Grief & Transformative Experiences: The Role of Breaks in Narration

PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS
2022, VOL. 25, NO. 3, 338–342
https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2022.2099564
COMMENT
On the importance of breaks: transformative experiences and
the process of narration
Line Ryberg Ingerslev
Institute of Philosophy, Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg, Wurzburg, Germany
ABSTRACT
ARTICLE HISTORY
In this comment, I argue that transformative experiences such as
experiences of grief often imply a break in one’s coherent, nonfictional and biographical narratives and practical identities. The
nature of these breaks is of a certain kind, as they interrupt even
the process of narration. To insist that the process of narration as
well as the narratives themselves belong to one and the same
process of adjustment in transformative experiences such as grief
might overlook the importance of such breaks, namely that the
contain a moment of refusal and revolting against mourning. The
tension involved in such breaks might not allow to be
circumscribed into narratives nor do they fit into the process of
narration as a destabilizing moment; the breaks insist on the
incomprehensibility of each loss and they remain part of what it
means to survive and to undergo transformative experiences.
Received 24 May 2022
Accepted 8 June 2022
KEYWORDS
Grief; practical identity;
survival; silence; narratives
During a walk with a friend and a young poet, Freud is struck by how the young poet is
incapable of enjoying the beauty of the summerly landscape, as it shall all perish (Freud
1916). Reflecting upon the young poet’s experience of transience, Freud suggests that the
experience consists in revolting against mourning. Mourning, as we know, is considered
by Freud to be a healthy activity of working through a devastating loss (Freud 1917). In
the end of our work of grief, an acceptance of the loss is gained, and the bereaved will
thereby come to relearn the world (Attig 2011).
The idea of a revolt against mourning is considered by Jonathan Lear (2018) as calling
out the illusion of an afterlife. The experience of transience is tied to how we conceive of
the afterlife in the following way: If we cannot think of meaningful forms of cultural preservation, it affects our engagement in this very life. The philosophical conception of an
afterlife does not consist in a social or religious imaginary of what life is like for our
deceased, rather it can be interpreted as a condition for mattering in the first place,
namely mattering in this life of our shared ideas and shared values (Scheffler 2016).
Lear’s claim is that the concept of an afterlife offers solace for the survivors of loss;
when we mourn the death of others or when we face our own death, it involves the
active belief in an afterlife that enables a trans-temporal continuing bond between the
realms of the dead and the living. The confidence, as Lear writes, in the afterlife
secures the continuing meaningfulness of our present interpersonal and cultural
CONTACT Line Ryberg Ingerslev
[email protected]
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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engagement. The possible perspective held by the poet entails a dreadful radicalisation of
this conception of the afterlife, namely that it is an illusion (Lear 2018, 1205). Our normal
understanding of mourning as a painful, but healthy, response to the death of others and
the loss of what we care for is, in the eyes of Freud’s companion, a cover-up of the truth. A
revolt against mourning is a revolt against not facing the truth, namely that ‘Death, for the
poet, is a difficulty of reality: It is that before which the mind – through suffering, disorientation, fear and trembling, wounding, anxiety, and, perhaps, through laughter – recognizes its fundamental inability to comprehend.’ (Lear 2018, 1206). In the eyes of the poet,
the hallmark of human health is truthfulness, as Lear writes (ibid), not recovery from grief
and thus forgetting about suffering and having to lose what you love.
We also find conceptualizations in the psychoanalytic literature of how ‘not knowing
how to lose’ as Julia Kristeva describes (1989) can turn into a refusal to mourn. In
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s interpretation (1994), a response to loss can be
denying that it has taken place. The denial is practiced by way of incorporation of
one’s loved object. By taking the loved object inwards and by erecting an intrapsychic
tomb, the loved object is ‘burried alive’ and the loss is silenced. That is, when we take
the deceased or otherwise lost object in, we can seemingly prevent the loss and we
thereby silence the pain of losing a loved one: ‘Without the escape-route of somehow
conveying our refusal to mourn, we are reduced to a radical denial of loss, to pretending
that we had absolutely nothing to lose. There can be no thought of speaking to someone
else about our grief under these circumstances. The words that cannot be recalled, the
tears that cannot be shed – everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that
led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a secret tomb
inside the subject.’ (Abraham and Torok, 130).
Might we see in Freud’s companion, not only someone who revolts against the passing
of time, but as someone who acts out in order to prevent it from passing? Is the melancholic root of transience an attempt to stop the flowing of time? If time were to pass,
Freud’s companion would have to mourn this passing of time, to bid the present experience of beauty adieu, and to accept his loss. Is it the case, that when the poet revolts
against mourning, he revolts against the very articulation of his loss, and instead he
insist on the traumatic silence of not returning to the world? We might say that the
revolt against mourning reveals one central aspect of the afterlife, namely that it is tied
to articulation. Articulation of the loss would confirm the change of time; it would
confirm the coming of a future.
The above questions occur upon reflection on the role of narratives and the process of
narration offered by the authors of ‘Grief, Self and Narration’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne 2022). In
the paper, it is argued that narratives positively contribute to sustaining, restoring and
revising a sense of who one is at times of existential disorientation such as in cases of
losing a loved one. Narratives are conceived of as ‘stories that are told, to oneself or to
others. Our emphasis here is on narratives with a principally non-fictional, biographical
content’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 1–2) Ratcliffe and Byrne focus on the aspect of grief
where the sense of who one is can suffer ‘a phenomenological disturbance that can be
construed as a loss, diminution, or disruption’ (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 2). It is argued that narratives assist the bereaved in the process of grief where one’s feeling of belonging to the
world has become indeterminate, and that dynamics of narration might facilitate the
process of reorientation, finding a way to learn to live with one’s loss. Whereas narratives
340
L. R. INGERSLEV
themselves provide affective scaffolding and coherence, the process of narration itself
might be tied to experiences of disruption and destabilization (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 9–
11). Together, however, narratives and the process of narration are integral to a larger
process of adjustment (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 13–4).
With the young poet in mind, we might ask, whether these two aspects of adjustment,
namely orientation and destabilization, are of the same root and whether are they tied in
the same manner to transformative experiences such as grief. Might it be the case that
within the transformative experience, we can attempt to cover up the truth and maybe
even by a narrative strategy that diminishes the break we are experiencing? The break,
that is, of coherent narratives and meaningful practical identities? Might it be the case
that the incomprehensibility of a loss insists so forcefully to not be circumscribed by a
new narrative and a new orientation and that we can in fact revolt against such processes?
Might it be the case that revolting against mourning contains strategies of silencing a
hope for narration?
The losses we suffer do not always fit into the narrative structure and narrative strategies for adjustment and reorientation, as we find ourselves living with practical disruptions of meaning and the practical incomprehensibility of having survived our loved ones.
‘Is the trauma the encounter with death or the ongoing experience of having survived it?’,
as Caruth asks (2016, 7). The oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis
of life is what constitutes a double telling according to Caruth, that is, of two incompatible
and absolutely inextricable components of the complexity of a history (ibid, 8).
This complexity is addressed by Ratcliffe and Byrne as they consider the aspect of grief
where one remains open towards being affected by one’s past. That is, letting the past be
one that is still becoming past, we might say. According to the authors, this process contains ‘the possibility of endless revision and novelty’ of one’s past (Ratcliffe and Byrne
2022, 10). The role of discovering of one’s past, however, might not neatly fit into the
‘adjustment process’ of which the process of narration and narratives are an integral
part (Ratcliffe and Byrne, 13–4). Rather, inherent to discovering anew the past as one’s
own, is, as a constitutive element, the possibility of breaks in the process of narration.
Such breaks show how grief might involve an opening to discover the past to be one
we keep surviving whereby past that keeps becoming – our past (Ingerslev 2020a). The
breaks of the process of narration are aspect of survival in the following way. Survival,
we might say, involves a dreamlike engagement, as Lear puts it (Lear 2006), where
what is practiced and what is thereby articulated or expressed in one’s doings is a practice
of hope for a meaning that is not yet there, not yet fixed or open for narration (Ingerslev
2022, 2020b). That is, even if the process of narration is granted a destabilizing and disruptive force, it might be that it is of an entirely different root or order than that of narratives and narration. What it called the process of narration seems to be not only the
struggling and creative aspect of language being disrupted, but a whole different dimension of life, namely that of surviving, that is of living with the uncertainty of not knowing
how to lose, and thus of surviving with practical incomprehensibility.
To revolt against mourning or even to refuse to mourn show how the breaks inherent
to grief and to living with the practical incomprehensibility of survival are of a different
order than the destabilizing process of narration. What Legrand calls inscription (2020),
what Lear calls a dreamlike engagement (Lear 2017, 2006, 1998), and what Mattingly
calls the paradox of hope (2010) describe ways of living with the practical
PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS
341
incomprehensibility of having survived a devastating loss. In these forms of survival,
something else is at stake than a destabilization of our narratives in the process of narration. The process of narration is not in the foreground of such world-building responses to
the loss of meaning, rather these responses themselves describe the ongoing struggle
and practice of survival. These responses are constituted by breaks and cannot be integrated in the process of narration as they would be a cover-up of the truth.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.
Notes on contributor
Line Ryberg Ingerslev is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of philosophy, Julius-MaximilianUniversity, Würzburg, Germany. Ingerslev’s work explores the intersection between phenomenology, psychoanalysis and the theory of action. She works on passivity, responsiveness, trauma,
grief, habit, and on aspects of emotional distress, as exemplars of situations where control and ownership of action is diminsed.
ORCID
Line Ryberg Ingerslev
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-0619
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