Modernism and Mourning (review)

Abstract

Patricia Rae, ed. Modernism and Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell up, 2007. 310 pp. $55.00. The cover of Modernism and Mourning features a photograph of what is perhaps most famous piece of Canadian commemorative art, Vimy Memorial. The memorial is often interpreted as an example of modernist innovation, but this reading overlooks extent to which it also draws upon an older vocabulary of mourning: figure of Canada Bereft who stands beneath soaring abstraction of monument's twin columns resembles kinds of statues of weeping women commonly found in Victorian cemeteries. Julia McArthur's photograph, while of a different mourning figure, nonetheless foregrounds this contradiction in a way nicely introduces this essay collection's focus on mourning as a site complicates persistent narrative of modernism as a clean break with past and interrogates binaries (new/old, high art/popular culture, intellect/emotion) have typically underwritten high modernist self-fashioning. Its Canadian cover art notwithstanding, most of essays in this book deal with British or American texts and contexts. An exception is Eric Reinholtz's discussion of death in poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca as a topic illuminates Spanish poet's complex relationship to Anglo-American modernism. Another is Jahan Ramazani's afterword, which describes how his readings of American, English, and Irish elegies in his book Poetry of Mourning (1994) were informed by his grief over execution of a beloved cousin in Iran in 1981. Rae's book clearly acknowledges importance of Poetry of Mourning as an essential starting point for any subsequent discussion of twentieth-century elegiac writing, but essays collected here move beyond Ramazani's conclusions to address more recent developments in mourning theory. Rae's introduction contextualizes these developments, including recent work by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and R. Clifton Spargo, by providing a cogent overview of body of twentieth-century writings on mourning and melancholia, beginning, necessarily, with Freud's eponymously titled 1917 essay. Vigilantly attuned to political implications of Freud's distinction between normal process of mourning and pathological state of melancholia, collection is provocative in its reassessment of recent efforts to recuperate melancholia as more ethical response to loss. Building on Ramazani's reading of modern elegy as quintessentially melancholic, critics writing in 1990s, such as Michael Moon and Philip Novak, explored uses of melancholia as a means of resisting ideological imperatives of normal mourning: for them, irresolution of melancholia provides a more appropriate way to memorialize deaths of those (gay men, African Americans) who are already excluded from category of normal by a dominant culture does not regard their deaths as grievable losses. Without denying persuasiveness of these arguments within their particular contexts, some contributors to Rae's book caution against reading melancholia as necessarily aligned with progressive politics. For Greg Forter, not only is recent embrace of melancholia founded upon a misreading of mourning as tantamount to forgetting dead, it is also curiously insensitive to intensely painful nature of melancholia as an affect. In contrast to those who celebrate melancholia as politically liberating, Forter reads The Great Gatsby as an example of a text that marshals its melancholy for conservative class and gender purposes (244). In her essay on D.H. Lawrence's analysis of post-WWI social problems, Marlene Briggs takes critique of melancholia even further, arguing self-alienation of melancholic (who remains unconscious of what s/he has lost) can only serve conservative interests, as it is aligned with the irrational, unconscious forces drive capitalism (206). …