The World of the Dying:’ John Mcgahern’s Memoir and the Thingness in Anticipatory Grief

Andrei Bogdan Popa

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.14

Abstract

My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.

Highlights

I will move from the spatial dimension of anticipatory-vicarious grief to its temporality: working under the assumption that the Thing can be said to time the world (Morton 272), we need to look at how memory itself is timed by the human agents’ reaction to the “no-thing” within the thinking apparatus, seen as “a space of suspension” (Connor 9)
If “the objecthood of the self” is stabilized by “conferring stability on the object world,” any affective engagement faced by anticipatory grief is always already subsumed by this “interobjective relation”: “the thingness of the constituted object is the outcome of an interaction between subject and object” (Brown 21-2)
I think that the redemptive potentiality that the text hints at can be understood by reading the father-son relation through the lens of a writerly anticipatory-vicarious grief engagement, while the need to keep things open can be related to the treatment of the no-thing within the thinking apparatus: the tension between father and son is the tension between acting in order to thingify the no-thing (Frank) and leaving it in a suspension between being and not-being (John)

Summary

Introduction

I will move from the spatial dimension of anticipatory-vicarious grief to its temporality: working under the assumption that the Thing can be said to time the world (Morton 272), we need to look at how memory itself is timed by the human agents’ reaction to the “no-thing” within the thinking apparatus, seen as “a space of suspension” (Connor 9). The emergence of affective awareness in the case of anticipatory-vicarious grief can engage with the object world in ways that can reveal a deeper, object-oriented understanding of our relation to death.

Results

Conclusion