The two documents we are presented with here both deal with the notion of bereavement and especially bereavement of a loved one. The first document is a poem, written by Tony Harrison in 1984 and entitled Long Distance. The second one is an extract from a short story entitled Stone Trees, written by Jane Gardam in 1983. They both intend to give us a glimpse of how different people react when confronted to the passing of a relative.
Through two completely different approaches and using two different genre – poetry and fiction –, as well as different literary technics, they try to reflect the highly personal emotion that one feels when confronted to death. The poem entitled Long Distance is composed of 4 stanzas, in the three first stanzas, the poet’s persona tells us about his father’s denial to face the death of his mother with a tint of loving criticism. For example the fact that he still includes her into his daily routine as if she would come back anytime.
In the last stanza of the poem though he – the poet’s persona – gives us his own impression on death and he seems to realise that he, too, cannot quite cut with the little things of everyday life. As for the extract from Jane Gardam’s Stone Trees, we follow a woman’s thoughts as she mourns her departed husband. She relates different moments she went through after his death and the story often looks as if she is directly addressing her husband.
The link can be made here with the cultural notion “je de l’ecrivain et jeu de l’ecriture” as the two authors both seem to have found inspiration in personal experiences, and therefore those texts could be considered as autobiographical. We could wonder how Harrison and Gardam proceed into putting us as close as possible with their character’s feelings in order to provide the reader with an understanding of their experience. In order to answer that question we will firstly analyse the different devices used by the two authors in order to put us into their character’s minds.
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We will afterwards try to interpret the different visions of mourning we are presented within the two texts and more specifically emphasising the deeply personal and irrational aspect of this experience. * ** I. Placing the reader as close as possible to the character’s emotion There are various technics used in the two texts to give the reader access to the characters minds. We will present the narrative devices first and then we will introduce the technic of stream of consciousness used in Jane Gardam’s Stone Trees. a. Narrative devices
The first thing that makes those two texts quite similar is the fact that they are both written in the first person narrative, giving straight away to the reader the impression that the story is told by someone who directly experienced the loss of a loved one. But this is not the only technic that gives us this impression, indeed the two texts are also homo-diegetic and they both use internal focalisation and even internal vocalisation in the case of Stone Trees. This allows us – the reader – to gain access to very personal feelings, sometimes unexpressed.
An example in the poem Long Distance is when Tony Harrison’s persona admits that he, too, is acting in denial towards death, just as his father did (4th stanza, line 3-4).
In Jane Gardam’s Stone Trees, the narrator confesses to “never having liked Tom that much” (line 10).
These most likely unexpressed or at least unspoken feelings put you in a trusting relationship with the character and the persona. b. Stream of consciousness The stream of consciousness technic is clearly identifiable in Jane Gardam’s Stone Trees.
Indeed there is no clear chronological pattern in the way the narrator tells her story, we receive her thoughts as they cross her mind. This explains the very frequent repetitions we can see in the text, for example on lines 8-10: “I liked it”…”I liked it”…”I liked his strong arm”. These repetitions combined with the non-chronological construction of the narrative, makes the text quite difficult to understand at first but once you get to know the character and try to get in tune with her feelings you start to see the bigger picture.
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This call for empathy automatically leads you to imagine what it is like for her to face the death of her husband. As we have seen there are several elements in the two texts that place the reader directly into the characters’ mind. The question we will try to answer in a second part is: Why did the authors wanted to do so? A clear answer that appears to us is that dealing with the death of a loved one is a highly personal and tragic experience and that there is not only one way of perceiving it. II. Bereavement of a loved one : a subjective experience a. Acceptance or Denial
In Tony Harrison’s Long Distance the persona presents us how his father is in complete denial towards the death of his wife. He just keeps going with the daily routine of the couple. As well as being explicit in the poem it is also symbolised by the rhyming structure of the first three stanzas (alternate rhymes: ABAB).
This changes to enclosed rhymes (ABBA) in the last stanza as the persona gives his personal view on the matter stating that “life ends with death” (4th stanza, line 1) and in a way marks the end of this routine: “You haven’t both gone shopping” (4th stanza, line 2).
Nevertheless in the last 2 lines of the poem the poet’s persona seems to develop the same habits as his father when he is himself confronted to grief by writing the name of the lost one in his “new black leather phone book” (4th stanza, line 3) and by dialling this very phone number still (4th stanza, line 4).
The poet’s intention could be to show that you cannot anticipate the way you will react to the death of a loved one until you are actually facing it. In Jane Gardam’s Stone Trees the woman confronted to the death of her husband seems to be in the process of accepting it.
This could be illustrated by the repetition of the sentence “So now that you are dead” (lines 1, 5, 15, 16, 28, 45, 58), as if she regularly tries to bring her thoughts back to the tough reality and face the fact that he will not return and that things will never be the same now. It might be necessary to clarify that when using the term “acceptance” here we simply suggest that she acknowledges the death of her husband and not that her pain goes away. This idea can also lean on the prominent role of pronouns in the text.
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Indeed the narrator progressively replaces the pronoun “we” (“we had no children”: line 13) by “you/I” (line 21, 30) as if she’s getting her head around the fact that this “we” is now obsolete and therefore clearly marks the division of “you” and “I”. b. A traumatic irrational experience The two texts also stress how traumatic the experience of losing a loved one is; we could even say “the” loved one for the narrator of Stone Trees and the father of the poet’s persona in Long Distance as we cannot be sure for the persona himself. We can see that the narrator in Stone Trees is deeply
affected by the death of her husband, hence the chaotic structure of the text following no chronological order, mixing old memories and recent events. The tone is resolutely desperate here. She seems to be unable to think straight and the way she relates the events is quite vague, quite blurry; she focuses on small details during the funeral: the cards accompanying the flowers (line 49-50, 54).
In Long Distance the father’s actions are completely irrational though he, too, seems to be conscious of it: “He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief” (3rd stanza, line 1), “As though his still raw love were such a crime” (2nd stanza, line 4).
And more surprisingly the persona himself gives way to this irrational behaviour in the end. Another print of irrationality in both text could be the attempt to get in touch with the departed one. In Stone Trees the narrator directly addresses her husband, sharing her thoughts with him as if awaiting for an answer. In Long Distance the poet’s persona dials the “disconnected number” of the person he is grieving for in a desperate attempt to reach him/her. * **
To conclude we can say that these two documents, by their inherent differences in terms of genre – a poem and a fiction – and the way they describe distinct experiences of bereavement, perfectly carry the idea that the world’s perception is resolutely subjective and that certain moments in life can be lived in different ways depending on the individual’s eye. They also give really good examples of technics and literary devices used to put us as close as possible to the characters’ emotions and give us access to a part of their psyche.
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