretical review will seem familiar. There is a full, dutiful conspectus of the place of mourning in Freudian psychoanalysis, of the notion of melancholy and loss in Derrida, and of the death of the author in Barthes. The book remains embedded in the matrix of its dissertation most apparently in these sections, and any graduate student from Baltimore to Santa Cruz will find himself or herself on familiar territory. The work on Dante and Petrarch—close, careful, and deeply attentive to the most recent of criticism—nonetheless feels like a follow-up to the groundbreaking studies of Freccero, Mazzotta, and Harrison a generation or two ago. Bows to "mimetic mourning...