The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature.

Wheeler, Michael

The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature. By. R. Clifton Spargo. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. x + 314 pp. 35.50 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8018-7977-9.

Take religion out of the discussion of elegy and you have to turn to philosophy. Without religion you can no longer take seriously the consolation of some kind of future life for both the passenger through death and the bereaved, or an ethics based upon (divinely inspired) unconditional love, extended in Christianity to enemy as well as friend or coreligionist. Although R. Clifton Spargo, who has taught American literature at Marquette University and creative writing at Yale, refers to religion in history at certain points, he writes from a non-religious standpoint and addresses his academic colleagues within the assumption that religion no longer counts. It is perhaps this very freedom from the traditions of the Abrahamic religions that has inspired him to move the discussion of elegy beyond received norms and to investigate the ethical significance of resistance to elegiac consolation.

Spargo's commitment to a secular understanding of death is revealed early in his discussion, when he argues that the 'pathos of any scene of dying derives from the vague apprehension on the part of the observer (or the reader who is a witness by proxy) that something might still be done to spare the one who is dying' (p. 3). No sense here, then, of death as a release for the dying, or of the 'observer' as a kind of midwife who is present at a birthing into a new life. Rather, we are encouraged to consider the kind of anxiety that plagues the medical profession in the West, where death is some kind of failure, in scientific and sociological terms.

Drawing upon the theories of Paul Ricaeur, Bernard Williams, and Emmanuel Levinas, Spargo examines the ethical dimensions of anti-consolatory grief in classical mythology and a wide range of English and American literature, always insisting upon the mourner's ethical responsibility towards the dead. The journey for the reader is often tortuous but usually worthwhile, occasionally opening up exciting new vistas from high and precipitous places.

Spargo grounds his central principle upon a paradox arrived at through Levinas and Williams: 'Emerging as a disruption of consciousness, responsibility means to be obligated beyond even the thoughts and actions of which we are capable; and yet despite the fact that it is always in excess of our capability, without the event of responsibility we would be less than ourselves, less than fully human' (p. 17). The memory of the other, in a 'useful act of commemoration', needs to be put 'in service of the general good, of morality' (p. 19). The story of Niobe and her children, which Spargo discusses here, directly associates grief and repentance. It is the figure of Hamlet, however, that cries out for detailed analysis, which he receives in a chapter entitled 'Mourning and Substitution in Hamlet'.

From here Spargo again broadens out to consider 'Lyrical Economy and the Question of Alterity', in a chapter which includes discussion of Dickinson, and 'The Ethical Rhetoric of Anti-Elegy', in which Shelley's 'Adonais' figures. Three chapters on individual writers then follow: 'Wishful Reciprocity in Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13', 'The Bad Conscience of American Holocaust Elegy: The Example of Randall Jarrell', and 'The Holocaust She Walks In: Sylvia Plath and the Demise of Lyrical Selfhood'. Spargo manages to be even more melancholy than Hardy himself, or other readers of Hardy, arguing that the 'other's reproach' is finally stronger than any sense of resolution in the poems (p. 167). Subsequent events of the twentieth century are so dreadful that, on Spargo's argument, the crisis in the project of commemoration becomes an event already inscribed with ethical meaning.

Michael Wheeler

Winchester