本論文的主旨在於探討瑪格麗特•愛特伍的《燒厝之晨》透過第一人稱敘述 者的方式，來凸顯哀悼與記憶的主題，來紀念作者的父親卡爾•愛特伍及其死亡， 進而分析敘述者在她父親死後的過程中所產生的敘述手法，尤其是詩學的語言展 現、個人記憶及歷史重新省察。本論文著重在愛特伍如何透過詩中敘述者的觀點 來再現父親的影像、敘述者如何和死者交涉溝通而形成的關係以及敘述者如何重 說歷史事件。換句話說，本論文強調愛特伍詩裡所側重的哀悼與記憶之間的倫理 關係及其必然性。這些面向常被批評家所忽略，批評家大部分著重在愛特伍的小 說作品，鮮少注意到愛特伍的詩有此複雜的面向。透過詩學的語言展現與文本分 析，《燒厝之晨》提供了富有張力的表現，透露出「死者」已儼然成為愛特伍的 寫作中一個十分重要的關懷。 本研究共計五章，第一章緒論說明研究動機、目的與方法。第二章分析愛特 伍詩裡的「哀悼」主題來切入，引用法國哲學家德西達的論點，討論哀悼的概念 及其哲學思想作為提供本論文的一個很重要理論基礎架構。第三章延續德西達的 論點來解釋「記憶」如何與哀悼構成一個糾結的關係。第四章跳脫出父親的影像， 選擇以個人記憶方式與家庭史來做分析，強調敘述者如何透過再現、重說故事的 方式來和死者與歷史做一個重新的溝通交涉。第五章為結論，說明解釋本論文所 選擇的文本與問題意識，追溯到早期愛特伍的寫作主題到晚期的轉變，強調「死 亡」與「哀悼」為其重要的主題發展，因此，《燒厝之晨》是愛特伍寫作生涯過 程極為重要的一本著作。
Abstract
In Morning in the Burned House (1995), Margaret Atwood (1939-) uses a first person speaker to foreground such themes as mourning and nostalgia in memory of her father Carl Atwood and of his untimely death. In my thesis, I take Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House as an example of memorial address to analyze the speaker’s mourning in the wake of her father’s death, especially the way in which she works through her poetic language performances, individual memories, and historical re-vision. My concerns are how the speaker in the poems re-presents the father’s image, how the speaker negotiates with the dead, and how the speaker re-tells the historical event in Morning in the Burned House. In other words, this thesis highlights the problematics of Atwood’s poems on the ethical relations and ethical necessity between mourning and memory. These complexities are often neglected by critics as they tend to focus on Atwood’s novels. Through the examination of Atwood’s poetic language performance and textual analysis, Morning in the Burned House offers an intensification of ongoing concern, demonstrating that the dead has been central to Atwood’s writing.
My thesis consists of five chapters with introduction and conclusion. Chapter One, “Introduction,” highlights the problematics of Morning in the Burned House. Chapter Two, “Keep Mourning in Memory,” analyzes Atwood’s mournful poems in the wake of the speaker’s father’s death. Derrida’s works of mourning and
philosophical thought will provide a very important perspective to examine Atwood’s poetry. Chapter Three, “Keep Memory in Mourning,” explores Derrida’s arguments about the entanglement of mourning and memory to reflect on the impossible
necessity of mourning. Chapter Four, “Revisioning the Dead,” delves into family’s history and language through Atwood’s “Half-hanged Mary.” Chapter Five,
Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House.
List of Abbreviations
The following are the abbreviations for Margaret Atwood’s and Jacques Derrida’s works.
Margaret Atwood:
MBH Morning in the Burned House.
NWD Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. SW Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960-1982. SPⅡ Selected Poem II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986. S Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. TS Two Solicitudes.
Jacques Derrida:
M Memoires for Paul de Man.
SM Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International.
PF Politics of Friendship. WM The Work of Mourning.
Contents
Abstract………Ⅰ Acknowledgements………..Ⅱ List of Abbreviations………Ⅲ Contents………Ⅳ
Chapter One Introduction………1
Chapter Two Keep Mourning in Memory………...23
Chapter Three Keep Memory in Mourning………...42
Chapter Four Revisioning the Dead………59
Chapter Five Conclusion……….73
Chapter One: Introduction
All writers learn from the dead. As long as you continue to write, you continue to explore the work of writers who have preceded you; you also feel judged and held to account by them. But you don’t
learn only from writers－you can learn from ancestors in all their forms. Because the dead control the past, they control the stories,
and also certain kinds of truth. (Atwood 2002: 178)
In Morning in the Burned House (1995), Margaret Atwood (1939-) uses a first person speaker to foreground such themes as mourning and nostalgia in memory of her father Carl Atwood and of his untimely death. In my thesis, I take Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House as an example of memorial address to analyze the speaker’s mourning in the wake of her father’s death, especially the way in which she works through her poetic language performances, individual memories, and historical re-vision. My concerns are how the speaker in the poems re-presents the father’s image, how the speaker negotiates with the dead, and how the speaker re-tells the historical event in Morning in the Burned House. In other words, this thesis highlights the problematics of Atwood’s poems on the ethical relations and ethical necessity between mourning and memory. These complexities are often neglected by critics as they tend to focus on Atwood’s novels. Through the examination of
Atwood’s poetic language performance and textual analysis, Morning in the Burned House offers an intensification of ongoing concern, demonstrating that the dead has been central to Atwood’s writing.
Morning in the Burned House, published almost a decade after Atwood’s collected volume Selected Poems Ⅱ (1987), marks a significant change in style and attitude. The title of the collection is personal; it also emphasizes an important place where the speaker had spent in her childhood which had been burned down. This collection of poetry reveals personal significance as it is filled with small incidents and intimate portraits. They address memory and fear, with reference to the past and present, reality and imagination. The poems are marked not only with those of the wry humor and witty irony as found in Atwood’s earlier poems but they are arranged in a moving elegiac sequence on the death of the speaker’s father.
The first section of Morning in the Burned House describes ordinary life with emotional emptiness, fear, frustration, grief, and comedy. When the sad child mourns, “I am not the favorite child,” the poem concludes tartly, “My darling, when it comes / right down to it / and the light fails and the fog rolls in,” that at the end of death, “none of us is; / or else we all are” (MBH 4-5). “February,” with its comic tone, portraits the cat “settles on my chest, breathing his breath / of burped-up meat and musty sofas, / purring like a washboard.” The cat bids the comic way of telling
“whether or not I’m dead. / If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am / he’ll think of something” (MBH 11). In “Asparagus” the speaker’s friend complains that he is in love with two women. In the speaker’s voice we could sense a certain tinge of irony. She says, “if I should let my hair go grey / so my advice will be better. / I could wrinkle up my eyelids, look wise” (MBH 13). The speaker pretends herself as an innocent listener, but she is astonished at his stupidities.
Section Two consists of dramatic monologues uttered by famous and powerful women of myth, describing their stories with black humor and irony. For instance, “Daphne, Laura and So Forth” (MBH 26-27) depicts the destiny of women who are silenced by men. In “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing,” the speaker Helen warns, “Try me. / This is a torch song. / Touch me and you’ll burn” (MBH 36). Section Three is focused on the powerful and impressive long poem “Half-hanged Mary” (MBH 58-69), which is about a Massachusetts woman in 1680 who was left hanged all night and failed to die. The woman is Atwood’s favorite ancestor Mary Webster. The powerful phrases, “Before, I was not a witch. / But now I am one” (MBH 67) suggest an ironic meaning which represents and embodies history of loss. “Marsh Language” mourns the dying of language and the loss of humanity. The “hard” language has replaced the human connection, and we are losing our “mothertongue” and “the sibilants and gutturals, / . . . the syllable for ‘I’
that did not mean separate” (MBH 54). Atwood conveys a horrific vision at the end of the poem that human language is threatened by cold computers or “the language of metal” (MBH 55).
The memorial poems of Section Four are written on the occasion of the father’s illness and death. The poems describe the speaker’s family history, childhood memories, “such minutiae” (MBH 92), and her mourning. In “Bored,” the speaker recalls that she was bored as a young girl doing such chores to help her father in the bush, and also realizes, “Now I wouldn’t be bored. / Now I would know too much” (MBH 91). In “Two Dreams, 2” (MBH 96-97), the speaker and her sister compare their dreams about the dying father because “such dreams are relentless” (MBH 97). Their father is not the way he looks: “in his winter parka, the hood up. / He never had one like that” (MBH 97).
Section Five occurs after the death. The bereaved speaker is left to struggle for survive. After the moving sequences of mourning, death evokes the speaker herself to understand, “You own nothing. / You were a visitor, time after time” (MBH 109). Concluding section five and this volume, “Morning in the Burned House” (MBH 126-7) ends with the paradoxes of memories and the mixes of time, half in the past and half in the present.
House and its connections to mourning and memory. In my reading, the first poem of the fourth section, “Man in a Glacier” (MBH 81-2) thematizes the connection between the father and the speaker. Drawing on French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s treatment of mourning, this thesis presents a reading suggesting that mourning helps console the speaker as a survivor in terms of family crisis. And, the last poem of the book, “Morning in the Burned House,” (MBH 126-7) provides in loss and mourning modes motifs that have been central to the whole book. As Atwood describes, this poetical volume is “motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality－ by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (NWD 156).
In the Politics of Friendship Derrida advocates that one must always die before the other. This is the law of friendship and thus of mourning. While one must see the other die, one of them will live on. The surviving one will be left to bury and to mourn the dead. Only one of them will carry the death of the other and the mourning. As Derrida points out, “Survival – that is the other name of mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited” (PF13). The survivor does not live without mourning. In my view, mourning is the central motif of Atwood’s poems and I would like to explore ethical responsibility and politics of mourning in relation to the dead to examine the place of Morning in the Burned House in Atwood’s literary
career.
Morning in the Burned House displays a distinctive transformation in terms of Atwood’s theme, tone and subject matters. As Kathryn Van Spanckeren states, “this distinguished volume, the first since the publication of Selected Poems Ⅱ in 1987, breaks new ground in its use of autobiographical materials” (106). For Atwood, autobiographical writing plays an important part because it is a way of self-discovery, self-determination, and self-construction. Thus in an interview, Atwood talks about her specific writing experience as follows:
I wanted a literary home for all those vanished things from my own childhood—the marbles, the Eaton’s catalogues, the Watchbird Watching You, the smells, sounds, colors. The textures. Part of fiction writing I think is a celebration of the physical world we know －and when you’re writing about the past, it’s a physical world that’s vanished. So the impulse is partly elegiac. And partly it’s an attempt to stop or bring back time. (Ingersoll 1990: 236-37)
Writing about “the past” and those “vanished things” can be regarded as Atwood’s definite writing concern. Atwood makes her efforts to constitute her narrative identity in terms of such themes as an intimation of lost memory, of transience, of disappeared things, of the dead and thus of mortality, constructed a world in flux
among her works.1 Loss or death is an important topic for Atwood in various stages
of writing and generic forms.
Unfortunately, on 5 January 1993, a striking event happened: Carl Atwood suffered a severe heart attack and died (Cooke 310). It was a crucial literary transition in Atwood’s writing career because Morning in the Burned House is a work to the memory of Atwood’s father, of those vanished things, and dedicated to her family (Sullivan 328).
According to Linda Wagner-Martin, Atwood’s remarkable literary career falls into three stages: in the beginning, Atwood established herself as “poet and novelist,” it was her poetry that built up her reputation. From her earlier publications, Atwood’s poems were “wryly lyric and blunt” in order to challenge readers’ expectations. In the second stage Atwood became a “mother” with her daughter born during the mid-1970. Mother image dominated Atwood’s second phase as a poet. As Atwood described her becoming “instantly warm and maternal” (SW 14), her poetry at the time dealt with “family dynamics” and the relationships between “mothers and daughters.” The third change turned Atwood’s position from being a “feminist voice” (71-72). Atwood challenged not only the inequities about gender and sex, but also addressed social injustice issues. Atwood mentioned that her
1
One of Atwood’s lectures at Cambridge University entitled “Negotiating with the Dead: Who makes the trip to the Underworld and why?” suggests that death and the writer’s responsibility to the dead are main concerns for Atwood.
involvement with social issues and human rights does not separate from writing. She explains, “When you begin to write, you deal with your immediate surroundings; as you grow, your immediate surroundings become larger. There’s no contradiction . . . I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me” (SW 15). These changes were connected with each other. While Atwood found out that the social milieu and ills destroyed her literary prospect, she started to break out of literary conventions she found confining.
In addition to the shifts, it is necessary to bring our picture into Atwood’s writing process in poetry. It was poetry that established her reputation from the outset. In Karen Stein’s argument, Atwood’s poetry can be divided into two parts. The first of them was from 1961 to 1975 (especially Double Persephone, The Circle Game, The Animal in That Country, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, and Procedures for Underground), a period when Atwood’s world could be characterized by “a stark and Gothic landscape, a harsh Northern geography of stunted islands, bedrock ridges, flooded forest, drowned worlds, frozen terrain, arctic wastes, and lakes that conceal drowned people” (9). Moreover, Atwood’s characters and personae were more archetypes than particular individuals in the early poems. While with the publication of Atwood’s influential critical book, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature (1972), she pointed out that in Canada many writers saw the cold northern landscape as a salient metaphor. This book considered in particular the notion of victim complex and the problem of victimization. She contended that survival is the Canadian symbol, because a lot of works, past and present must struggle to survive in a new land. Atwood thematically questioned the binary oppositions in her poems; she listed the objectionable: “surface and depth, city and nature, speech and silence, visibility and invisibility, the observer and the observed, rationality and irrationality, the real and the mythic, entrapment and freedom, life and death” (10). In this period, Atwood’s poetry continued to elaborate and explore the Gothic world of Atwood’s country.
Instead of Atwood’s earlier stereotypical persona and victimhood position, in the second part, the poems from 1976 to 1995, Atwood displayed in her later poems (including Two-Headed Poems, True Stories, Interlunar, Morning in the Burned House) a wider “tonal, emotional, and thematic range and versatility . . . The world of these poems is larger than that of earlier poems” (110). In the earlier poems, the persona often viewed herself as a victim. In contrast, the narrator was “a crone, a witness, an older and wiser woman who observes life’s events with sympathy, humor, anger, indignation, and compassion” (110). Characters in earlier works were often archetypal; however, we could find out particular roles such as husbands, daughters,
and fathers in the later pomes. To read Atwood’s poetry, especially the latest volume Morning in the Burned House, we may discover that “[t]he mood frequently turns to elegy. Awareness of mortality suffuses these poems” (110). This book can be regarded as a new break in Atwood’s poetic career, and also to be a significant transformation in her life as well.
To illustrate this transformation of Atwood’s writing career, we may better take a look at Atwood’s personal life history. Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario. She was the second of three children. Her parents came from Nova Scotia. Her father, Carl Edmund Atwood was a professor of zoology, and her mother Margaret Dorothy Killam was a nutritionist. The Atwoods spent most of their time traveling because of Carl Atwood’s forest-insect research station was in northern Quebec. Atwood was carried into the woods with a backpack when she was only six months old, as Atwood later recalled, “this landscape became my hometown” (NWD 7). Carl Atwood built a cabin around Quebec, where Atwood noted that cabin itself was “on a granite point a mile by water from a Quebec village so remote that the road went in only two years before I was born” (SW 107).2
Atwood lived in the city during the wintertime, but she also spent long summer periods in the wilderness of Quebec and Ontario until she was twelve. As a result of
2 In Margaret Atwood: A Biography, Nathalie Cooke writes, “the Atwood’s cabin, by the way, was not finished until Margaret was twenty-seven. It still has neither nor running water” (22).
these extraordinary childhood experiences, Atwood developed a long-lasting interest in the wilderness and described this landscape in her writing.
Atwood’s poetry and novel have won lot of awards. Her self-printed and published poetry collection, Double Persephone, for example, won the E. J. Pratt prize (1961). In 1966, The Circle Game won the Governor General’s Award for poetry. The works were followed by several poetry collections and Atwood’s first novel The Edible Woman (1969), establishing her as both poet and novelist during the 1970s. In 1972, the publication of Surfacing and Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature establish her to be an important cultural critic and writer. Several remarkable novels followed, among them, The Lady Oracle (1976), Bodily Harm (1982), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), The Robber Bride (1993), Alias Grace (1996), brought Atwood international fame. She eventually won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. And more recently, her new novel Oryx and Crake (2003) was again shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003.
As Atwood’s marvelous oeuvre evolves, a number of critics have focused their attention mostly on Atwood’s novel rather than on her poetry. In Taiwan, for instance, people tend to know Atwood through her novels instead of her poetry.3
3 There has a research project named “Emergent English Literatures/ New Literatures in English: Crossing the Boundary” in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, under National Science Council from 1995 to 1998. The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao-tung University, takes charge of this project to construct and organize the significant Taiwanese scholars’ perspectives to research literary works from various English spoken writers. In NSC project, Margaret Atwood is one of the writers to be focused on her work; however, her novels remain the most
Atwood’s poetry has been slighted. Her novels have raised unfairly a series of discussions and questions filled with Biblical, historical, social, political, literary, and mythical allusions, and also in other forms of symbolism, satire, intertextuality, and parody. As result, Atwood’s works have widely been studied by scholars from all over the world. She acquires the status of international acclaim.
Hence, I plan to examine Atwood’s most recent poetry collection, Morning in the Burned House as a text on mourning exploring the tensions between loss and epiphany, longing and belonging with a thematic reading to interpret Atwood’s poetic narration and landscape. In other words, what concerns my thesis is not solely the theoretical practice but the interrelation between mourning and memory in Atwood’s poems. It also emphasizes Atwood’s personal change in her writing career because of her father’s death. For the tragedy urges Atwood to look back on her family’s history, cultural memory, and individual experience as personal testimony.
Quite a few critics and scholars have commented on the importance of this particular personal transition in Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House. The work is regarded as a substantial departure in her poetry career. Critic such as Kathryn Van Spanckeren acclaims that Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House traces a “self-oriented mode to a more human vision” and it is also a “memento mori, a skull popular genre to be researched rather than poetry. The research paper is collected in Remapping the Territory of Literary Studies: Perspectives on Foreign Literatures from Taiwan (1999). In addition, Atwood’s novels have increasingly become the topics of dissertations for graduate students in Taiwan.
on the desk, a look at death from a thousand angels” (106), and Charlene Diehl-Jones claims that this volume is “a new turn of mind” to shape Atwood’s well-structured prose poems (30); John Bemrose states Atwood “uses grief . . . to break away from that airless poetry into a new freedom” (85); George Woodcock describes Atwood’s poetry as “a great deal different from the earlier work; less acerbic perhaps, more resigned to aging and to loss in general,” (25) and Nathalie Cooke characterizes tersely Atwood’s poems as “intensely personal, strikingly so” (312). Indeed, Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House unfolds a “new” sentimentality with mourning and loss, in which Atwood makes a claim to her emotional authenticity in order to set free her traumatic experience of losing her father.
Several recent researches upon Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House could be divided into two different perspectives. The first group of critics focuses on such topics as female identity, feminist vision, mythical storytelling, aesthetic interpretation and trickster narratives, applying them to a diverse group of poems. In Karen Stein’s essay (1999), she emphasizes that Atwood’s poetry is full of “political undertones” and “storytelling” skills (111). Stein advocates the central figure of Morning in the Burned House to be the survivor, who has “seen a great deal and now observes life’s predicaments with sympathy and wry amusement” (122). Her essay provides a comprehensive theory in general view; she does not find clues. In “Margaret
Atwood’s Poetry 1966-1995” (2000), Lothar Honnighausen treats Atwood’s mourning poems as “autobiographical urge” and “aesthetic achievement” (116). As to Charlotte Beyer (2000), her article focuses on the analysis of “feminist revision of myth, language and spirituality” (276) with critical and theoretical interpretations to see Atwood’s recent poetry collections Interlunar and Morning in the Burned House. Kathryn Van Spanckeren (2003), in “Humanizing the Fox: Atwood’s Poetic Tricksters and Morning in the Burned House,” offers the trickster, fox-like persona as the way to examine how “tricksterism” (103) develops in Atwood’s poetry.
Some other critics assume that mortality and loss suffuse the whole collection. A modern elegiac reading is for Sara Jamieson (2001), which delves into the conventions of pastoral elegy to analyze Atwood’s elegies. As Jamieson asserts, through Atwood’s poems, Atwood works through a genre that “has traditionally precluded feminine subjectivity, as well as the challenge of writing consoling memorial poetry from within a secular, materialistic society in which death is seldom discussed in public” (39). Here, morning is most frequently interpreted as mourning by critics. For instance, Van Spanckeren points out “[w]e witness an elegiac new ‘morning’ within ‘mourning’” (118). Jamieson entitles her essay “Mourning in the Burned House” to stress the importance of mourning in Atwood’s poetry. Along the line, Janice Fiamengo (2000) concludes 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). Similarly, Fiamengo’s essay, “’A Last Time For This Also’: Margaret Atwood’s Texts of Mourning,” calls attention to the identity performance of mourning. Fiamengo also concentrates on the way in which memory is suffused with Atwood’s mournful poems in emphasizing its connections with her previous poetical works by intertextual analyses.
As Fiamengo’s essay was developed before Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001) was published, it did not deal with mourning further with its theoretical exploration and interpretation. Thus Fiamengo admits that “[a]lthough I have not explored Derrida’s arguments in full, his reflections on the impossible necessity of mourning lie behind many of my thoughts about Morning in the Burned House” (161). Fiamengo’s argument is inspired by Derrida’s Memoires for Paul de Man (1989). Therefore, this thesis is a further attempt to deal with Atwood’s poetry with Derrida’s The Work of Mourning and Memoires for Paul de Man to see how Atwood’s poetic persona’s mourning and memory can be better understood.
In a number of books, especially since Memoires for Paul de Man, Derrida has associated the question of affirmation with mourning and with a sort of fragile memory. In the context of Derrida’s writing, he elaborates Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to focus on the loss of the loved one.
Notably Derrida writes about the death of his friend Louis Marin in “The Force of Mourning” in The Work of Mourning. In The Gift of Death (1995), Derrida discusses the story of Abraham and Isaac to examine the project of a philosophical ethics, and he also ponders abstraction loss in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994) to enrich his argument on Marx and his fate in western Europe in the 1990s, however, Derrida also speculates on the loss of a loved one Chris Hani, who is the South African Communist Party leader. For Derrida, mourning loss is interminable, “mourning in fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept” (SM 97). Reflecting on “work of mourning,” Derrida says, “All work in general works at mourning. In and of itself. Even when it has the power to give birth, even and especially when it plans to bring something to light and let it be seen” (WM 142-43). Although Atwood’s early work had provided mourning, for example, in Surfacing, where a father dies and the protagonist as daughter searches for him. Atwood’s writing can be seen as an attempt to handle emotion such as sadness and loss, but eventually Atwood realizes that lamentation cannot be dealt with because the fact is that “[n]othing gets finished, / not dying, not mourning; / the dead repeat themselves” (MBH 100). Here, we could see that mourning is still an ongoing process connected with the dead. My analysis owes much to that of Derrida’s
concept of mourning, in his astonishing books The Work of Mourning and Memoires for Paul de Man to examine how do we let the dead speak and how else do we speak. Mourning is always in relation to memory. “The memory is no friend,” the speaker said to her father in the hospital, but “it can only tell you” what the speaker’s father had left and remembered (MBH 88). In other words, as Derrida says, “All we seem to have left is memory.” (M 33). Memory, in Atwood’s poems, is always kept in a way of linking to a sense of loss. Atwood repeats her poetic personas, events, settings, and images because these repetitions are the ways of seeking some kinds of consolation and compensation of loss and of mourning.
Atwood admits that these poems are about the memory of her father’s life with particular detail, and more importantly it is also to bear witness to a relationship with the deceased. Here, this kind of relationship with the dead can be considered in terms of an ethical relation between the father and the daughter. In Atwood’s case, to use Avishai Margalit’s argument, father-daughter relation is good for two reasons, positive and negative. The positive reason is that father-daughter relations are caring relations. The negative reason: the relations do not violate moral demands. Such good relations, we are discussing about the goodness of the relation (86).
This sort of goodness of relation is different from Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They both have written angry poems or elegies for their fathers. Plath uses her angry
poems or elegies to “express anger creatively,” and “fury flows out into the figure of the letters” (McCullough and Hughes 1982: 273, 256). As to Sexton, her early poem named “A Curse Against Elegies” obviously demonstrates her relationship between the dead and the living. She writes:
I am tried of all the dead. They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone. [ . . . ] I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing. (60)
According to Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning g: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), he concludes that “While the daughter in Plath’s ‘Daddy’ returns her father’s violence, Sexton’s poem paradoxically takes psychic retribution in its use of an impersonal tone—a tone that mirrors her father’s impersonality. . . . Like Plath, Sexton would also use the genre of the elegy to exorcise her father’s memory and block any legacy that may penetrate her defenses” (307-8). Therefore, I would like to distinguish that Atwood’s relation to her father is different from Plath’s and Sexton’s.
poetic language and representation for her intimate reflection. To Atwood, the dead only can be recalled but cannot be presented. Consequently, Atwood recounts personal memories of the deceased through the speaker in Morning in the Burned House: finding a “box of slides” (MBH 81) that contain the pictures of the speaker’s father with her brother in the cellar, bringing “fresh flowers” (MBH 93) to her father in the hospital, doing “such minutiae” (MBH 92) with her father, and recounting history of witch-hunt with the speaker “Half-hanged Mary” (MBH 58). Each text, as Fiamengo writes, like individual memory, is “faithful both in attempting retrieval and in failing” (149).
In “Mnemosyne,” Derrida advocates that mourning involves remembering in order to forget. We represent and create various images of the loved person in our memories in order to embed the loved one’s memories to rest and continue with life in the face of loss; however, the beloved other always eschews our representation and thus mourning must be a failure. This failure is a kind of ethical necessity (M 35). Furthering this point, this shows the ways in which Atwood’s poetic representations and strategies reflect a fruitful and constructive exploration of Derrida’s ideas by way of textual analysis. I argue that mourning is not only just an ethical mode for Atwood but also actually for all human beings or humanity in general.
Following “Chapter One: Introduction,” “Chapter Two: Keep Mourning in Memory” analyzes Atwood’s mournful poems in the wake of the speaker’s father’s death. Derrida’s works of mourning and philosophical thought will provide a very important perspective to examine Atwood’s poetry. A dominant theme, mourning links the general background to the twelve poems collected in section four. Derrida’s ideas such as mourning and memory are very much relevant to our understanding of Atwood’s poetry, which seems to be about finding and articulating ways of being in the world which enable people to define themselves and each other in spiritual and ethical ways. Through the speaker’s storytelling, Morning in the Burned House reveals the ways in which how mourning and memory become intertwined.
“Chapter Three: Keep Memory in Mourning” explores Derrida’s arguments about the entanglement of mourning and memory to reflect on the impossible necessity of mourning. Memory is at issue in relation to mourning. In her Morning in the Burned House Atwood constantly repeats her images and poetic personas to articulate and construct those specific details, childhood episodes and everyday life. Through the speaker’s narration, these repetitions are ways to bear witness to Atwood’s relation to her departed father, and to compensate for her memory and loss. These repetitions intensify the poet’s explorations of loss as integral part of the mourning.
“Chapter Four: Revisioning the Dead” delves into family’s history and language through Atwood’s “Half-hanged Mary” (MBH 58-69). This chapter will appropriate the American poet Adrienne Rich’s argument, advocated in her seminal essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision” (1971). Rich wrote in a feminist context, but for Atwood the definition of re-vision offered a very special perspective to see history. To Rich,
Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival . . . We need to know the writing of the past and to know it differently . . . not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (167-168)
In this regard, Atwood’s long poem “Half-hanged Mary” can be seen as the crucial text in response to Rich. Atwood revisits her own ancestry and personal family history. This chapter attempts to argue that Atwood’s “Half-hanged Mary” explores history as a continuous engagement with loss, memory and its remains. In “Mourning Remains,” Eng and Kazanjian suggest that “This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimaging of the future” (4). Mourning, on one hand, means to relinquishe the lost loved person (or object) in order to lay histories to rest, and on the other hand, to unfold a relation
to the past and the present, so that the dead and the living may gain new perspectives on lost person (object).
“Chapter Five: Conclusion” serves to conclude this thesis with an attempt to recap major themes of Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House. Examining the significance of this collection that establishes Atwood’s literary career. My conclusion will comment on my findings and also evaluate Atwood’s literary development in the future.
Chapter Two: Keep Mourning in Memory
To speak of mourning or of anything else. And that is why
whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible -- and that mourning is interminable. Inconsolable.
Irreconcilable. (Derrida 2001: 143)
We must keep one incontrovertible fact in mind, a single, humble fact: the scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it was less so. (The reality, for him, was that first life and then death had taken Beatrice from him.) Forever absent from
Beatrice, alone and perhaps humiliated, he imagined the scene in order to imagine that he was with her. (Borges 1999: 304)
In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud writes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (243). Freud’s essay proffers the theoretical frame for Jacques Derrida to organize and develop his concept of mourning. Derrida takes up Freud’s argument on the “loss of a loved person” to elaborate his work of mourning with a provocative philosophical and theoretical thinking. His recent book The Work of Mourning (2001) is a collection in memory of those friendships in the wake of death. Among
the well-known figures are Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabes, Joseph Riddel, Michel Serviere, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
One must always pass away before the other, while one must see the other die. The surviving one will be left to memorize, to mourn, and to bury the other. In Politics of Friendship (1997), Derrida writes:
Survival – that is the other name of mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited. For one does not survive without
mourning . . . [T]he difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship; the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship. (PF 13-14)
explore how death structures a friendship, and draws attention to a series of questions and aporias of how to confront both mourning or its politics and ethical responsibility in his recent work. Moreover, Derrida also speculates how to remember someone, and what it means to mourn the dead. These writings not only shed light on Derrida’s relation to his friends, but also on some of the prominent themes of Derrida’s entire oeuvre: mourning, memory, friendship, time, and the “gift of death.” In a sense, as Brault and Naas (2001) argue that Derrida’s texts of mourning “not only speak of or about mourning but are themselves texts of or in mourning” (3).
In addition to The Work of Mourning, notably Derrida writes about the death of his friend Paul de Man in Memoires for Paul de Man (1989), and discusses the pain of losing a friend. In this book, Derrida’s argument about mourning adheres to a paradoxical logic. Ironically, he also hints that remembering is to forget. We shape an image of the loved person to hold the one’s memory to rest, and then keep on with life to confront the losses. The loved other, however, resists our efforts of “interiorization.” Thus, mourning fails. This kind of failure is what constitutes Derrida’s concerns in terms of ethical responsibility and faithful fidelity. We can thus understand that Derrida attempts to remember de Man with his “rhetoric of mourning” to ask why the aporia of mourning that indicate “success fails” and “failure succeeds” (M 34-35). In “By Force of Mourning,” Derrida examines the
aporia of mourning further:
[F]or this is the law, the law of mourning, and the law of the law, always in mourning, that it would have to fail in order to succeed. In order to succeed, it would well have to fail, to fail well. It would well have to fail, for this is what has to be so, in failing well. That is what would have to be. And while it is always promised, it will never be assured. (WM 144)
The aporia of mourning where we may be caught by the following of a friend’s death is already there and at work, at the end of a living relationship, from the very beginning of the friendship. Hence, as we shall see that mourning also begins before death. Writing in the wake of Edmond Jabes’s death, Derrida explains his experience of aporia: “There was already in this first reading a certain experience of apophatic silence, of absence, the desert, paths opened up off all the beaten tracks, deported memory—in short, mourning, every impossible mourning. Friendship had thus already come to be reflected in mourning, in the eyes of the poem, even before friendship—I mean before the friendship that later brought us together” (WM 122). He also writes in his essay on a knowledge of Sarah Kofman’s death, “From the first moment, friends become,” says Derrida, “as a result of their situation, virtual survivors, actually virtual or virtually actual, which amounts to just about the same
thing. Friend knows this, and friendship breathes this knowledge, breathes it right up to expiration, right up to the last breath” (WM 171).
In Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, these addresses are not only about or speak of mourning but also bear witness to a singularity of relationship with the deaths of friends and colleagues. However, Derrida’s concept of ethical relation is influenced and inspired from German philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s (1906-1995) ethics and concept of responsibility. As the critic Simon Critchley (2002) argues, Levinas’s “one big thing” is expressed in his thesis that “ethics is first philosophy, where ethics is understood as a relation of infinite responsibility to the other person” (6). Levinas has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Blanchot, Lyotard, and Irigary. It is this ethical relation to the other person that is connected with every one of us. This philosophical thought of ethical relation makes thematic in Derrida’s work.
Derrida’s ideas are very much relevant to Atwood’s poetry. In drawing attention to these personal and mournful texts, we realize that, after all, we cannot mourn for those another has mourned or not in the same way at least. Therefore, we shall go back and reread what we have read, take up what has left us through reading those works of mourning. This chapter endeavors to analyze Atwood’s mournful poems in the wake of her father’s death. Derrida’s works of mourning and
philosophical thought provide a very important perspective to examine Atwood’s poetry.
In Morning in the Burned House, memory is at issue in relation to mourning. Atwood begins the sequence by recalling memory and exploring mourning and loss involved in peculiar form of storytelling. She manifests to construct a proper memorial to her father. Consequently, she starts the first poem of section four, “Man in a Glacier,” to thematize the connection between father and the speaker. This poem evokes the speaker’s loss and desire of preservation of the father, the dead, the photograph or even the image. Atwood enables the speaker to prefigure mourning for the father, as the speaker / sister and her brother find a “box of slide” (MBH 81) in the cellar. Those slides are pictures of their father. The speaker shows her father’s photograph,
and here’s my father, alive or else preserved, younger than all of us now, dark-haired and skinny,
in baggy trousers, woolen legs tucked into those lace-up boots of our ancestors, by a lake, feeding a picnic fire (MBH 81)
thinly / with fading colours” (MBH 81-82), the speaker remains that her father’s image is “there. There still” (MBH 82). In this poem of mourning for her lost father, as we shall see that the speaker invests individual emotion to the memory of her father’s photographic image as absence. Clearly, the speaker bears witness to her relation to the loved person, her father in the photograph, and she tries to preserve it. Thus by laying particular stress on the image of the father, the photograph replaces the lost father for the speaker. In “By Force of Mourning,” Derrida discusses on Louis Marin’s final book on the power of image, he depicts:
[T]he image commonly used to characterize mourning is that of an interiorization (an idealizing incorporation, introjection,
consumption of the other). . . We 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 158-159)
the “box of slides” and “fading colours” of photographs. In other words, memory itself is the representation of images. As Derrida mentions that they are all images “in us,” only images. When the speaker sees her father’s picture:
This was all we got, this echo, this freeze-framed
simulacrum or slight imprint,
in answer to our prayers for everlastingness (MBH 82)
The father’s images are also the left memory that the speaker could preserve. While the speaker sees her father’s photograph, in the some way, its image of the father also looks at the speaker. So the speaker is looked at by her father’s image from the picture which is can be seen as such a force that constructs her living, her subjectivity, and her mourning. This is what Derrida states the force of image:
The image sees more than it is seen. The image looks at us . . . Louis Marin is outside and he is looking at me, he himself, and I am an image for him. At this very moment. There where I can say cogito, sum, I know that I am an image for the other and am looked at by the other, even and especially by the mortal other. I move right before my eyes, and the force of this image is irreversible. Louis Marin is looking at me, and it is for this, for him, that I am here
this evening. He is my law, the law, and I appear before him, before his word and his gaze. In my relationship to myself, he is here in me before me, stronger or more forceful than I. (WM160)
One of Derrida’s central motif about mourning is “in us.” The dead must and can be only “for us.” As Brault and Nsaa comment, “Fidelity consists in mourning and mourning—at least in a first moment-- consists in interiorizing the other and recognizing that if we are to give the dead anything it can now be only in us, the living” (9). In this regard, everything we receive from and give to the dead will remain among ourselves. In the poem, “Man in a Glacier,” (MBH 81-82) Atwood begins her mourning text for her father Carl Atwood by way of preservation of his image to reduce her sense of loss. This poem unfolds the entangled relationship between memory preservation and loss, and thereby contain death by creating a lasting image of the loved person, that is, Atwood’s deceased father. Hence, this poem reveals a state arising from a loss of the dying person about whom tremendous amount of effort has been invented both in writing poetry and in mourning the dead. In the seventh poem of this sequence, “Flowers,” Atwood describes that she brings flowers to her dying father in the hospital, replacing the place of the old bouquet with a fresh one. The speaker depicts that the “greenish water” (MBH 93) of flowers smells “like dirty teeth” (MBH 93), and cuts the stems with “surgical
scissors” (MBH 93) which borrowed from the “nursing station” (MBH 93). The speaker sits silently beside her father in the sickroom, and hears different kinds of voices flood them— ticking the “little bells” (MBH 93), trailing the “rubbery footsteps of strangers” (MBH 93), and whispering “all around of the air-conditioner” (MBH 93). Then, they do not talk with each other. The speaker’s father cannot hear, and also cannot see her “because he won’t open his eyes” (MBH 93).
In the meanwhile, the nurses coming with “large and capable” (MBH 94) hands move her father carefully in the deathbed. Their professional deeds generate the speaker’s anxiety and she looks upon the rest of family are “helpless amateurs” (MBH 94). She cannot offer any real help at all. So she can only “sit there, watching the flowers / in their pickle jar” (MBH 94). The image of jar, here, can be seen as a form of death, like death in the hospital as confinement. “He is asleep, or not” (MBH 94), says the speaker, “he looks erased” (MBH 95). Her father is incapable of opening his eyes, of responding, and even of hearing. Here, communication between the speaker and her father completely fails. As Derrida writes in the wake of de Man’s death, “Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence or a refusal to share one’s sadness” (M xvi). Language, in this poem, is a failure before the excess of sadness and grief.
She recalls that last canoe trip with her father: “[t]here will be a last time for this also” (MBH 95). The next two lines are to think that perhaps she will die some day just like her father. Eventually, the speaker realizes that
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers, even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then, (MBH 95)
In “Flowers,” Atwood associates personal experience with both the speaker and her memories of her father in order to express mourning and loss for her lost father. To the speaker, her father remains alive in her memory. She finds herself at a loss that she may be losing her father, but still wants to save him if possible. In the last line, the speaker says that “hoping I could still save him” (MBH 95), even though she knows she cannot. This shows that the speaker not only mourns for her father’s death, but also muses over the essence of death.
Awareness of death is also cruel and real to the speaker in “The Time.” The setting of this poem is also in the hospital in which the smell is mixed with “[t]he sweet, dire smell of hospitals, / stale piss and disinfectant, / and baby powder” (MBH
98). The family stays together waiting for the time of her father’s death. The speaker’s brother speaks to the speaker, “You’d better come down” (MBH 98). A monologue of the speaker says, “It’s the time. I know death when I see it. / There’s a clear look” (MBH 98). When the nurse asks, “Has anyone been away?”(MBH 98), the speaker said “Me” (MBH 98). The nurse says “Ah” (MBH 98). The Atwood family still have to wait until their father appears. The speaker describes her dying father “winced / like pulling off a bandage, / he frowned” (MBH 98). Finally, her mother said, “I need some time / with him. Not very long. Alone” (MBH 98). The sequential introduction of family numbers, such as, “my brother,” “I,” “my sister,” and “my mother,” echoes the traditional and temporal procession of mourners. Here, as we shall see that the Atwoods do not speak too many words, only short sentences to reply or response. Word fails when it approaches death. In this poem, Atwood suggests that such experience of the joyless and bleak deadness reveals the time is crucial but we also need “some time” to bear, and to be “alone.” This ordinary, short, and simple poem illuminates Atwood’s employment of thematic storytelling in her poetry for representing mourning and loss.
In “Two Dreams,” dreams of searching for the father in water (diving into a lake) and fire in the burned cabin seems to predict the death of the father in this poem. The second and also the last dream is that the speaker dreams her father is distant and
she cannot catch him. They are up on the hill, seeing “the small cabin that burned down, / each window zinced with frost” (MBH 96). The speaker just can watch him disappear into the wood. She says ruefully, “Such dreams are relentless” (MBH 97). Her father completely ignores the speaker’s presence in the dream. The speaker ends this poem by saying that she is at the loss because her father is not the one who she knows before in her dreams.
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)
This poem is also about dream. In “Two Dreams, 2,” the speaker and her sister compare their dreams concerning the dying father. They dream different kinds of father images, seeming to laugh at the speaker’s attempt to remember him, “like clumsy drunks / lurching sideways through the doors / we open to them in sleep” (MBH 100). Their father’s images appear in the dreams, says the speaker, which are
all
slurred guests, never entirely welcome, even those we have loved the most,
especially those we have loved the most, returning from where we shoved them away too quickly (MBH 100)
These images of dreams still cannot represent for their true father. In other words, the images of father fail to represent the one who they desire truly and cannot substitute for the father. This as Derrida suggests: successful mourning of the deceased other actually fails because the other person becomes a part of us, and then the other person no longer seems to be the other. So, we bear and remember the other in us. On the other hand, failure to mourn the other’s death is to succeed, because the image of the other’s presence is prolonged (M 35). Hence, the latter can be suitable to interpret Atwood’s condition of mourning and loss as failure succeeds. To some extent, Atwood displays that how dream image and death are known to us (the living or survivors) are able to work through our grief: “from under the ground, from under the water / they clutch at us, they clutch at us, / we won’t let go” (MBH 100).
voice about cultural ritual of death. This poem can be read as a memento mori poem. As Jahan Ramazani argues, poetry has increasingly become “an important cultural space for mourning the dead” (1). It addresses the speaker’s dead father, with lots of survivors coming to pay respects to their dead ones:
It’s Christmas, and the green wreaths, festive and prickly, with their bright red holly berries, dot the graves,
the shocked mouths grief has made and keeps on making:
round silent Ohs, leafy and still alive
that hurt when you touch them.
Look, they are everywhere: Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. What else can be said? (MBH 101)
The poet heightens such unspeakable state for those survivors (of course, including the poet) who hardly say a word but just “oh”s with soundless, and oh after oh, nothing more. The poet ponders over the cemetery ritual or the essence of death
while death happens:
Strange how we decorate pain. These ribbons, for instance,
and the small hard teardrops of blood. Who are they for?
Do we think the dead care? (MBH 101)
“Who are they for?” asks the poet; they can be the mournful poems (or elegies), the wreaths, the tears, the pains, the emblems of death like the ribbons, or even our mourning. The poet’s focus on the decoration of death may imply itself as ornamental and trivial. Perhaps Derrida’s argument could evoke and deepen the way of thinking about this stanza, as he asks:
What, then, is true mourning? What can we make of it? Can we make of it? Can we make it, as we say in French that we “make” our mourning? I repeat: “can we?” And the question is double: are we capable of doing it, do we have the power to do it? But also, do we have the right? Is it right to do so? Is it also the duty and movement of fidelity? (M 31)
“The bare trees crack overhead” (MBH 102) as those mourners bring their flowers which are “stiff with ice ” (MBH 102) placing them in front of the grave. Flowers
are one of the most important symbols in the funerals. In this respect, its image is often connected with death. According to social anthropologist Jack Goody’s The Culture of Flowers (1993), “Flowers are particularly associated with rites to the dead” (375). In Michael Taussig’s latest essay “The Language of Flowers” (2003), he also mentions, “[F]lowers and death go together in the Christian world, with a long history of use on graves and in funerals. Could it be that flowers frequent death because they are seen as bearers of life and that this “mix” is what enters so naturally into our everyday life-rituals as something superbly sardonic, savage, cruel, and uplifting” (110).
Indeed, flowers plays an important role, for instance, in “Flowers” and “Oh,” where the settings of Atwood’s poems are apparently located on sites of death: the cemetery, the hospital, and the nursing home. Atwood writes these poems in memory of her dying father, but “aporia of mourning” and condition of loss are actually what she cares about as we can see from her beautiful and humane poetic lines. In the final stanza, Atwood presents mortality as the seasonal interchange and its regeneration:
In the spring the flowers will melt, also the berries,
We will go around In these circles for a time, winter summer winter, and, after more time, not.
This is a good thought. (MBH 102)
Spring is a symbol that stands for rebirth in a new year. In A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (1999), Michael Ferber writes “The word ‘spring’, as its other meanings today imply, meant a rise or leap of something, hence a first onset; the phrase ‘springing time’ was used in the fourteenth century, and ‘spring of the year’ and ‘spring of the leaf’ were once common” (200). By using the symbol of hopeful seasonal cycles, Atwood reminds us that death is part of our life like the four seasons. The experience of grief often associates with the seasonal circle, in C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961), he depicts that “For in grief nothing ‘stay out.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?” (46). As we have seen that Atwood, at the end, hopes all survivors will get over their grief.
As a poet, Atwood conveys her sense of responsibility in taking this role upon herself in memory of her father’s death. This ethical responsibility is as though the
father-daughter relation, which such relation that one person will have to die after the other. The surviving one is left to mourn and to memorize the other one. This rule is what David Farrel Krell (2000) discusses about Derrida’s thought and works of mourning, and he continues, “we will not see one another die any more than we will see ourselves die” (182). One of the two will carry the death of the other, and of course, thus the mourning. In Atwood’s texts, her speaker articulates for her by raising some profound reflections about the necessity of such mourning and memory, and of negotiating with the dead and calculating the losses between them. Atwood addresses her lost loved person, Carl Atwood, in poetry in order to imagine that she is with her father. Therefore, this chapter shows the poems to keep mourning in memory, not only in order to intone a lugubrious threnody, but also to promise memory to one and one’s others, dead and living.
Chapter Three: Keep Memory in Mourning
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:
It’s all right here, I said. There are no bears.
There’s food. It isn’t snowing. No. We need more wood, he said. The winter’s on its way.
It will be bad. (MBH 83-84)
4 In “While I Was Growing Up” (1985), Atwood says, “I must have been 6 or 7. We were living then 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.
