Everything remains “in me” or “in us,” “between us,” upon the death of the other. Everything is entrusted to me; everything is
bequeathed or given to us, and first of all to what I call memory—to the memory, the place of this strange dative. All we seem to have left is memory, since nothing appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or to come, from the other to the present.
(Derrida 1989: 32-33)
Following Jacques Derrida’s provocative lead that it is only “in us” that the dead just may speak, this chapter argues that it is only by speaking of the dead that we could keep them alive. As Derrida asks, in “The Death of Roland Barthes,” “To keep alive, within oneself: is this the best sign of fidelity?” (WM 36). In other words, fidelity consists in mourning, and thus mourning consists in interiorizing the other.
And if we can give any response or anything at all to the dead, then the dead can be only in us now. The image of memory interiorizes between us, the living and the dead, and also in us.
Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House is so rich a text on memory, reminiscence, and mourning. Memory is again related to mourning. Mourning entails forgetting to care about the lost loved person (or object). In other words,
mourning helps us to “relinquish real objects by building psychic memorials to them—the memorials we call “memories”” (Forter 2003:139). Indeed, in this poetry collection, Atwood recounts her personal memories of her dying father: recalling the past and memories with her family, in particular, her father, recounting such trivial things in their everyday life, discovering her father was teaching her mother how to dance, and describing the fire and the house or cabin.
In her Morning in the Burned House Atwood constantly reiterates her images and poetic personas to articulate and construct those specific details and everyday life.
These repetitions are ways to bear witness to Atwood’s relation to her departed father, the dead, and to compensate memory and loss. These repetitions also intensify the poet’s explorations of loss as an integral part of the mourning. This chapter explores Derrida’s arguments about mourning and memory intertwined in order to reflect on the impossible necessity of mourning.
Mourning is such a process of interiorization of the other’s memory.
According to Derrida’s “By Force of Mourning,” “[w]e are speaking of images.
What is only in us seems to be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scenes that are no longer anything but images, since the other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who,
having passed away, leaves ‘in us’ only image” (WM 159).
In Atwood’s poem, memory’s images seem to be constantly haunted by the speaker, and then such memories appear “in speaker” only images. Thus, Atwood utilizes technique of flashback to trace her childhood memories or events in the past from the present in her narrative through recollection recounted by dreams or characters (the speakers), or through reveries. In my examination of Atwood’s representations of memory, this chapter will focus on related main themes (mourning, memory, and loss) or locations (the forest, the beach, and the house) which she uses to characterize or personalize the speaker’s voice and also to bear witness in relation to her father, family, and the world.
The last poem of section three, “A Pink Hotel in California,” links Atwood’s childhood experience by way of flashback to recount her memory about the lakeside cabin where the speaker’s family stayed in 1943 up to 1994. The speaker recalls that
“My father chops with his axe / and the leaves fall off the tree. / It’s nineteen forty-three” (MBH 76), and “[m]y mother rakes the ashes / out from under the oven”
(MBH 76). The speaker continues, This is comfort and safety,
the sound of chopping in the empty forest, the smell of smoke.
It’s nineteen forty-three.
[. . . .]
I rolled them in my mouth like marbles, they tasted pure:
smoke, gun, boots, oven.
The fire. The scattered ashes. The winter forest. (MBH 76-77)
Also, it recalls World War Ⅱ and the speaker as a child at that time was starting to learn those words about war: “smoke, gun, boots,” and “fire, ashes.” Now the speaker asks herself that “Isn’t there enough of the past / without making more?”
(MBH 77), when she sits in a pink room. This can be seen as a yearning for a time of the speaker’s childhood. Atwood addresses the speaker as the first person “I” to be her persona who reiterates the past time they had spent.
It’s nineteen forty-three.
It’s nineteen ninety-four,
I can hear the sound of the chopping.
It’s because of the ocean, it’s because of the war
which won’t stay under the waves and leaves.
The carpet smells of ashes. (MBH 77)
The speaker stays in the pink hotel “where everything recurs,” and “nothing is elsewhere” (MBH 77). This poem is about the way in which the speaker makes sense of seemingly ineffable nostalgia and loss to her family and memory. Atwood makes an effort to describe her poetic embodiments of these childhood episodes and sense of her helplessness within the elapse of time in such the way of memory recurring.
In “Wave,” the speaker envisions that the cabin near the beach is a locus of her father’s death, because “a wave washed over him. / Suddenly, whole beaches / were simply gone. / 1947. Lake Superior . . . Nothing was left . . . We remained to him in fragments” (MBH 83).4 The speaker keeps on talking to appease her submerged and worried father: north of Lake Superior, in a tiny cabin my father had just finished building. He’s gone off on a trip, leaving food for three weeks, which was still stored in one of the tents: we hadn’t had time to move it into the cabin; we were going to do it the next morning. But we woke up to find that a bear had walked through the back of the tent, eaten everything he liked, and squashed or mingled everything he didn’t like” (93-94). So, the lake, the cabin, and the bear are indeed happened to Atwood when she is a little girl. And this setting also appears in Atwood’s other poems.
As the critic Jean Mallinson has argued, “[p]erennial concerns, like love and death, move a poet towards traditional images—or towards a deliberate resistance to those images” (26). Here, the speaker’s submerged father is so uneasy that he seems to know something will happen. The bad weather implies an ominous fate, of the death coming and of the foreboding. As we shall see that Atwood uses times of the day and four seasons to delineate the cycle of death and life. Janice Fiamengo concludes, commenting on Atwood’s use of elegiac images in her article on Atwood’s poetry that:
The “bad weather” (81) that claimed the man in the glacier is
paralleled by the father’s premonition of a “bad” winter “on its way”
(84) at the beginning of his final illness. Immortalized on color slides, the forever young father is framed by the blue sky of “a northern summer” (81). Contemplating the cultural meaning of wreaths—which are like ritual “Ohs” signaling our wordlessness before grief—Atwood reflects that we “go around / in these circles for a time, winter summer winter, / and, after more time, not” (102).
(152)
“Bored” is an ordinary but special poem for Atwood because this is also about her childish boredom. The speaker remembers the vanished days she spent with her
father in banal details in the forest, “Holding the log / while he sawed it. Holding / the string while he measured” (MBH 91). Atwood’s repetition emphasizes that such trivial things and chores are so boring to a little girl that the speaker loses her patience:
“hardly wait to get / the hell out of there to / anywhere else” (MBH 92). The speaker recounts,
Or sat in the back of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn’t even boredom, it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details.
[. . . ] Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes I would. The boring rhythm of doing things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. (MBH 91-92)
In the last five lines of this poem, the speaker is appreciated that her father is no
longer there; therefore, a poignant sadness occurred to her. The poem continues, Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or groundhogs. Now I wouldn’t be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know. (MBH 92)
Atwood suggests that life is filled with boredom and, of course, ended with death.
The final lines indicate that the speaker is well aware that things would be no different because she has known and accepted her father’s death. This as Janice Fiamengo argues that “Knowing at all is knowing too much because it is knowledge of death.
Knowledge makes the moment retrospectively precious but also forecloses the possibility of regaining the remembered experience because the happy boredom of a world without time is forever lost” (158).
On the other hand, Atwood is brought up against the things that she does not know about her father’s life while she is a little girl. In “Dancing,” the speaker recalls, “There is always more than you know” (MBH 90) discovered to her surprise that it was her father who taught her mother how to dance. The parents’ “graceful twirling, / curved arms and fancy footwork” (MBH 90) signify that the daughter is like the sheet music that she “can’t play” (MBH 90).
In “A Visit,” her father’s paralysis causes the speaker to revisit her childhood memory about her father. Her father is not the person as she imagines. He is not strong enough, but vulnerable because he is an ordinary human being. As the speaker mourns:
Gone are the days
when you could walk on water.
When you could walk.
The days are gone.
Only one day remains, the one you’re in.
The memory is no friend.
It can only tell you
what you no longer have (MBH 88)
“Let’s not panic” (MBH 88), the speaker says, and she talks to her father about “axes”
and “the toolbox” (MBH 89) in order to salvage his lost memory. However, he cannot remember anything but only recognizes “the bed” (MBH 89). So, Atwood reveals her helplessness and feeling of anxiety, “Can’t we do anything but feel sorry?”
(“Flowers” 94).
The poem “Up” also depicts the occasion of the speaker’s father laying on the deathbed that he “can’t get out of bed” (MBH 110), she continues, “Forget all that and let’s get up. / Try moving your arm. / Try moving your head” (MBH 111).
Apparently, we can see that Atwood’s poems engage with the ways in which mourning and memory both inscribe and reiterate in many different forms in order to express Atwood’s acceptance and consolation about her father’s death through poetic persona.
In “A Fire Place,” the fourth poem from the end, Atwood indicates that new growth comes to replace the old in a burned house. The speaker revisits the place in the forest where her family’s house had burned. The charred place looks like a
“gash” and “scar” (MBH 116) where poplar, fireweed, berries, and bears all grew on the ashes; “that bright random clearing / or burn, or meadow” is gone, and then a new forest is growing now. Only humans “can regret / the perishing of the burned place.
/ Only we could call it a wound” (MBH 117).
The title poem of this collection, “Morning in the Burned House,” takes place in the burned house. In this poem, the speaker is simultaneously represented both as an aging adult and as a child, with consciousness split in half between the present and the past. She is alone sitting in a house where no longer exists. The speaker
imagines the loved ones and also looks for her family, “Where have they gone to, brother and sister, / mother and father?” (MBH 126). Though everything “in this house has long been over / including the body I had then, / including the body I have now,” the speaker still sits “at the morning table, alone and happy,” her “bare child’s feet on the scorched floorboards” (MBH 127), wearing her
burning clothes, the thin green shorts
and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent. (MBH 127)
Particularly, the last stanza indicates that the speaker has reconciled her mourning and memory with the burned house. The poem suggests the speaker saw her burning body, and thus memory in which she sees it now. Though her family’s
“clothes are still on the hangers,” the reality of its minutiae is “every detail clear, / tin cup and rippled mirror” (MBH 126). This poem suggests that the speaker is not sure
“if this is a trap or blessing” to possess her memory, but we can see that she is “alone and happy” (MBH 127).
Janice Fiamengo suggests that this title poem “articulates the complex gift of loss” and that it is “’morning’ signals some sort of resolution: both ‘mourning’ and
‘morning’ come after the darkness of death and night, dispelling and lightening it”
(159). Another critic Kathryn Van Spanckeren argues that this poem “links loss of consciousness with larger cultural losses—nuclear war, Hiroshima’s burned spots in which large vivid flowers grow . . . The book’s title assumes new meaning. We witness an elegiac new ‘morning’ within ‘mourning,’ the long-anticipated advent of spring, precisely in the locus of death, the ‘burned house’” (118). Lothar Honnighausen (2000) also comments that the title “’Morning’—‘Burned House,’
encapsulates the poet’s equal acceptance of the past and present” and the last stanza particularly expresses Atwood’s “aesthetic achievement” (116). On the other hand, Susanne Becker (1999) interprets Atwood’s “Morning in the Burned House” to carry
“gothic overtones in its title” and “evoke the uncanny, domestic situation of a virtual ghost speaking from the burnt breakfast table” (191).
In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast, yet here I am. (MBH 126)
To some extent, this poem indicates that the speaker not only mourns her vanished past and childhood memory, but also mourns for herself because she is burning with the burned house into the whole, and “incandescent” (MBH 127).
Images of the burned house often reappear in Atwood’s poems, especially in
“Wave” (MBH 83), “Two Dreams” (MBH 96-97), and “Up” (MBH 110-111), and “A Fire Place” (MBH 116-117). While the burned house no longer exists, it has become a symbol of loss or of the end of history. As Judith Butler claims in her “After Loss, What Then?”:
Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first. And so there is an impossibility housed at the site of this new place.
What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within it a sense of
belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it. And so this past is not actually past in the sense of “over,” since it continues as an animating absence in the presence, one that makes itself known precisely in and through the survival of anachronism itself. (426)
According to his “Mnemosyne,” Derrida writes in the wake of Paul de Man’s death:
Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the
closure of our interiorizing memory. With the nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death, since death constitutes and makes manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other than them; something outside of them within them. (M 34)
Here, in Morning in the Burned House, the image of the speaker’s father appears in her dreams in different forms. For example, in “Two Dreams,” the speaker’s father always eludes the speaker. Using Derrida’s phrase, he investigates the paradox that mourning involves remembering in order to forget. We create and imagine an image of the loved person in order to lay the loved one’s memory to rest. And then we have to try carrying on with our life in the face of loss. However, the loved one always evades our attempts to interiorize him or her. Hence, this is what Derrida avers that “failure succeeds” (M 35). This failure, as Derrida argues, is such a kind of respectful tribute or ethical necessity (M 35). In the poem the speaker dreams that she dives to find her father in the lake, but “he [the speaker’s father] was too far down.
/ He still had his hat on” (MBH 96). Then, the second dream describes that the speaker looks at her father turning away. She says,
My father is standing there with his back turned to us
in his winter parka, the hood up.
He never had one like that.
Now he’s walking away.
The bright leaves rustle, we can’t call, he doesn’t look. (MBH 97)
The images of the speaker’s father always turning away, “walking away,” which explain Derrida’s paradox of mourning in “failure succeeds.” This failure is that the father’s images evade to represent the true father “because they cannot substitute for the father, they are truer—in the sense of more faithful—representations, testifying to loss without achieving consoling substitution” (Fiamengo 2000: 158).
Through the speaker’s narration, her father’s images reveal both in retrieval and in failing. To the speaker, this failure of the father’s image is such kind of respectful homage to remember or to in memory of her father. But the father’s images often laugh at the speaker while she tries to interiorize her father’s images in the dreams,
“like clumsy drunks / lurching sideways through the doors / we open to them in sleep”
(MBH 100). In “Two Dream, 2” (MBH 99-100), the dreams are frustrated by the
speaker. The dreams of her father’s images the speaker creates fail to retrieve the father figure. In the dream, the speaker depicts that her father “is blind” and “we were trying to be cheerful,” but she “wasn’t happy to see him” (MBH 99). She describes the dreams:
we shoved them away too quickly:
from under the ground, from under the water, they clutch at us, they clutch at us,
we won’t let go. (MBH 100)
As Janice Fiamengo writes, “the surprising we at the end of the line confirms the speaker’s need to be reminded of her loss. The multiple images of the father
As Janice Fiamengo writes, “the surprising we at the end of the line confirms the speaker’s need to be reminded of her loss. The multiple images of the father