Since beginning this project, I’ve gotten into the annoying habit of cataloguing many (most?) of the books I read as works of grief. Without delving here into the question of genre/subgenre, the narratives I read often point to grief, if not as prompt then at the very least as key to the heart, the center, of the storyline.
Loss, mourning, grief—how often these experiences are catalysts for some of the most important works of literature and thinking out there.
Plato’s The Apology, as an ode to his teacher, Socrates, a way of marking his (Plato’s) own grief. (Let’s call this a precursor text; I know it’s a stretch but read between the lines!)
Saint Augustine’s Confessions—those meaty chapters about his mother’s death, and his “twofold sadness”—the grief of grieving:
But I knew what pressure lay upon my heart. And because it caused me such sharp displeasure to see how much power these human frailties had over me, though they are a necessary part of the order we have to endure and are the lot of the human condition, there was another pain to put on top of my grief, and I was tortured by a twofold sadness. (from Book IX, Cassiciacum: to Monica’s death; trans. Henry Chadwick)
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Lately, in an effort to anchor myself in the midst of work/life/world chaos in the time of COVID-19 (what is grieving now?; more on that some other time), I have been reading/rereading some Simone de Beauvoir, and I can’t stop thinking about the closing lines of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
[SPOILER ALERT.]
Of Zaza’s death—an event saved for the very end of the book (what structural brilliance to this memoir), she writes:
She has often appeared to me at night, her face all yellow under a pink sun-bonnet, and seeming to gaze reproachfully at me. We had fought together against the revolting fate that had lain ahead of us, and for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death. (trans. James Kirkup)
And here are the final lines to Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (trans. Ann Goldstein):
Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity. I thought: now that Lila has let herself be seen so plainly, I must resign myself to not seeing her anymore.
The freedom to imagine, to create, to gaze lovingly at the image of the lost other, the lost friend, comes in these two works at a cost: the footstep trace in the sand is gone; in its place, an image, a copy, of that footstep trace.
The grief of grieving.
The grief of grieving in public.
The grief of grieving in, and through, writing. Of marking one’s grief.
But grieving in solitude, in silence, is, I imagine, always worse.
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The Mandarins felt like an obvious follow up to Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, though I realize, of course, there are actual follow ups to the memoir series, further volumes. The Mandarins is a fictional story set in postwar France. The central characters—intellectuals and artists, mainly—are in a state of shock, emerging from years of wartime living into a world they no longer recognize. (It felt eerie enough to read in April 2020, a weird foreboding of things to come.)
Here’s Henri, the still somewhat young writer/intellectual, soon to be grappling with the central question of the book, which is the question of the role of literature in relation to politics, to action:
France was no longer a prison, the borders were opening up again, and life shouldn’t be a prison either. Four years of austerity, four years of working only for others—that was a lot, that was too much. It was now time for him to think a little about himself. And for that, he had to be alone, alone and free. It wouldn’t be easy to find himself again after four years; there were so many things that had to be clarified in his mind. (trans. Leonard M. Friedman)
Henri stops writing fiction for a time. He can’t do it. He doesn’t think he should. He focuses on journalism, on political engagements. And he reads, a lot. He wants to learn things, almost as though he is learning the world from scratch.
It’s a few months later. He’s on a biking trip with his friends, on the countryside. He has yet to write a word. At breakfast they read, in the papers, about the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Nothing makes sense, yet again.
They come to a plateau. There’s a parade of marching soldiers and townsmen, all in black. The parade is ending. The friends eat at a restaurant, surrounding by mourners. Henri is told to pour a drink for the woman next to him, as “Her husband was one of the ones they hanged at St. Denis.”
He can’t look at her; he sweats. He thinks of how nothing makes sense anymore, again. He is glad to have quit writing. He doesn’t think anything—commemoration, political action—is of use.
But as the scene ends, he is suddenly gripped. “It was absolutely necessary to decide what would become of that woman.” In other words, he’s ready to return to fiction, if only to enter into this individual stranger’s grief.
What fades when he writes (it turns out to be a play)? What’s the cost? Her grief is the catalyst, but it can’t be her grief he’s writing. He doesn’t know her; he barely met her. And he doesn’t exactly know grief, either. What right does he have?
Grief, again, is the catalyst, but it’s someone else’s grief. A dangerous catalyst, and a dangerous mission. Perhaps this is why I’m so drawn to memoir instead of fiction, as a portal for thinking through grief. What right do we have to other people’s experiences of grief, other than as witnesses, as listeners? And yet, how important it is for us, to resist the possibility that others will have to remain separate, alone, in their grief.
The widow? We don’t know what came of her.