Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgehn: Presence in absence

Abstract

One of the initial tasks in approaching this paper was to define the characteristics of the idea of 'lament' in somewhat structural terms. In fact, this goal of articulating 'lament' as a concept, as opposed to merely letting the multiple meanings of the word resonate as they will, was, for me, a persistent irritation. Or perhaps it was more like one of those occasions when one forgets a name, or a word, that then remains frustratingly, infuriatingly on the tip of one's tongue, because the tantalising idea that underpins the concept of 'lament' is surely one of absence.Every lament is an encounter with an absence. The classic, canonic and central laments are the elegies and threnodies that mark the felt absences of death. But, life being what it is, there are many other subjects for lamentation: lament for lost love, lament for lost youth, all the way to Beethoven's rage over a lost penny, which certainly qualifies as a lament, even if an infantile one. And what has been frustrating me in my definitional musings is that I cannot think of one single example of a lament that does not encounter the lost, the absent-either actual or potential.The nature of this encounter with absence varies by context. A musical ritual of mourning usually serves to place an individual's grief in a communal context: to share, and to locate mourning within a cultural tradition. In the lament as ritual, private grief is made public through communal enactment.In contrast, an artistic response to absence usually creates a presence: through art, music, poetry or an image of what or whom is lost is created within the work. In the lament as art form, from a real or literal absence, a figurative presence is generated: an image of the departed. Here, private grief is made public through communicative representation.The majority of my paper concerns the nature of this communicative representation in the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder: 'Songs on the Death of Children.' The notion of 'presence' is loaded, theoretically speaking, and is a contested one, and in some senses this short song of Mahler's is about to become the battleground on which the theoretical struggle for presence will be waged. But first I'd like to fling a few visual and textural laments into the mix, to provide some depth and perspective on the relationship between presence and absence. Sir George Clausen painted Youth Mourning in 1916. Interpretation here is not problematic: the image is of youth, as a vulnerable, naked young woman, lamenting the dead young men of World War I. The kneeling figure in a ritual posture of grief, together with the partial cross, frames in the background the waterlogged shell-holes of a Flanders field. The interesting thing here is the portrayal of absence-in particular, the cross being truncated at the edge of the canvas tells us that the focus of the composition of the painting has been shifted to what is central, to what is even more important. The cross and the woman frame, enfold-cradle, if you will-what is at the centre of the painting. And what is central is...absent. A palpable absence. We could imagine the mourning woman as Isolde, singing to a dead Tristan who only she can see. It is not that there is nothing at the centre of the painting: on the contrary, there is something, gone. A presence through absence.Rather than my waxing lyrical about this conceptual inseparability of absence and presence in the lament, it is probably better to let Shakespeare do so for me. Certainly Harold Bloom would approve of letting art speak in place of criticism.1 Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 64' is both a lament and a love song, and makes the point of presence in absence more compellingly than I could:When I have seen by Time's fell hand defacedThe rich proud cost of outworn buried age;When sometime lofty towers I see down-razedAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage;When I have seen the hungry ocean gainAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,And the firm soil win of the watery main,Increasing store with loss and loss with store;When I have seen such interchange of state,Or state itself confounded to decay;Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,That Time will come and take my love away. …