Description as Redress

This chapter examines the poetics and ethics of literary description as mode of redress in traumatic fictions that evoke seemingly indescribable circumstances. It discusses the affective energy of style as it counterpoints catastrophe and suffering in the work of Cormac McCarthy and W. G. Sebald. In so doing, the chapter poses larger questions that establish some of the book’s principal interpretive coordinates. Namely, can expression compensate for plot? What ethical implications does the brilliant description of devastation in The Road (2006) and Austerlitz (2001) magnify, when athletic acts of depiction counterweigh the material or mental damage they elegantly convey? Behaving as such, how does literary style probe as much as it affirms its own consolatory affordances? Over the course the chapter, description emerges as a form of narration in its own right. And the importance of reading for description highlights the need to distinguish this kind of analytical attention from the proposed aims of so-called ‘descriptive reading’.

Epilogue

The Epilogue considers the broader political and interpretive implications of reading for consolation against the recent backdrop of intense methodological self-scrutiny in literary and cultural studies. It also examines the historical and sociocultural coordinates of the phenomenon of ‘discrepant solace’ this book has charted across borders of nation, genre, and style. With a meditation on Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), the Epilogue reflects on the metacritical ramifications of attending to how writers confront the challenges of living with and writing about emotional worlds that appear to evade articulation. This is a struggle for adequate representation that the book as a whole has tried to trace, one in which consolation’s affective and ethical contestability enters the dramatic precincts and formal textures of contemporary writing—in ways that require criticism to keep pace with what literature can do in situations that would seem to herald its inadequacy.

Apprehensive Alleviation

When might the source of sorrow be the expectation of alleviation itself? How could the very prospect of solace effectively morph into a jeopardizing moment from which one wants to flee or, in wishful desperation, to forestall? And in such situations, whether immediate or remote, what other resources of emotional rescue are at our disposal when consolation wears out its welcome? Chapter 5 takes up these questions with the help of writers who combine retrospection with expectant threat and anticipated mourning. After an introduction centred on the recent short stories of Graham Swift, it turns to an unequivocally bleak work that offers a stark forewarning of the perils of biotechnology: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). The chapter argues that this speculative novel about state-authorized cloning shows how, through its depiction of what some critics have deemed futile, institutionalized forms of care, Ishiguro provokes readers to reflect on their own parameters of sympathy and judgment—most notably, on our grounds for subjecting to critique what his characters utilize to console.

Life-Righting and Magical Thinking

In Chapter 5 parallel or potential fortunes become the dramatic subject and aesthetic trigger for texts that enter the consolatory scene of magical thinking: Joan Didion’s now-iconic The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Doris Lessing’s final book, Alfred and Emily (2008). Taken together, Didion and Lessing present us with works of ‘life-righting–’, revealing the inescapably tempting yet formally generative prospect of rewriting what cannot be rectified. Simultaneously conjuring and questioning consolatory counterlives, their books draw rhetorical and structural energy from existential speculation, while confronting the dilemmas of recreating the dead. Lessing and Didion countenance only to rescind the hypothetical amelioration of scarred fortunes and the compensations of magical thought, respectively—mobilizing this process of affective self-examination as a formal catalyst for contemporary memoir.

Elegy Unrestored

Showing how elegy thrives as vibrantly in contemporary narrative as in its natural habitat of poetry, Chapter 3 reads two grief-memoirs—Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life (2013) and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014)—alongside Colm Tóibín’s 2014 historical (and implicitly autobiographical) novel, Nora Webster. Together they ask not only whether grief’s intricacies can ever be captured in language but also whether the quest for such a language reaches for aesthetic consolations of its own, setting up an internal competition in these works between bereavement’s ingenious description and the proviso of inexpressibility that elegies often thematize. The chapter revisits critical accounts of elegy as a genre that has traditionally fostered solace, in order to show how Barnes, Macdonald, and Tóibín intensify elegy’s reflexivity and its capacity to resist the simplification of consolation itself as a flimsy remedy bent on resolution.

Fetched from Oblivion

This opening chapter traces a modernist genealogy for the poetics of consolation in contemporary writing. It considers the way Virginia Woolf probed in self-contesting fashion the consolations of experimental form. The legacy of her arguments with the redemptive efficacy of aesthetic form in To the Lighthouse (1927) becomes evident even in contemporary novels that maintain a combative stance towards modernism itself. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is one such text: a genre-medley of wartime romance and high-modernist pastiche that dissects the ethical ramifications of solace as a contentious aspect of artistic reparation, especially when that reparative impulse also turns out to be a morally compromised stimulus for artistic creativity.

The Religion of Style

Chapter 4 brings together two strikingly different novels that exhibit comparable modes of proleptic mourning: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990). Their plots sketch preparations for mortality, testing consolation’s sufficiency without stripping its contribution to the role fiction can ‘play’ in what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘the apprenticeship of dying’. Testaments to what writing itself might conserve in advance of what cannot be altered, these epistolary fictions of expectation place the perceived consolations of religion in critical conversation with the ethically contestable consolations of style. They confirm Ricoeur’s warning that when ‘consolation’ emerges in fiction, ‘one must not cry self-delusion too hastily’, even if the unpicking of self-delusion is part of a novel’s economy of affect—as Disgrace (1999), the chapter’s third selection, powerfully exemplifies, a work that interrogates its own redemptive language of the soul at a juncture for South African culture characterized by pervasive disappointment and the irreparable pain of apartheid’s legacy.

Introduction

The Introduction elucidates the central theoretical, literary-historical, and methodological arguments in the book. It explains how the coming chapters navigate the representation of consolation by examining both the formal and the thematic elements of contemporary narrative. The Introduction also situates the contribution Discrepant Solace makes to recent conversations in affect studies, the history of emotions, literary aesthetics, and ethical criticism. It explains the book’s rationale for selection and comparison, while summarizing each of the core chapter’s arguments and focal texts. As a way of offering preliminary examples of the book’s larger metacritical and literary-historical claims, the Introduction integrates close readings of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave (2013); Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone (2016); and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).

Walking with the Unconsoled

The final chapter extends Chapter 6’s examination of consolation itself as a source of dread in an extended reading of David Grossman’s epic anti-war novel, To the End of the Land (English trans. 2010) and Falling Out of Time (English trans. 2014). To the End of the Land dramatizes the trepidation surrounding solace, focalized as it is by an Israeli mother, Ora, for whom intimations of respite are shot through with jeopardy. Analysing Ora’s pre-emptive stance on solace, this chapter reveals just how differently consolation applies to situations facing persons who fear for those who are very much living (but whose lives could be cut short), in contrast to the compensations available to persons who know they are dwindling and who become the eulogizing subjects of their own conciliations. Grossman’s Ora mounts a lyrical defence against death’s imminence, writing to repel the oncoming moment when elegy will undoubtedly be the most fitting mode of address.