Mourning as Melancholia: Works of Grief in Contemporary Literature and Theory

Abstract

Mourning as Melancholia—Works of Grief in Contemporary Literature and Theory is a study that observes how experiences of loss and bereavement are portrayed in contemporary texts. My dissertation’s argument is based on the assumption that the portrayal of mourning does no longer comply with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical agenda. It does, to be more precise, no longer follow the assumption that the mourner has to ‘work’ through loss in order to overcome it and achieve a former state of wellbeing and functionality. Recently published autobiographical, fictional, and theoretical accounts of mourning thus challenge established assumptions about what grief is and how it affects us. This is why this study reassesses the notion of the ‘grief work’ (‘Trauerarbeit’) that Freud developed in his canonical “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Freud’s essay, mourning is cast as a necessary process that enables the mourner to externalize his or her grief. Melancholia is on the contrary framed as a pathological condition because here, the melancholic

identifies with its enigmatic sense of loss and thus holds onto and incorporates the lost object. My study proposes that the narrators and protagonists, whom I observe, can be described as melancholic mourners, who continue to identify with their relation to the loved person without, however, being able to fully comprehend or explain it. As a consequence, they remain inconsolable, vulnerable, and impaired. The essentially bereaved melancholic figures that populate contemporary texts do therefore not only present grief as incomprehensible and potentially interminable, they also strongly identify with the vulnerability that the experience of loss has exposed them to. In doing so, they refuse to tell stories that coherently incorporate all of their essential episodes, but instead insist on the meaninglessness of loss. This is why this study has made it its task to ask how a life story that no longer ‘makes sense’ because it revolves around the stubbornly enigmatic void of loss can be written, read, and understood today. The first chapter retraces the social history of the conceptualization of grief. It demonstrates that the experience of grief is dependent upon the cultural context from which it emanates. The fact that grief was once clad in public rituals but is today perceived as a private feeling already indicates how impressionable the concept of grief is. In order to highlight the dynamics that shaped our idea of what it means to mourn, Freud’s psychoanalytical theorization of the ‘work of mourning’ will be reassessed and aligned with Max Weber’s critique of a paradigmatically American ‘work ethic.’ Recent sociological approaches that address the social construction and determination of emotions will factor into a discussion that focuses on the interceding functions that texts about mourning can assume today.

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After chapter one discusses Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye (2011) as paradigmatic examples for the growing genre of the ‘grief memoir,’ chapter two focuses on Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). In Eggers’ book, the traumatic experience of parental death is circumvented rather than rendered. Yet it is precisely the young narrator’s inability to articulate his grief and inexplicable sense of loss that both motivates and disables his story. This raises the complex question of how to tell an experience that one cannot and does not want to integrate into one’s life story, for fear of ‘making sense’ of the essential meaninglessness that melancholic mourning incorporates. Chapter three retraces Roland Barthes’s concern with the lacerating pain of emotional

suffering. It observes how the critic’s perspective changes after his mother’s death. A close- reading of Barthes’s posthumously published Mourning Diary (2010) and late Camera

Lucida (1980) highlight that Barthes insisted as much on the meaninglessness of his mother’s death as on the intractable uniqueness of her being, the latter of which he intended to capture in an envisioned, but never realized literary text called Vita Nova. His failure to render his mother’s essential being without imbuing her death with conventional meaning had a grave impact on Barthes’s worldview: it essentially changed his perspective on the relation between the writing subject and the written text. Siri Hustvedt’s works are the focal point of the fourth chapter. Her narratives exhibit characters that are defined by their affective ties and unconscious desires. It is through the experience of grief that the design of their relationally constituted identities is brought to light. Despite the fact that Hustvedt’s stories are deeply steeped in psychoanalytic theory and rely heavily on Freud’s assertions, they are told from the point of view of narrators, who grapple with a melancholic form of grief that arises from their complex, often ambivalent and always persistently captivating relationship to the deceased.