Aimee L. Pozorski

Department of English
Central Connecticut State University
pozorskia@ccsu.edu

 

Review of: R. Clifton Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

 

R. Clifton Spargo begins The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature with a poignant discussion of Ruth Behar’s 1996 retelling of an Isabel Allende story: a story about a relationship between a girl dying beneath the rubble of an avalanche and the reporter who struggles as he watches her there. The poignancy of this scene, for Behar, depends on the tension the reporter feels between his professional obligation to narrate her story and his human obligation to ease her suffering.

 

Such a scene of suffering, on a first reading, refers to a “time of mourning” crucial to Spargo’s book. As his reading of Behar illustrates, the time of mourning occurs when a witness confronts the loss of another. More importantly, this sense of time is also definitively “ethical.” For Spargo, “there is an ethical crux to all mourning, according to which the injustice potentially perpetrated by the mourner against the dead as a failure of memory stands for the injustice that may be done to the living at any given moment” (4). When phrased in this way, “ethics” here is not only concerned to recognize injustice, but, more crucially, to remember the dead adequately.

 

But Spargo’s book also seems invested in another kind of time, when the grieving survivor comes to mourn time itself. Spargo’s understated second interest is about what it means to mourn the measured time that offers comfort and stability during moments of need; in other words, the book is equally about the kind of linear time in which we have all come to organize our lives, but have, despite ourselves, lost in this historical moment. Although he does briefly write in his chapter on Hamlet about a “time of mourning” (77), the theorization of mourning’s time that runs throughout the book in these terms is perhaps too implicit, and I could wish for a broader or more explicit theorization of the intersection between time and mourning. Specifically, I would call for a theory of mourning indebted to the time of the trauma, which Spargo sometimes invokes as analogous to mourning while seeing the two modes of psychic unpleasure as distinct in their social and literary implications. For Spargo, although he doesn’t quite phrase it this way, part of the value of literature lies in its potential to represent the traumatic time of the loss of a loved one in a way that straightforward, journalistic accounts fail to do. Literature can move the reader-as-witness because it functions like the unconscious mind: absolutely refusing the imposition of linear time in those moments that come too soon to be processed in a neat and linear fashion that cultural codes prescribe.

 

One way literature invests the reader in the mourning process is through its reliance on what Spargo calls “elegiac address” (25-26, 188-89, 192-94). Otherwise known as “apostrophe,” the potential for literature to address an other is typically associated with elegies in the most traditional sense. Spargo’s reading of the literary, indeed, of “elegiac literature,” does not focus on traditional elegies, but on literature that invokes prosopopeia in order to call upon the reader as ethical witness (25). Drawing on a subtle and informed understanding of prosopopeia, Spargo’s theory of elegy explicitly refuses the trope of the personification of the dead and instead emphasizes the dimension of relationality created by literary texts–specifically, literature’s potential to render an alterity in space and time that signifies as responsibility. For example, Spargo claims that “mourning promotes a temporal confusion whereby the question of memory is treated as though the remembered dead stood within range of an imminent threat of violence to a living person” (4). Spargo posits Freud’s famous theorization of the dream of the burning child as an exemplary case of this temporal confusion. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud recounts the story of a dead child who appears in the dream of a grieving father, a father who falls asleep as the child’s body lies surrounded by candles under the watch of an old man. After a few hours, Freud recalls, the father dreams that his child appears before him, grabs his arm, and whispers “Father, can’t you see that I am burning?” (330; qtd. in Spargo 173).

 

On the one hand, this scene posits the father’s “temporal confusion” over whether the child is dead. Is the time of the dream before the child has died, or after? The answer, of course is both: In the dream, the child is both dead from burning and alive at his father’s side, as his reproachful whisper proves. As Spargo suggests, the lesson of Freud’s example is that “our capacity to revere the living other as an unassimilable, yet irremissible precondition for both relationship and subjectivity depends upon the paradoxical capacity of our consciousness to be dedicated to the permanently absent other as to the primary and abiding signification of alterity” (176). The literary nature of this father’s dream, in other words, necessarily conflates the living child with the dead child, allowing the father both to express a dedication to the child’s memory and to recognize that his child’s subjectivity is radically separate from his own. Spargo’s commitment to the impossibility, yet absolute necessity, of this ethical moment leads him to Cathy Caruth’s interpretive work on this very scene. As Spargo relates, Caruth reads it as “the story of an impossible responsibility of consciousness in its own originating relation to others, and specifically to the deaths of others” (176). Spargo emphasizes further the skewed timing that this dream reveals. For him, “this apprehension of an impossible responsibility is not merely retrospective, but prospective, since the child’s accusation reinstitutes and indeed redefines the father’s protective agency” (176). For this grieving father, in other words, the child’s ultimate death is yet to come, calling into question as it does the father’s ability to protect the body from burning even as it lies lifeless in the shroud.

 

But this example, too, brings out an important tenet of Spargo’s ethics: that literary works are ethical not simply in their demand that we confront the radical otherness of the death of a loved one, but also in their critical rejection of more dominant cultural models for grief. As Freud’s discussion of this father’s dream makes clear, the culturally prescribed mourning process in the wake of a close relative’s death–recognizing it with a funeral service and then going about one’s daily life–is unworkable. Not only is it impossible, it is naïve: time, for the mourner, does not work so neatly. Spargo uses mourning, often literally, but sometimes as a figure, to reveal “a belated protection of the dead” (6). For him, “this retrospective effort always pertains to a question about the place the other still holds in the world” (6). After death comes life–for the mourner, but for the deceased as well. In this resistance to passing out of memory Spargo senses a “resistant strain of mourning,” a strain “in which there is opposition to psychological resolution and to the status quo of cultural memory” (6). Ultimately, “it is precisely because our cultural modes of memory so often neglect the other whom they would remember that unresolved mourning becomes a dissenting act, a sign of irremissible ethical meaning” (6). And this is why the literary work itself becomes so crucial to this study. In its very stylization, in addition to its content, literature bodies forth a capacity to refuse resolutions over and against more normative references to mourning.

 

In describing literary representations of melancholia as “the elegy’s most persistent sign of dissent from conventional meanings” (11), Spargo closely and self-consciously aligns his book with such other studies on literary representations of mourning as Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994). Both Ramazani and Spargo privilege poets in mourning for their potential to understand what we others do not: that social rules for mourning do not account for the problem of time–the lost time, the mourning time, the very time of mourning–following the deaths of those we love. According to Spargo, however, while Ramazani and Peter Sacks understand the “melancholic potential in all mourning,” “neither perceives melancholia as evocative of an ethical concern for the other elaborated by the mourner’s objections to the cultural practices presiding over grief” (11). In other words, whereas Ramazani values the modern elegy’s melancholic potential to “reopen the wounds of loss” (xi), Spargo reads melancholia as a “persistent sign of a dedication to the time and realm of the other” (11). And it is this focus on “the other”–more crucially, a radically other human being whom we possibly love, one for whom we feel a responsibility after death, but also, and simultaneously, impossibly, one whose alterity we are committed to preserve–that sets Spargo apart from some other scholars on elegiac literature.

 

And there is no lack of scholarship in this field. Such recent books as William Watkins’s On Mourning (2004), Rochelle Almeida’s The Politics of Mourning (2004), Anissa Wardi’s Death and the Arc of Mourning (2003), Sam Durrant’s Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (2003), and Alessia Ricciardi’s The Ends of Mourning (2003) are just five examples of studies published in the last four years. However, precisely because of the way it links the literary attributes of the elegy with the ethical imperative–with a necessary and impossible engagement with the other on his or her own terms–Spargo’s book accomplishes something these other books do not: it places the reader in the uncomfortable position of having to take responsibility not only for our own dead, but also for our reading of the figures to which Spargo turns in the book. In other words, invested as it is in the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Spargo’s sense of literary and social ethics refers not simply to “doing the right thing” in the wake of a significant death, but rather to the impossibility of both adequately carrying forward the memory of the deceased other and of preserving the irreconcilability of death. In this way, Spargo’s ethics is as much an ethics of reading as it is an ethics of mourning–a move surprisingly antithetical to the philosophy upon which he relies so heavily.

 

In order to think Levinasian ethics together with the ethical work of the elegy, Spargo must confront (and he does) an important Levinasian claim: that ethics does not “fit all that well with the imaginative capacities of literature” (9). Spargo’s defense, however, is that literature has a crucial indirect potential for conveying the untranslatable, as a way of marking particular limits of representation. Confronting this fact is one way of “facing the figure,” as Levinas himself commanded. While it is true that Levinas originally theorized the ethical relationship as taking place between two human beings, later scholars, like Spargo, have understood Levinas’s ethics through encounters with language and art. For example, Jill Robbins has suggested that we “face the figure otherwise,” extending Levinas’s theory of the “ethical relation to the other as a kind of language, as responsibility, that is, as language-response to the other who faces and who, ‘in turn’ speaks” (54). Levinas’s ethics of an other with a face, then, can also be understood as a standard for reading–a standard that requires us to “face the figure” as we would face an other.

 

However, Spargo’s reading of the other, and particularly our disorienting relation to the other as it exists in both time and texts, appears as dependent upon Levinas as it is upon Freud. For Freud, the alternative state of mourning time is “traumatic,” not simply because it is difficult to endure or even unimaginable. Rather, it is an event that cannot be understood straightforwardly in linear time, and therefore returns experientially in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, and hallucinations. A closer reading of Levinas might also reveal that his ideas about ethics are closely bound up with the problem of time as Freud most famously articulated it with the notion of belatedness, or Nachträglichkeit as first introduced in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). Granted, while Spargo is sensitive to Freud’s contributions to our theorization of mourning and is indebted to certain Freudian categories, he explicitly attempts to move beyond a psychic model of mourning that focuses on the survivor’s resolution, always cognizant of this model’s betrayal of the dead. But I am not confident that we can afford to forsake psychological priority in such a way. Perhaps we, too, need a greater reconciliation of Freud and Levinas, one that Spargo may not deem entirely possible or even desirable. While Spargo suggests Levinas’s implicit debt to Freud, contemporary readers of Freud might be interested in hearing more about this, especially considering Freud’s underestimated influence on Levinas.

 

For Spargo, then, while “belatedness” is a significant category, obligation becomes more important. And even if chapter four, for example, argues that the belatedness of literary mourning corresponds to the belatedness of ethical mourning in everyday life, here Spargo’s turn from Freud does not quite answer what I see as the inevitable psychic consequences of such a view of responsibility–one that is traumatic in its own right. As such, Spargo’s account appears to take us too far afield of the necessarily psychic dimension of ethics which I see as more realistically explained by Freud’s account of the psychic time in which mourning occurs. For Freud, every newly discovered love object appears as a rediscovery of a former love. Love, and indeed death, operate on a model of traumatic repetition. Spargo’s understanding of ethics seems to recognize this impliclitly: an ethical obligation to the other takes place in skewed temporality, which is, perhaps, part of the point; a refusal to master the other, while still trying to recall her. It necessarily takes place in an alternative realm of time, an alienating sense of time that repositions us in “the time of the other”–both inside and out of time–both lost and perpetually losing.

 

There is a “sense of peril” in this Levinasian (and, I would add, Freudian) ethics that is not based on what is to be gained in the name of “doing right,” but is structured around loss. For Spargo, this sense of peril comes with the recognition that “the death of the other demands a renewal of responsibility–on the other side of loss, as it were, in a beyond that structurally remembers the obligation that precedes the event of the death” (29). Ultimately this obligation, this responsibility, as the story of the troubled reporter in the beginning of the book reveals, is at the heart of Spargo’s model of ethics, which requires a willing listener who hears the testimony of a witness without reducing the speaker and his or her story to an easily assimilable experience.

 

Thinking about the elegy in this way allows Spargo effectively to formulate the surprising proposition that the anti-elegiac tradition provides a trajectory for responsibility that in some way anticipates the necessarily literary strategies of elegies about the Holocaust. At first glance, it appears that Spargo chooses his particular subjects–literary texts that range widely from Hamlet to Renaissance, Romantic, and Modernist poetry, to Randall Jarrell’s and Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust poetry–because each of them has something to do with an ethical listener, and more crucially still, a persona who refuses consolation in the name of melancholy. However, a closer look, especially at the last two chapters on the Holocaust poetry, suggests that far more interesting claim is driving this book: The Holocaust appears here as the point at which the anti-consolatory gesture of the modern elegy is pushed too far and strains beneath its own weight.

 

Spargo reads Jarrell’s poetic voice as Holocaust witness, for example, as a commentary on “the American public’s own unwillingness to have traded present pleasures for attitudes translating into practical actions on behalf of the refugees” of the Holocaust (210). In so doing, Jarrell struggles to transform his personal lyrics into something more wide-ranging that can take on a “persuasive public dimension” (222). Spargo’s defense of Sylvia Plath against charges that she appropriates the atrocity of the Holocaust to convey her own personal pain argues–to the contrary–that in her Holocaust imagery, Plath figures “the difficulty our society has in commemorating victims of atrocity” (244). Because he is a Holocaust scholar in his own right, this seems only natural, and it sheds new light on the book’s premise that we, as readers of poetry, like the poetry itself, not only recognize injustice but also maintain an adequate memory of the dead without perpetuating injustice itself. Ultimately, then, this is not just another book about mourning or loss, nor is it simply about time. It is a book that demands that we realize how implicated we all are in a traumatic past, and that–despite our own inclinations to the contrary–we can’t so quickly or easily forget our responsibility to the millions who have died unjustly.

 

In keeping with this impossible model of responsibility–a responsibility for death and injustice that we must take on, but necessarily cannot take on–Spargo concludes his book by proposing that “mourning is both a figure for and expression of an impossible responsibility wherein one refuses to yield the other to the more comfortable freedoms of identity” (274). What are we to make of this conclusion, one not more comforting than the story of the reporter at the beginning of the book? Do we accept the impossibility, feeling–somehow–like more ethical beings, and then find a way to move on with our lives? Spargo’s answer, in fact, is a resounding No. There is no way to fulfill this sense of ethics, there is no way to forget injustice, there is no way to find closure, and then move on. And this is the point: to refuse consolation where there is none to be found. Spargo’s book rightly, albeit quietly, calls for a sense of collective ethics, an ethics that takes responsibility for those deaths in which we have not had a direct hand. If there is anything unsettling in this book, it must be that. Not only do the poets read here refuse consolation in this way, but Spargo’s book does as well. The Ethics of Mourning is about much more than a relationship between a poet and his or her personal dead. It is also about a significant relationship with those millions in history who have died at the hands of injustice. Such a recognition calls us all to be responsible not only for those we love, but for those who died–all those who died–in the name of love…and in the name of hate too, and history, as their stories have been recounted through the ages.

 

Works Cited

 

• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
• Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
• Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.