Nouri Gana, Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011.
In the preface to his recent book, Signifying Loss, Nouri Gana argues that “[i]n a world marked by the swift and sanitized infliction of loss and suffering, especially as a result of the insidious banalization of global warfare and everyday violence,” “signifying loss is crucial to adjusting to a persistently mutating and alienating reality and, simultaneously, to carrying out sociopolitical changes.” Indeed, the opening claim implicitly yet clearly announces that the following pages will demonstrate how contemporary understandings of loss and suffering normalize and institutionalize violence and warfare at the expense and erasure of historical, political, and cultural specificity. But it also cleverly establishes the guiding structure for the work as a whole, insofar as signifying loss simultaneously invokes “how loss is signified (i.e. figured and inscribed” and “the critical, political, and ethical significance (i.e. import and valences) of such signifying.” From the outset, then, signifying loss is deployed and mobilized as its own term, the stakes of which, as Gana tells us, at once reveal and offer a solution to the “theoretical impasse in current theories of mourning between the injunction to mourn the early Freudian model of therapeutic morning and the demand for an ethics of impossible or interminable mourning practices.”
What the preface opens up, and the subsequent chapters spell out with clarity and precision, is the heart of Gana’s project, which aims to develop a new theory of mourning that enables “an ethically and politically responsible practice of mourning.” To that end, Gana takes up deconstructionist and psychoanalytic theories of mourning (namely those posited by Derrida in The Work of Mourning and Freud in his essays “Mourning and Melancholia” and “The Ego and the Id”) in order to posit a new dialectic between mourning and melancholia in which melancholia is understood as part of the work of mourning rather than in opposition to mourning. In so doing, Gana also forges a unique intersection between mourning and literary tropes and figures in modernist and postcolonial literatures that both stages and elucidates this new account of mourning. Whereas postcolonial and modernist fields of inquiry have traditionally remained separate, Gana identifies and fosters critical similarities between the fields in the signifying process of mourning—a process that he claims is “the common denominator.” This critical nexus, which emerges from and resides within the rhetorical function of tropes and figures of loss, hinges on Gana’s reformulation of the structural relation between mourning and melancholia.
The introductory chapter, which largely focuses on Freud’s seminal essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), lays the theoretical groundwork for a new model of mourning and melancholia. Rather than perpetuate what has become the pervasive binary opposition between mourning and melancholia, Gana first argues that melancholia is a function of mourning. But insofar as Gana understands mourning as “an economy of emotional response to a painful loss that counts on the passage of time” (emphasis mine), mourning and melancholia exist in a temporal continuum with each other. Gana’s reformulation of mourning and melancholia thus relies upon the temporal movement of mourning as that which involves a rethinking of the present in relation to both the past and the future. This is a critical move in Gana’s rubric, because it enables him to situate the sociopolitical work of mourning in the experience of mourning. It follows that, “[r]elations are built in mourning, not in response to it,” precisely because the experience of mourning invokes the realm of the future in the form of sociopolitical change as part of the process of working through loss. The therapeutic aims of mourning are therefore freed from temporal constraints (in that they are not dependent upon a particular amount of time for their success) but are nevertheless constituted by the movement of time for their possibility in the first place. The experience of mourning thus becomes, as Gana’s contends, “a threshold moment of solidarity and community building, particularly in the wake of the Great War and the decolonization struggles in the first half of the twentieth century, both of which can be seen, respectively, as the midwives of modernist and postcolonial literatures and cultures.”
The remaining chapters of Signifying Loss pursue the ways that modernist and postcolonial literatures stage the implications of this rethinking of mourning while also offering theoretical insights into how we understand the signifying process of trauma in both narrative and history. In particular, Gana works out what he calls a “poetics of narrative mourning,” which he broadly defines as the simultaneous conceptualization and evocation of “the passage from suffering to signifying loss,” by examining how specific rhetorical terms both figure and are shaped by the psychodynamics of mourning. To do so, Gana first aligns prosopopoeia (the poetic conceit of personification and apostrophe) with mourning; catachresis (the figure of misused or improper words) with melancholia; and chiasmus (the figure of repetition or inverted parallelism) with trauma. He then brings these conceptual alliances to bear in close readings of James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend, and Elias Khoury’s City Gates.
The first two chapters devoted to literature commence with an analysis of mourning in Joyce’s Dubliners. Although Gana’s focus on mourning and prosopopoeia in Joyce’s collection of short stories runs against the popular critical trend of emphasizing melancholia, his analysis of the tragedies of losses experienced by Emily Sinico and Father Flynn examines how the poetics of mourning can transition from offering us a kind of rhetorical access to mourning to representing the psychoaffective excess of mourning. Specifically, Gana’s provocative reading of the “tropologics of prosopopoeia” in Emily Sinico’s decent into mania and her final act of suicide elucidates his broader claim about the experience of mourning as that which can “reach empiphanic proportions” or “congeal into melancholia and result in either madness or suicide.” Yet Emily Sinico’s suicide also stages, according to Gana, a “strategy of sociopolitical protest and posthumous vengeance […] against the devaluation of mourning practices and of communitywide solidarity in turn-of-the-century Dublin.”
Insofar as the short stories that constitute Joyce’s Dubliners expose the “vicissitudes of melancholia,” they also necessarily open into what Gana calls the “politics of melancholia,” which considers how the signifying process of melancholia inscribes and recuperates histories that are inherited experiences of loss. To begin developing the politics of melancholia, Gana pays close attention to how the confluence between melancholia and catachresis in Kincaid’s writings reveal “how the economy of mourning originates in an insistent identification with an allegedly lost object whose identification, identity, or location in narrative historiography, perennially eludes the mourning subject.” In Gana’s rubric, the postcolonial subject is thus understood as the mourning subject, insofar as such subjectivity is trapped between the identification of and the identification with a historical inheritance of losses that have been codified into identity as a cathected object.
Gana then proceeds to situate Kincaid’s writings and Ben Jelloun’s novel The Last Friend in a “dialectical confrontation” with Derrida’s writings (namely his essay “The Force of Law” and again The Work of Mourning) in order to think through the ethical stakes of mourning, both in relation to the act of writing (as we see in Kincaid’s texts) and in terms of the relationship between the mourner and what Gana terms the “mournee” (as is played out in Ben Jelloun’s novel). For Gana, The Last Friend powerfully reveals the problematics of the ethics of mourning by dramatizing “the voice of the mournee” through a “polyphonic narrative structure.” In so doing, the novel stages what Gana calls “mournership,” which he defines as “an ethics of relationality and sociocultural intelligibility inaugurated by a constellation of collective and individual interdependencies in which mourning occupies pride of place.” Whereas Derrida’s notion of impossible mourning tends to result in “a philosophical anxiety over the question of mourning,” Ben Jelloun’s novel limits the anxiety of the ethics of impossible mourning to the perspective of the mourner precisely by mobilizing “the concept of the mournee.” In this regard, The Last Friend not only exposes how the ethics of impossible mourning fails to account for the ethical, political, and personal dimensions of the position of the mournee, but also offers a solution in the idea of mournership.
It is, however, in the chapter devoted to Elias Khoury’s abstract novel City Gates that the rigorous theoretical threads of the preceding chapters coalesce into Gana’s most richly provocative reading. Engaging City Gates as a “chiastic oscillation” of the trauma of the Lebanese civil war, Gana argues that Khoury’s novel grants us “emphathic access to the devastating effects of war without entirely or necessarily proffering us with consolatory reprieve or clear exit strategies.” Focusing on the narrative structure as fragmented and formless, without a clear plot, and as characterized by repetition, Gana illuminates how the novel is an “allegorical performative of trauma” that fails “as a symbolic form.” In its attempt to talk about the catastrophic events of the civil war, City Gates confronts the psychic elaboration of trauma as an excess of signification. As such, the novel therefore works to inscribe its own chiastic vacillation between the nature of the traumatic event as incalculable excess and the failure of the novel to conjure the traumatic event as such. Yet this chiasmus between failure and excess becomes, in Gana’s words, “a poetics of trauma” that produces “vulnerability” as “a potential psychosocial concept for reenvisioning sociopolitical, communal and human ties.” Vulnerability, in other words, inaugurates transformations in modes of subjectivity.
Ultimately, Gana’s engagement with Khoury’s novel offers an alternate model for reading trauma in literature. Rather than interpret fragmentation and repetition exclusively as indications of trauma’s essential inaccessibility and failure, Gana reads such structural elements as instances in which trauma as an unrepresentable experience becomes the source and foundation of literary representation in the first place. Conceived of in this way, literary figurations of trauma become sites of possibility for working through psychological suffering rather than insisting upon failed repetitions with no therapeutic end. Gana’s rich reading of City Gates establishes a new dialectic between literary representation and trauma that bears pressing implications on the structural and affective possibilities of recovery. But what Gana’s reading of Khoury’s novel brings to the fore is how this rigorous rethinking of trauma offers a new and powerful strategy for working through, and perhaps even coming to terms with, historical and political violence without erasing or marginalizing the specificities that shape particular experiences with violence and codify identity.
A good deal of the importance of Signifying Loss lies in its rigor and scope; it masterfully negotiates a range of complex psychoanalytic and deconstructionist theories on mourning and melancholia with diverse literary texts. Yet the most powerful work of Gana’s impressive study can be found in its central coda: “Signifying Loss points at and toward a tactical and differentiable theory of mourning—a geopolitics of mourning—that can attend to the particular historical circumstances in which mourning arises or refuses to arise.” Though this coda ruminates from the beginning, it is at the end of the book that it announces itself, finally, not simply as the call for, but more crucially, as the new model of mourning. It is Gana’s geopolitics of mourning that no longer reduces “historical suffering and catastrophe to a series of structural operations depleted of affect,” but instead successfully recuperates such suffering into effective practices of mourning that mobilize affect in order to envision and realize sociopolitical change.