Grieving (mostly with Kristeva)

In the past week you lost two dear friends. The first was very well known, the composer Charles Camilleri; the second was Lucy Zammit, the mother of your secretary. What are your reflections on the human experience of bereavement?

The philosopher who has perhaps meditated most movingly on grief is Julia Kristeva, who has become in the minds of many the very icon of post modernist feminism. In 1989 her father was assassinated in a Bulgarian hospital, no account was given to the family of what exactly had happened and the corpse was cremated without their permission and certainly against what would have been his will. Kristeva says that she found herself deprived of the possibility of mourning.

This experience led her to believe that when a human being suffers a loss, especially of a loved person, the pain is like that of oneself undergoing a symbolic death. The pain is the result of identification to a greater or lesser extent of oneself with the other, and becomes the most fertile soil out of which art arises.

When the suffering of loss is depicted in images or articulated in poetic writing, there occurs a kind of symbolic rebirth. The aesthetic expression of grief turns into a sure way of overcoming depression, which is in itself a manifestation of the death wish. For this reason, given that the human being is an essentially symbol-making animal, Kristeva argues that it is impossible to be an authentic human being and a pure hedonist, i.e. somebody whose paramount driving force is pleasure seeking. One would not be able to mourn creatively.

Kristeva goes on to say that grief is most fully expressed in forgiveness, but that forgiveness needs to be signified in some form or other in words or gestures. Forgiveness is the truest expression of love. Grief at a person's loss, of itself, induces forgiveness of all the faults of the lost other.

Suffering when it is overcome through the imaginative use of signs opens up the space for a sort of rebirth, the dawn of a new future, as Raskolnikov experiences in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Moreover, by writing the account of Raskolnikov's grief/forgiveness, Dostoyevsky gave himself a fresh lease of life. The rebirth of his characters through grief and forgiveness is inseparable from his own. Kristeva says that "it is in signifying dying, especially one's own, that the human being survives as a symbolic animal".

Are there good and bad ways of mourning?

Kristeva built her theory on Freud's distinction between mourning (normal grief) and melancholy (complicated grief), which results when the lost person (or object) has been internalised as part of the bereaved person's self and is partly hated as well as loved. "Mourning needs time to complete itself and become detached finally from its object. If completed, mourning removes our morbid lining and sets us up as independent, unified subjects".

Kristeva says that in order to express pain, one cannot allow the style to be completely harmonious, but one has to make the sound grate, strain and limp. "Stylistic awkwardness is discourse of dulled pain". However, it is possible to place this kind of writing or sign language against a background of elliptic words/allusive sounds that somehow makes the pain superable precisely because it is being portrayed in a symbolic performance.

The wrapping up of loss in a context that transforms its negative meaning in a re-creative sense is the way in which faith achieves the power of turning mourning into a means of salvation. Probably that perception accounts for the depth of popular devotion to the Pietà.

Kristeva notes that such an anti-nihilistic context is lacking in the novels of Marguerite Duras, but is most subtly present in Marcel Proust. In his great novel, there are simple and direct outbursts of earnest grief. Implicit within them is the conviction that it is always better to feel something rather than nothing, and that is why we do not shirk from weeping and displaying our inner wounds even at the risk of being counted sentimental fools. Shedding tears can be the way of opening a conduit to a new dimension of inner life.

Would I be correct to say that the gist of your views is that in the journey to the heart of grieving, sometimes neither spiritual thoughts nor philosophical ones count, but it is the power of love that eases the pain which the loss of a loved one brings about?

That is especially true when the lost ones were each, in his or her own different way, agents of peace as with the two friends I lost over the past week.

I loved the music of Charles Camilleri because of its exceptional capacity to evoke the numinous, through its rhythmic interlocking of sound and silence, and because the music was the best expression of the man - I loved the man, paradoxically, in restless quest of peace.

Nobody could have been more alien to showmanship than Lucy Zammit. She did admirably what wise women have always done since it all begun: ensured as unobtrusively as possible the prevalence of peace often even at great personal expense.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti