Reflexões sobre personagens melancólicas: um olhar sobre o romance de João Tordo / Reflections on Melancholic Characters: A View to João Tordo’s Novel

Resumo: O presente artigo examina o comportamento das personagens no romance O luto de Elias Gro (2015), do escritor português João Tordo, levando em conta os efeitos traumáticos que as assolam frente às situações trágicas. O romance apresenta os espaços geográfico, arquitetônico e literário como condicionantes, sem, todavia, associá-los à história e ao nome de um país ou região. Num sentido global, o romance traz uma reflexão acerca da fragilidade humana quando se depara em situações de perda. Para tanto, o ensaio Luto e melancolia, de Sigmund Freud, serve como referência inicial, observando o seu aproveitamento para a compreensão das figuras em ação no romance.Palavras-chave: melancolia; romance português do século XXI; João Tordo.Abstract: This article discusses the behavior of characters in the novel Mourning Elias Gro (2015) by Portuguese author João Tordo, considering the traumatic effects that plague them in the face of tragic situations. The novel brings geographical, architectural and literary spaces as buildings elements, but does not associate them to the history and name of a particular country. In an overall sense, the novel sets a reflection about the human fragility when facing situations of loss. Therefore, the essay Mourning and melancholia, by Sigmund Freud, is used as an initial reference, as well as a basis for understanding the characters represented in the novel.Keywords: melancholy; 21st-century portuguese novel; João Tordo.

Acceptance, Endurance, and Meaninglessness: A Qualitative Case Study on the Mourning Tasks of Parental Death From Childhood Experience to Adolescence

Bereavement and mourning are arguably one of the research interests of psychologists, psychoanalysts, and psychiatrists since Freud’s publication of Mourning and Melancholia. This paper is a qualitative case study that sought to examine the mourning experience of the participant from childhood until his adolescence. For theoretical foundation, the four tasks of mourning primarily developed by James Worden was utilized for the proper direction of the research inquiry; namely: a.) accepting the reality of death; b.) experiencing the feeling of grief; c.) adjusting and creating new meanings in the post-loss world; and d.) reconfiguring the bond with the lost person. The paper finds that the participant’s cognitive attitude, emotional experiences, and personal observations of the environment enable him to overcome actively (in an overlapping manner) the three tasks of mourning. However, the failure to find an enduring connection with his deceased parents is not a result of strong attachment but with the absence of personal belief about the meta-existence of God.

Haunted spaces: trauma, mourning, and melancholia in the HIV epidemic in France

Several AIDS films produced in France in the last five years approach the subject of AIDS in a memorialized fashion, resulting in the contemporary stakes of the epidemic going unheard, as noted by François Berdougo and Gabriel Girard. In this essay, this phenomenon is read as a cultural trauma and melancholia for gay men. Through Freudian trauma theory and Derridean notions of hauntology, this article argues that gay men are unable to escape the specters of the AIDS epidemic. First, the article explores the way haunting is invoked through public health campaigns, reactions to the epidemic, and cultural productions. Second, it engages with the 2016 film Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau to assert that while contemporary discourse is still marked by spectres of trauma, today’s advances in medicine and understanding of the disease allow for certain sexual behaviors to be practiced without fear of contamination and with the resolution of melancholia. Théo et Hugo accomplishes this through a reversal of the Orphic tragedy, here reread as an invitation to live life after AIDS.

Post-9/11 Melancholic Identities: Memory, Mourning and National Consciousness

This paper discusses the ways in which Nadeem Aslam’s novels – Maps for Lost Lovers and The Wasted Vigil – highlight the need for a re-conceptualisation of immigrant identity, in post-9/11 world, by linking traumatic experiences of an individual to the collective memory of a community or nation. Taking cue from Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, an interface between transnational movement and mourning will be investigated in order to emphasise how private grief becomes a metaphor for public grief. With reference to Aslam’s novels (that are set against the background of post-9/11 rhetoric of war on terrorism), I discuss how an endless process of diasporic nostalgia and mourning interacts with immigrants’ efforts to deal with different ‘others’ in their adopted homelands.

Impossible Emotions: The Ethics of Mourning and Melancholia

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.