Mourning Time

• Published in: Postmodern culture Vol. 17; no. 2
• Main Author: Pozorski, Aimee L. (Aimee Lynn)
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 2007
• Subjects: Consciousness; Cultural heritage; Deaths; Ethics; Grief; Injustice; Literary criticism; Memory; Otherness; Spargo, R Clifton; Time
• ISSN: 1053-1920; 1053-1920
• DOI: 10.1353/pmc.2007.0022

R. Clifton Spargo begins The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature with a poignant discussion of Ruth Behar’s 1996 retelling of an Isabel Allende story: a story about a relationship between a girl dying beneath the rubble of an avalanche and the reporter who struggles as he watches her there. [...]this example, too, brings out an important tenet of Spargo’s ethics: that literary works are ethical not simply in their demand that we confront the radical otherness of the death of a loved one, but also in their critical rejection of more dominant cultural models for grief. Both Ramazani and Spargo privilege poets in mourning for their potential to understand what we others do not: that social rules for mourning do not account for the problem of time—the lost time, the mourning time, the very time of mourning—following the deaths of those we love. According to Spargo, however, while Ramazani and Peter Sacks understand the “melancholic potential in all mourning,” “neither perceives melancholia as evocative of an ethical concern for the other elaborated by the mourner’s objections to the cultural practices presiding over grief” (11). [...]it is this focus on “the other”—more crucially, a radically other human being whom we possibly love, one for whom we feel a responsibility after death, but also, and simultaneously, impossibly, one whose alterity we are committed to preserve—that sets Spargo apart from some other scholars on elegiac literature.