‘On this near side of a cut’: Fault Lines as ‘principle of song’ in Denise Riley’s Grief-Writing
After losing her son Jacob to a previously-undiagnosed heart condition, English poet and philosopher Denise Riley published a collection of poems entitled Say Something Back, among which features the famous piece ‘A Part Song’, in 2016. The devastating loss also led her to write Time Lived without i...
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| In: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Language: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2023
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| Online Access: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | After losing her son Jacob to a previously-undiagnosed heart condition, English poet and philosopher Denise Riley published a collection of poems entitled Say Something Back, among which features the famous piece ‘A Part Song’, in 2016. The devastating loss also led her to write Time Lived without its Flow, a short piece of non-fiction, part-philosophical essay, part grief journal, in 2012. In this earlier work that sheds light on her poetics of grief, Riley metaphorises the catastrophic event as a seismic shift that causes the wounded self to experience life ‘on this near side of a cut’ (77). As a result, the wounding experience, which derails the apprehension of time, but also entails a faulty memorialization of the deceased and cognitive failures, seems to preclude the possibility of a complete recovery. Riley’s multi-generic grief-writing probes the nature of the cut and represents it stylistically in order to showcase the vulnerability of the grieving subject. While traditional elegy is described as a ‘poem of mortal loss and consolation’ (Sacks 1987, 3), whose goal is to heal the wounds of grief, the 20th-century emergence of its melancholic counterpart, anti-elegy, strives ‘not to achieve but to resist consolation, [. . .] not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss’ (Ramazani 1994, xi). In this article, I intend to investigate the nature of the friction between elegy and anti-elegy at the heart of Riley’s philosophical, autobiographical and poetic grief-writing. My aim is to show that this fault line can result in opening up a third category, which eschews binary distinctions between mourning and melancholy, healing and (re-)opening the wound. Riley’s aesthetics of grief could be conceptualised as a poetics of vibration, i.e. an oscillation that results from a loss of equilibrium and sets in motion an emotional response, which becomes a creative ‘principle of song’ (Riley 2016) and questions the notion of consolation. |
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