Authors: Lynne Segal
Barthes had not, he would claim, introjected his mother, not secretly become her; indeed he kept stressing the contrasts between them, suggesting that since her death he had become
less
like her. He knew that the one true object of his love, the one he would always idealize, could not be brought back to life, but he could, and would, continue to pay homage to her, to her ‘nobility’, ‘sweetness’ and ‘goodness’, in his writing. Her virtues are there in the words in his diary, and more publicly elsewhere, in the work he put into his book on photography,
Camera Lucida
, the whole second half of which he spent eulogizing his mother when discussing the impact of finding a photograph of her as a five-year-old child.
58
It was only with her in mind, he said in
Mourning Diary
, that he was able to ‘integrate my suffering with my writing’ (105), knowing his mother ‘is present in everything I have written: in that there is everywhere a notion of the Sovereign Good’ (131, 105).
Interestingly, Barthes believed that his mother’s death was the one thing in his life that he had not responded to neurotically, since his grief had ‘not been hysterical, scarcely visible to others’ (128). While he used to live neurotically in fear of losing his mother, now, he said, echoing Winnicott, he suffered
‘from the fear of what has happened’
; but despite and because of
his constant awareness of his sorrow, he was no longer neurotic: ‘I live in my suffering and that makes me happy’ (173). He did not want to suppress his mourning, but ‘to change it, transform it, to shift it from a static stage … to a fluid state’ (142). There is no evidence that Barthes expected these notes to be published, but near the opening of his diary he wrote: ‘Who knows? Maybe something valuable in these notes?’ (7). Barthes survived his mother’s death by only two and a half years, yet as he probably hoped, his work of mourning may help others not just to find words for the barely effable, but perhaps even to find ways of tolerating the intolerable.
Something seemingly valuable in producing, or taking in, this expanding language of loss and mourning is much in evidence in the huge popularity of other creative works nowadays. This includes the memoir and subsequent stage production of
The Year of Magical Thinking
, by the eminent American literary journalist and novelist, Joan Didion, which she began nine months after the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, at seventy-one. He died of a heart attack, in mid-sentence, as she was preparing his dinner. The ‘magical thinking’ Didion relates was a persistent form of wishful thinking or cognitive denial in that first year of bereavement. Yes, she knew that this man, with whom her life had been intertwined for almost every hour of almost every day for over forty years, was dead. Yet she acted in ways that she herself soon recognized indicated that she thought that somehow his death might be reversible.
‘I needed to be alone so that he could come back’, she said of the first night she spent without him: ‘This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.’
59
She also needed to keep his clothes and shoes, and not to allow his organs to be donated, in
case he returned. Nor did she read his obituaries. Always the pellucid, rational, concise observer, even as she calmly describes the ‘madness of grief’, Didion details the sense of fragility and instability she feels, alongside the many tricks she uses in refusing to accept the permanence of loss: ‘I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back’, she writes, also knowingly referencing Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (150). The fragility she feels connects with her new sense of being old, recognizing that as she mourns her husband, she is also mourning herself. She now reflects that her marriage had enabled the denial of time: ‘For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age’ (197). Throughout this time her only child, Quintana, was dangerously ill and, despite several apparent recoveries, would soon die (which Didion’s readers know starting the book, but she did not until after the memoir was completed, her daughter’s death occuring shortly before its publication). As the book closes, a year later, Didion still has trouble seeing herself as a widow, though she feels ‘The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place’ (225). No clarity, except in the writing itself: ‘Is it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?’ (162).
Didion also comments on the paucity of grief literature and the cultural rejection of public mourning, although this book, like others similarly acclaimed over the last two decades, suggests one form of public mourning. The writing, reading and sometimes performing of these texts have become new guides to survival, a way of commemorating the dead and, except in the case of Barthes, of beginning to move on. Two more mourning memoirs have recently appeared from Didion’s literary compatriots. More dramatically than any I have mentioned so
far, in
A Widow’s Story
the prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates uses her diary jottings as a stream of consciousness to evoke the hysteria, chaos and pain of her grieving for the husband she had lived with for forty-seven years, at times picturing herself as a wounded animal, a dead creature, at others fearing that she is going out of her mind: ‘The widow’s terror is that, her mind being broken, as her spine is broken, she will break down utterly. She will be carried off by wild careening banshee thoughts like these.’
60
However, after her year of desolate suffering, often experienced as utter madness, wondering if she should pay someone simply to come and be with her, Oates’ memoir closes with a determined upbeat message about the ability to survive grief, however devastating: ‘Of the widow’s countless death duties there is really only one that matters: on the first anniversary of the husband’s death, the widow should think
I kept myself alive
.’
61
Similarly, in
The Long Goodbye
, the far younger Meghan O’Rourke describes her erratic, intense grieving following her mother’s death from cancer at only fifty-five: ‘I was not prepared for how hard I would find it to reenter the slipstream of contemporary life … a world ill-suited to reflection and daydreaming.’
62
O’Rourke describes how in her grief nothing seemed important anymore: ‘Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam … I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday’ (11). Over six months later she still wakes up ‘exhausted’ and ‘leaden’, reflecting ‘I am ashamed of my pain; it seemed abnormal’ (195). However, she is now beginning to realize that she is also attached to her grief, rejecting the consoling advice from friends that it was time to let go of sorrow and move on: ‘But I didn’t want to let
go.’ She cites cases from China where the living continue to talk to the dead, commenting that ‘in fact studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects’ (154). (She does not, however, spell out the cultural context, myths and religious beliefs that would of course bear upon the social acceptance of such practices of grieving in China.)
By now it is becoming clear that such books are written and widely read not just as survival manuals, but also to convey a certain allure attaching to the fearsome landscape of grief, with all its vividness and intensity compared to normal life. As Adam Phillips noted a decade ago in an essay entitled ‘Coming to Grief’: ‘One of the ironies of the so-called mourning process is that it tends to make people even more absorbed than they usually are; in need of accomplices, but baffled by what they want from them’, which is why others want the mourning process to come to a reasonably swift end.
63
In the face of bland incitements to happiness today, however, these memoirs point to a contrasting cultural interest in loss and grieving, with greater acknowledgment of the inevitability of life’s tragic contours, at least in certain literary circles. Although, in a shallower vein, what we seem to see in the spectacles of public grief after the death of celebrities, most extravagantly in the case of Princess Diana, is surely people’s desire to seize the affect, the opportunity to express feelings, without really having to embrace any personal loss.
Pondering the current appeal of grief memoirs thus returns me to Feinstein’s comment that it is easy to love the dead, compared to the challenges of loving the living. This is also noted by Adam Phillips in a subsequent essay, ‘Time Pieces’, where he points out that grief is full of surprises, even at its
most desolate. Phillips, like Frosh, suggests that what we most want is the ability to feel and to express desire, and what we are most threatened by is the absence of any form of love or desire. Ironically, death can help us to express longing, and to communicate more smoothly with those we have lost, those whom we are now freer to idealize in ways formerly denied us: ‘When people are alive … they can be a barrier to what we feel about them.’ Death can sometimes help us jump those hurdles that kept us apart from those who mattered to us: ‘It is easy not to notice people when we are in their presence, and far more difficult to hide from them when they are no longer there … And in this sense, the dead leave us stranded with our potential as it once was, intact.’
64
Also following in the footsteps of Freud, Frosh similarly suggests that it is better to feel sorrow than to feel nothing at all, which perhaps explains why sorrow may be in some sense experienced as ‘pleasurable’, even sought after. Moreover, he adds, here in line with Barthes’ thoughts expressed in
Mourning Diary
: ‘The capacity to feel sad, to embrace sorrow and then to articulate it so that something new is made of it, is a fundamental sign of mental health, supplying the basis of being able to relate constructively to the world.’
65
Mark Doty reaches much the same conclusion when he finally comes to accept that he can survive the death of the last of his two dogs, those creatures who seemed to have carried his ‘will to live’ over the previous sixteen years, during which he watched his lover die of AIDS. Suffering and compassion, he realizes by the close of his book,
Dog Years
, can make you feel more alive, not less so: ‘I am grateful to have felt even this sharp sadness … Despair is one note in the range of feeling that will pour through me, but I do not have to be frozen there, locked in the absence of futurity and hope.’
66
When still at the height of his emotional loss and sorrow, while caring for his beloved partner dying of AIDS, Doty had written in an earlier memoir of ‘everything in the world closing down to one little point of dread’.
67
It therefore becomes less surprising that it is in talking to the dead or other lost objects – those absent presences – that we may sometimes find more ways of working out how to live in the present. Such thoughts can be found in much of the often mournful, nostalgic yet in my view always life-affirming writing of Colm Tóibín. His narrative twists repeatedly present older characters reflecting on parents and lovers, as well as spaces and places, that they have loved and lost, or loved and left. This is the dominant mood of the short stories in a recent collection,
The Empty Family
, many of which contain sharply perceptive sequences that capture autobiographical fragments Tóibín has mentioned elsewhere.
For instance, at the beginning of ‘One Minus One’, a son is looking at the moon in Texas and mourning his mother six years after her death: ‘The moon is my mother.’
68
In his head, he begins confiding his thoughts about his mother to his former lover who was always so exasperated with him because of his obstinate refusal ever to be direct or truthful, always hiding his feelings in small talk and jokes. What he only now feels he can share with this ex-lover, and only in his absence, are his memories of the journey he made from New York to Ireland as his mother lay dying, and of his feelings after her death. In this imaginary way, he also wants, at last, to ‘share’ his recollections of a much earlier time in childhood when he and his younger brother had been abruptly sent off to live with an aunt in an empty, neglectful and loveless world at the start of his father’s illness from which he died a few years later. During these childhood
months of silence and sorrow, his mother never once visited her sons or ever later mentioned the episode or its sequel, leaving a perpetual void of ‘sad echoes and dim feelings’ (7).
Elsewhere, in interviews, Tóibín has referred to a similar event which occurred when he was eight and his younger brother was four, and which he could never discuss with his own mother. In the short story the episode is succinctly summarized as a deep regret that the narrator knows he can never raise while his mother lives: ‘there was this double regret – the simple one that I had kept away, and the other one, much harder to fathom, that I had been given no choice, that she had never wanted me very much, and that she was not going to be able to rectify that in the few days that she had left in the world’ (12). For the narrator here, as perhaps for the author, one is led to suspect that it will only be in mourning that the son will ever finally come to feel close to the mother he loved, and resembles, but whom he could never touch or confide in while she lived:
She loved, as I did, books and music and hot weather. As she grew older, she had managed, with her friends and with us, a pure charm, a lightness of tone and touch. But I knew not to trust it, not to come close, and I never did. I managed in turn to exude my own lightness and charm, but you know that too. You don’t need me to tell you that either, do you? (9)