Introduction

Abstract

In her essay, “Without Stars: A Small Essay on Grief,” Gail Jones grapples with Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of Disaster, while trying to make sense of her own grief in the wake of a close friend’s suicide. Although she feels it is almost “a shameless act: to attempt to write of it” (139), she invites us through the process of forgetting, remembering and embodying grief, ending with Blanchot’s image of a boy’s unspeakable experience confronting “the disaster … the sky without stars” (149). Though an admirer of Blanchot, she feels that there is something missing in his discussions about death, a sentiment echoed in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. During the year in which she waits for her dead husband to return, Didion laments the absence of any significant body of literature that will help her through her grief. She says, “Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare” (44). Other contemporary memoirists agree that “very few books [speak] of the particulars of loss” (Robin Romm, The Mercy Paper 207). Didion goes on to mention C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, protagonists’ responses to death in novels, medieval literature, ancient Greek plays, and elegies (which have occupied the limelight in literary studies of death). But she remains unsatisfied; a gulf opens up between her experience and the written word that often falls short of the experience itself.