“The Altar of the Dead”: James’s Grammar of Grieving

Abstract

“THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD” : JAMES’S GRAMMAR OF GRIEVING KAREN SMYTHE U n iv ersity o f R egin a Tzvetan Todorov notes that James’s tales are often about the “presence of absence” (165). A critical revision of this claim is that many tales are about the writing of absence. Krishna Baldev Vaid groups thematically “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” and “The Jolly Corner” as “a triptych depicting man in quest of his [absent] Self” (214). But in these tales, James is not merely writing about the past, present, or future; he is writing about writing about them. For example, “The Altar of the Dead” is, on one level, a story about how to write and read an elegy. In this “allegory of elegy,” George Stransom (one of the elegists in the tale) is what Jacques Derrida would call a “master of writing, numbers and calculation [who] does not merely write down the weight of dead souls; he first counts out the days of life, enumerates history” (Dissemination 92). James uses a life-to-death continuum as a model not only for the history of a subject (autobiography), but also for the subject of history itself; in other words, life becomes a text, and texts — both historical and aesthetic — are given life.1 By thematizing the passage through life in textual terms (in figurative language), James provides a conceptual passage from aesthetics to history. That is, the elegiac genre allows James to explore this connection between the thematics of aestheticism (where death is the occasion for creation), and the linguistic or rhetorical techniques involved in the representation of the past, or history. Generally, elegiac literature is occasional, written in memory of a dead or lost person (or thing) in order to describe the relationship and the grief involved, and in order to find some consolation for the loss. The tradition includes an apostrophe or address to the dead, and the elegist performs verbal rites or repetitions just as the “mourner” performs grieving rituals. The speaker’s rites include a focus on the self as survivor (for the purpose of self-recovery), meditations (such as Stransom’s “plunges” into the past [106]), and artistic self-consciousness in the search for consolation.2 “The Altar of the Dead” is clearly elegiac on the thematic level — An­ drzej Warminski calls it a “tale of erosion” (264), and S. Gorley Putt calls it a “fable of human grief” (394). Warminski criticizes Putt for this statement, English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , x v i, 3 , September 19 9 0 and though it is admittedly a limited and somewhat misplaced reading, Putt provides an accurate thematic description of the tale. R.P. Blackmur makes a similar comment on the theme and form of “The Altar,” suggesting that it is a “fable of the dead” (340) that “can be thought of with Lycidas and In Memoriam and Adonais, and without their particularity of reference” (338). Though Blackmur does not offer an explicit generic description of James’s tale, he does situate it in the elegiac tradition. Vaid agrees with Blackmur’s grouping of “The Altar” among canonical English requiems, as well as with the distinction he makes between it and them. He writes that there is a meaning behind this meaning: the “altar” is a symbolic bridge between the living and the dead, and the fable exemplifies the point that this bridge is never complete, aesthetically or spiritually, so long as there is even the last vestige of egotism in the devotee. Stransom must give up his self to gain his Self. This metaphysical pun, I believe, is also embedded in the tale. (222) Clearly, Milton, Tennyson, and Shelley had different agendas for their ver­ sions of elegy. But Vaid’s insightful interpretation is, again, a thematic one. On a more subtle rhetorical level, however, James uses the symbolic bridge as a symbol itself. That is, the theme of uniting the living with the dead is indeed a motive of elegy, a motive that James figures in the symbolic altar as text. The fable of how to write an elegy therefore provides a “nexus between [James...