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8 Signature, Inheritance, Inquiry: Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches
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8 Signature, Inheritance, Inquiry Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Cartouches Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx a frog teeming with recollection sang: “I am the daughter, I am the resurrection.” — Lola Lemire Tostevin, Cartouches In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks cautions that an elegist must engage in “frequently combative struggles for inheritance,” including the possibility that he may need to “wrest his inheritance from the dead” (37). When Jacques Derrida asserts in Specters of Marx that inheritance is a task, he stresses the performativity of inheritance: that work underwrites mourning . Derrida’s reminder that inheritance is work that must be performed rather than an automatic privilege to be assumed is welcome to the task of reading daughteronomy and defiance in Canadian women’s paternal elegies. As creative work that is undertaken on behalf of one person by another, elegies are conscious and deliberate undertakings that function to preserve memory (much the way other forms of inheritance preserve possessions or attributes), but at the same time, elegies as forms of inheritance do other important work in confirming the relationship between 1 8 7 1 8 8 F u r i e s a n d F i l l e s d e l a Sa g e s s e the granter and the inheritor. They preserve their cultural rectitude by balancing degrees of likeness against degrees of difference. Any prospective inheritor must prove him- or herself to be worthy of inheritance by demonstrating a dependence on the granter as a parental or mentor figure, yet also show an independence from the granter in terms of the inheritor’s competence in the world, thus proving the inheritor’s ability to use the inheritance in an appropriate manner. In other words, the inheritor must be enough like the granter to be named as inheritor, and enough unlike the granter to receive the inheritance in the proper cultural and social spirit. Such derivations of dependence and independence are all very well in traditional father–son filiation, but how do such dynamics work across gender lines when the daughter is the inheritor-elegist? As Lynda E. Boose suggests, because a daughter is “set apart from the other members as the only one who does not participate in extending [the family’s] integrity into history,” she remains an “alien” in the filial system until such time that she can “change her sign” by giving birth to a son (22). However, the possibilities for a daughter’s legacy to emerge outside of the bounds of patronymic inheritance are mediated by Derrida’s assertion that inheritance involves labour and performance. The work represented by the elegy as an artifact of mourning offers hope for the reconfiguration of the daughter’s ability to inherit from her father, if inheritance can be construed, as Derrida seems to suggest, as task-oriented work rather than a cultural given. This language of attentive labour suggests strongly that the work of mourning and the task of inheritance are contiguous, if not mutually inclusive. In Lola Lemire Tostevin’s 1995 book-length elegy, Cartouches, the daughter-elegist labours to inherit a transfiguring alterity, and, in doing so, she does not so much wrest inheritance from the father as forge subjectivity from the process of mourning him. Inheritance does a double duty in this text; the daughter transforms in order to inherit and she inherits in order to transform. Tostevin fashions the narrating daughter as the father’s other and creates a poetic alter ego that is determinedly “other” to the narrating daughter herself. The mourning daughter of Cartouches locates the power of alterity in the multiple figures of the wise daughters of Egyption mythology, and reconfigures the act of naming as female transfiguration rather than reiteration of patronymic inheritance. In addition, a frog sings of daughterly resurrective power and so leads the mourning daughter away from grief and towards transfiguration. With such guides, Tostevin explores paternal elegies that not only enact the cultural imperative of a daughter’s paternal mourning, but also consider the power of a daughter’s alterity in the paternal elegy. [3.231.3.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:10 GMT) S i g n a t u r e , I n h e r i t a n c e , I n q u i r y 1 8 9 The alterity that Tostevin explores in Cartouches is a result of abjection; however, the daughter is not estranged...