The Poetics of Fidelity in Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015) and Nicholas Royle’s

Abstract

Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Nicholas Royle’s Quilt fall within a literary tradition of contemporary elegy which turns to the poetics of anti-consolation. Porter’s novel presents mourners caught in the ambivalence of mourning, as they waver between normal mourning and melancholia. Conversely, Royle’s Quilt shows how the pain of loss endures, and thereby plunges the bereaved into a melancholic state: a frozen time and a space haunted by the spectral presence of the dead. Inspired by the notion of ‘fidelity’ as developed by Jacques Derrida and through the innovative techniques of these two novels, fidelity manifests itself in a poetics of anti-consolation and the search for reciprocity with the dead, which impels the bereaved to open up to otherness. Moreover, fidelity is illustrated through the process of recollection which is marked by failures of memory induced by the abrupt loss of a beloved one.