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Articles

Volume 36, Number 2 (2011)

Grieving Time: The Recollection and Reproduction of Loss in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty

  • Lisa Kabesh
Soumise
mars 8, 2012
Publié-e
2011-12-12

Résumé

Madeleine Thien’s Certainty proposes a restructuring of how individuals and societies conceptualize trauma and loss in time. While post-Freudian attempts to depathologize melancholia have traditionally relegated melancholic losses to the past – a move that ultimately limits the agency of the subjects of grief – loss continuously occupies the present of Thien’s text, even when the event(s) in question occurred in the past. As the traumatic images and events of the past perpetually repeat in the present of this novel, characters experience loss not simply as a spectre of the past but as an imminence that is always about to arrive. This configuration of loss as imminent produces the potential for transformation, or for an active and agential engagement with loss; it gives characters the opportunity to engage productively with loss in both the present and in the future. Through this disruption of the teleology of loss, Thien clears a temporal space where the melancholic subject or community can move from “grief” to “grievance.”