The Death of the Author’s Mother: Postmodern Uncertainties in Contemporary Memoir
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Linda K. Karell in
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After his mother’s death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began making notations on his experience of grief following her death, probably in anticipation of eventually writing a book or memoir. Although he did not write that book, his notes were collected and published as Mourning Diary in 2009, well after his own death in 1980. Although Barthes’ brief, suggestive comments contrast with the several fully developed contemporary memoirs my chapter investigates, his stature as a critic investigating the place of the author forms the framework of my chapter. In my chapter, I examine three contemporary memoirs by American women writers that explicitly explore the experience of their mothers’ deaths: Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon, and The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke. Each of these memoirists are professional writers in other fields or genres, and each invokes the literary genre of memoir – albeit differently – in order to question the meaning of her mother’s death in contemporary American culture. For example, Williams connects her mother’s death to specific, politicized acts of nuclear testing, while Gordon questions the possibility of integrated selfhood and its impact on the possibility of words to render meaning from death. O’Rourke’s meditation, with its efforts to present the minutiae of death, might be read as an extended act of perhaps impossible self-healing. What the memoirs share is an attempt to explore the postmodern uncertainties of language in relation to the death of a person of immense importance in their lives. By using Barthes’ Mourning Diary in tandem with my investigation of the above memoirists, my chapter claims the unrepresentability of death in language, while investigating the psychological need to write, and to read, the incomplete and always shifting narratives we make about death and its possible meanings.