Mourning and the Uncanny Space

Abstract

In the second chapter, mourning is examined not merely as disturbing our experience of time but as a process that is inscribed in the places that we associate with the dead. This chapter begins by outlining the importance of space for mourning, which has been unfairly neglected in Freud’s and Proust’s works even if the topos of the transformed experience of space in mourning goes back as far as Cicero’s tale of Simonides of Ceos. To this end, it focuses on three episodes of mourning, in which spatial experiences significantly shape the process: (1) the narrator’s belated grief over his grandmother in Balbec, (2) his hidden grief over Albertine in Venice and (3) collective grief during the First World War in Paris.