Abstract
In response to recent work in cultural geography on the spatial practices of mourning and remembrance, I draw upon my own research on the discourse of romantic love (in the field of literary and cultural theory) in order to theorise a connection between the memorial practices associated with the ‘life’ of a relationship and those pursued in retrospect. Through a focus on embodied mobility, I propose that there are implicit links between the way in which we create and store memories (à propos Bergson), the way we protect and project them (the processes commonly associated with nostalgia) and the way we activate them in later years (memorialisation). A secondary – but related – line of argument concerns the distinction between public (and ‘spectacular’) and private (and ‘invisible’) memorial practices and the function of mobilities of various kinds within each. With reference to a small selection of autobiographical and literary texts, I reflect upon the way in which burials (in the Christian tradition) have, for centuries, been inscribed by spectacular hypermobility (for the deceased as well as the bereaved) and how, by contrast, our more private memorial practices are often invisible precisely because they exist only as micro-mobilities of some kind. For while mourning may involve visits to memorials in the landscape (as explored in the work of Avril Maddrell and others), it may equally take the form of walks (or drives) devoid of both destination and visible trace (what I refer to here as a ‘trackless mourning’) or express itself in the smallest of gestures that, unbeknown to the world, unite the deceased and the bereaved.
Whenever I plant the young larches I’ll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I’ll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven! (Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders)
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If we recognise the mobility of embodied and emotional grief, greater understanding of the complex dynamic spatial patterns of grief, mourning and remembrance will follow. (Avril Maddrell)
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The country music song, ‘The Long Black Veil’, 3 tells the story of a woman who continues to ‘walk’ the ‘cold dark hills’ where her lover is buried 10 years after his death. In ‘her long black veil’ she assumes the otherworldliness of a ghost and, indeed, the lyric takes the form of a double ghost story inasmuch as it is narrated by her dead lover, hung for a murder he did not commit. This miscarriage of justice was the result of his refusal to provide the alibi that would have spared his life; namely, the fact that he had spent the night in question ‘in the arms’ of the woman in question (who also happened to be ‘the wife of his best friend’). As well as being an irresistible love story – combining mystery, passion and sacrifice – ‘The Long Black Veil’ captures the way in which the bereaved, as well as the deceased, can ‘haunt’ a landscape through their recursive wanderings. Indeed, most of us have been – or have the potential to become – the woman in ‘the long black veil’ at some point in our lives, with our acts of mourning remaining every bit as elusive and ‘trackless’ as hers.
The significance of mobility to the practice of grief, mourning and remembrance has been commented upon by Avril Maddrell (see epigraph), 4 whose recent work on ‘grief maps’ 5 and the ways in which (reiterative) performance is an integral part of everyday memorialisation, 6 has made a major contribution to our understanding of the spatiality of bereavement. In this article, I would like to extend the discussions begun by Maddrell and others 7 by focusing rather more explicitly on the mobilities involved vis-à-vis my own work on romance and repetition. 8 Indeed, the research presented here has emerged from preliminary work on a new book project exploring the role of mobilities in the production and sustenance of intimate relationships throughout the lifecourse – from childhood through to the end of life 9 – and in that regard also speaks to recent publications by Clare Holdsworth 10 and Lesley Murray and Susan Robertson. 11 In general, however, mobilities scholarship has yet to explore the formative significance of mobility upon our intimate relationships to any great extent and it is my hope that humanities-based approaches, such as my own, will contribute new layers of psychological complexity to the debates. With respect to the material under discussion here, I am proposing that it is sometimes strategic to take together the memorial practices associated with death and those pursued in everyday life on account of their (often surprising) continuities. Following both Tim Ingold’s work on ‘lines’ 12 and Henri Bergson’s on memory, 13 it may be mooted that the ‘tracks’ (both literal and figurative) that we lay down during the life of a relationship are often the same ones we use to honour it in after years, both consciously and unconsciously. My recent research has indeed discovered strong similarities in the spatialities and mobilities associated with courtship 14 and those practised in bereavement, and a comparative mapping can produce fascinating insights into the way in which individuals, couples and families experience and perform their love for one another across the lifecourse. The activities and events that characterise the early years of a relationship – whether this be public promenading, 15 car driving, 16 spontaneous wayfaring 17 or secret assignations 18 – become part of the (embodied) ‘memory-bank’ of the partners concerned. Thus, while the woman in ‘the long black veil’ and her lover may or may not have roamed the hills where ‘the cold winds moan’ during the life of their affair, her repeated journeys there, under the cover of darkness, are axiomatic of the trackless, traceless, mobility that defined their clandestine relationship.
The discussion that follows is in two parts and explores, first, some of the different ways in which we can theorise the connection between the mobilities we pursue in the course of a relationship and those we use to memorialise it. This takes the form of a section of autoethnography and reflection, followed by a brief overview of how my proposition builds upon recent publications on mobility, mourning and the landscape. This is followed by another subsection on memory and nostalgia which draws upon Henri Bergson’s work on the (embodied) processes by which we create, store and actualise memories to further make the case for there being a link between the mobilities of love and loss. The second part of the article then explores the contrast between public (and ‘spectacular’) and private (and ‘invisible’) mourning with reference to a selection of literary texts and proposes that the practice of remembrance may – at one limit point – be reduced to pure (re-iterative) movement. However, while such transient gestures of remembrance may be contrasted with the many and various place-specific memorials investigated by geographers working in this field in recent times (see notes 7 and 27), I conclude the article by interrogating the fine line that distinguishes place-marking from place-making and enquire whether any act of mourning which involves an element of repetition can be truly trackless.
Theorising the mobilities of love and loss
Automobility and autoethnography: following the hearse
On 6 September 2003, I found myself making one of the more unusual car journeys of my life. My father was in the late stages of terminal cancer and – after a long afternoon and night in which he was physically stuck in his chair, unable to move – I was finally allowed to call the doctor. After some ringing around, the doctor eventually found him a bed in a local hospice and, a few hours later, an ambulance was transporting him down the A30 to Hayle (in Cornwall) with me following behind in my car. This was the last journey he was to make while still alive.
Even at the time, the symbolism of all this did not escape me. Trained as a mechanic in the years immediately following the Second World War, my father’s life had been, in many ways, defined by automobility. Now he was making his final living journey in a vehicle not dissimilar to the Scammell he drove during the Korean War, while I followed respectfully behind in the old VW he once bought for me.
Two days later, I found myself making an even more extraordinary journey along the same stretch of road, but in the opposite direction. By now my father was dead, having passed away peacefully, within 28 hours of arriving in Hayle. It was Monday morning, and I had returned to the hospice to collect his belongings and to register the death (which entailed a further journey to Penzance). It was therefore some hours later before I made my way back up the road again and, just before Redruth, I found myself following a hearse. As it turned off at Scorrier Crossroads, it dawned on me that the hearse contained my father who was now on his way to the funeral director’s chapel-of-rest. In the space of just 2 days, then, I had accompanied my father (by car) on his final, earthly journeys – the first, still living; the second, newly dead – and grasped something of the way in which the end of life is characterised not by rest and stasis but, rather, an interval of intense mobility.
Although the circumstances – and co-incidences – which disclosed to me the signal role (auto)mobility plays in the last days of a person’s life were, of course, unique, 19 their implications can be felt more widely. As Roger Marjavaara has also noted with specific reference to Sweden, 20 in purely spatial terms, the geographical reach of a 21st century funeral is (potentially) vast, with mourners located far afield and/or abroad; translated into mileage, the figures are even more thought-provoking – especially when one considers (with respect to the deceased) that a good deal of this movement is unnecessary. Thus, while – in my father’s case – transportation to the hospice was clearly urgent and essential, his return journey 2 days later arguably was not. The deceased person could be taken for cremation or burial straight from the hospital morgue, but an interim ‘laying-out’ in the undertaker’s funeral parlour (‘chapel-of-rest’) remains the preference of most families in Britain today. In a tradition that is seen to date back to Ambrosial rituals of the 8th and 9th centuries A.D., 21 the journey from the hospital to the undertaker’s is often but the first leg of a long, staged, journey for the corpse: from hospital to chapel-of-rest, from chapel-of-rest to the family home (although this is less common than it once was); from the family home to church or chapel; from the church or chapel to the cemetery – as well as the shorter journeys the coffin makes as it is carried to and from the hearse. Placed in the specific historical and geographical context of the British Isles, the protracted – often circular – motorised journeys undertaken by the deceased today also replicate the ways in which bodies were transported along corpse roads in past centuries – often quite closely. In the district of Morvern, in the Western Highlands, for example, the hearse still stops at a local landmark (‘Clach na Criche’) in order for the mourners to build a small cairn in memory of their loved ones. 22 The ‘clachan’ (stone) itself is a huge slab – used as a rest for the coffins (and their bearers) on their often long and arduous journey to the kirk – while the cairns themselves remain unmarked (it being considered bad luck to name the loved one). I return to the significance of cairn-building as a memorial practice vis-a-vis Maddrell’s work in the subsection following, but here cite the practice as a reminder that – in some nations and cultures, at least – hypermobility has, for centuries, been integral to the funeral ceremony. I will then use my readings of the literary texts in the section ‘From public highway to traceless track’ to reflect upon why the multi-staged procession has remained such a powerful tradition.
Meanwhile – and to conclude this section – these reflections on my father’s death also revealed to me the way in which the journeys we make to mark the end of life often shadow those made years earlier in the most telling of ways, not least because people still often ‘return home’ for the funerals of family members. As a child I travelled along that stretch of the A30 with my father on many occasions, and being able to do so once again in death – albeit by chance – became an important part of the grieving process for me. My drive home, behind his hearse, is also indicative of the way in which the public journeys occasioned by death often mask, or run alongside, private and subjective ones: a consideration which I now explore, and attempt to extend, in my review of the recent work on bereavement and mourning.
The mobilities of encounter and return
As readers of this journal will be aware, research on the role of the landscape (variously configured) in relation to concepts such as home, belonging, nostalgia, memory and mourning now stretches back several decades, with the authors concerned becoming ever more mindful of the way in which this most material object of study is perceived, engaged with, worked upon and remembered by the human subjects who pass through it in the most elusive and immaterial of ways. Indeed, as I posit elsewhere, 23 our movement through a landscape is often our only material contact with it as our footsteps (or wheels) glide over its surface without a trace. When conjoined for the practice of remembrance, mourning or memorialisation, the challenge of making a permanent mark upon a landscape is therefore immense; we become instantly (if unconsciously) aware of both the vulnerability and ephemerality of places that natural and human forces are forever seeking to destroy as well as our own transience as pilgrims and/or custodians. For the geographer John Wylie, this challenge is figured as a ‘heart-breaking’ struggle between the bereaved – who attempt to tether their lost loved ones to terra firma by some manner or means – and the indifferent landscape (which itself mirrors the unrequitable nature of human love). 24 In similar vein, the philosopher, Dylan Trigg, concludes that the workings of memory mean that we can never return to a place with which we were once familiar without a sense of the uncanny: 25 the slippage between our memory of the place and our encounter in the present is simply too stark, hence undermining our trust in a once dearly loved location. This wariness of erstwhile ‘special places’ is also evidenced by the difficulties the bereaved encounter when trying to dispose of the ashes of their loved ones. As revealed by one of the participants in Lakhbir Jassal’s study of contemporary Asian mourning practices, what was a ‘beautiful park’ in memory proves to be nothing of the sort when the family returns there to scatter ashes on a dreary day. 26 The place is not as beautiful as the family remembered it and, most of all, it is not beautiful enough.
In view of this potential for disappointment – even betrayal – by the landscapes we love, it is perhaps surprising that we continue to entrust our loved ones to them through acts of remembrance to the extent that we do and in such a variety of ways. Over the past 10 years, Avril Maddrell’s work has researched the siting of memorials within the natural landscape across several locations, 27 observing both their extraordinary (and increasing) popularity as a contemporary mourning practice and the way in which their construction and maintenance combines a determined effort to make a material mark upon the landscape and an element of largely invisible re-iterative performance (typically involving serial visits over many years). The latter is evidenced in Gemma’s grief maps – as presented in Madrell’s 2016 article (see note 2) – which represent the combined physical, psychological and virtual ‘journeys’ undertaken in the 18 months following her bereavement (pp. 181–182), while the resolutely material, ever-expanding, Whithorn Witness Cairn (see note 27) has become the means not only of bearing witness to one’s love for an/other (or God) but also of using the other people who visit the cairn as witnesses to your devotion. While the act of placing the stone on the cairn may itself be ephemeral, it is made with the intention of exacting from the landscape a permanence that scholars such as Wylie and Trigg (cited above) believe it can never deliver. Yet the very fact that the cairn-building involves both the desire to make a permanent mark upon the landscape and the application of bodily movement (in the act of gathering the stone and adding it to the cairn as well as the need for return journeys), serves to remind us that the one rarely occurs without the other and that, in this regard, the qualitative difference between the various types of memorial place-making is probably best thought of as one of degree rather than kind. This is evidenced in Anna Petersen’s work on different types of spontaneous memorials, 28 and of Leonie Kellaher and Ken Worpole’s 29 on the contrasting significance of a park bench, a tree-planting and a roadside shrine: all these memorials combine attempts to insert the lost loved one back into the landscape through an installation of some kind and return journeys to the site, but whereas, for some, re-encountering (and maintaining) the monument will be the primary concern, for others the regular pilgrimage will become most important thing. Taken in the round, then, this research alerts us to the variable, but always intersecting, roles both place-marking and mobility play in our expressions of love for those who are lost. This is widely evidenced in Maddrell’s many poignant case studies, such as the bench on the Port Erin coastal path (Isle of Man) which has been continuously ‘dressed’ – throughout the seasons – in the 15 years since the person honoured died. 30
For me, these examples of the (hyper)mobilities frequently involved in maintaining memorials to the dead is strikingly reminiscent of the mobilities of courtship and speaks to the connection I wish to make in this article between the mobilities of love and the mobilities of loss. As I discuss elsewhere, 31 in courtship, ‘walking out’, as it was once popularly known in the north of England – the journeys lovers make to one another’s homes or other rendezvous, the private walks or public promenades 32 – is the romance, and separation and reunion 33 (whether for an hour, a day or a year) is a guaranteed means of re-igniting the moment of ravissement 34 and initial attraction. More profoundly, these journeys of departure and return may be seen to explore, and test, the boundaries of self and other, with the alterity of the other (evidenced by an electric shock of (mis)recognition) causing the lover to grasp his or her own (desiring) subjecthood in a new and often startling way. So powerful are these sensations that it is hardly surprising that lovers continue to manufacture ways of recreating them, especially in the first weeks and months of courtship when mobility between ‘you and me’ and ‘here and there’ is often at its most intense. And while it might, at first, seem odd to compare a young girl dashing off to meet her lover and an elderly woman visiting her husband’s grave, the underlying compulsion, I would propose, is not dissimilar: in both scenarios, there is the same need to explore the sensation of the self in relation to the other and reassure oneself of the authenticity of one’s love. The way I have described this dynamic clearly resonates with Maddrell’s own exposition of mourning as a negotiation of absence and presence, 35 but in such a way that the compulsion to mobility is brought to the fore; furthermore, that the practice is undertaken not only to ‘guarantee’ the enduring presence of the other but also the special (and enduring) value of the love itself. In the section that now follows, I draw upon the work of Henri Bergson to further explore the connection between the mobilities we pursue and practice during the early years of a relationship and those we subsequently use to honour it.
Memorialisation, memory and nostalgia
One of the ways of understanding the connection between the memorial practices associated specifically with death and those practised in everyday life is via the concept of nostalgia, especially when placed alongside Henri Bergson’s model of memory and/as perception. 36 Indeed, in this section, I would like to propose that there are similarities between the way we ‘create’ and store memories (according to Bergson), the way we project and protect them (via the mechanisms of nostalgia) and the way we activate them in later years (i.e. memorialisation). This will, I hope, resonate with recent work in social and cultural geography where memory, especially in relation to landscape, has become a central concern. 37
Even as nostalgia is defined, etymologically, as a longing to return home, 38 so has it come to exist in the popular imagination as a dream-like journey backwards in time. From a geographer’s point of view, it is precisely the fact that this journeying in time is also a journeying in, and through, space that renders it such a resonant phenomenon: the two dimensions being locked together in the manner of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’. 39 Reflecting on the story most often told to explain the origins of the disease – namely, Dr Johannes Hofer’s ‘discovery’ of a curious psychosomatic illness present among Swiss soldiers fighting abroad in the 17th century 40 – what leaps out is the fact that the exiles’ longing to travel back in time (i.e. to their former life) has been facilitated by the very material possibility of their doing so in/through space. In other words, they know that – across the miles – their homes are still there, waiting for them. As I have discussed elsewhere in relation to day-dreaming, 41 some modicum of credibility is necessary to make all fantasies that project images from the past onto the future meaningful and compelling.
While most of the theorists who have written about nostalgia 42 have continued to treat it as a historical disease of the zeitgeist (although one that is now more commonly associated with late modernity), a few commentators – including Raymond Williams 43 and Frederick Raphael 44 – have been prepared to hazard that it is a transhistorical human condition rather than a ‘form of invented tradition’. 45 If we focus on its Bakhtinian temporal-spatial properties as outlined above then, perhaps, this case can be made; although with the proviso that, rather than an extraordinary and/or impossible fantasy, nostalgia is better understood as a realisable everyday practice. Probably the best way to illustrate my thinking here is by way of personal anecdote. Since moving to my village in Scotland 20 years ago, I have built up a portfolio of local walks that I make on a regular basis. Each one of them is inscribed by multiple memories of things that have happened in my life during those years and there are a great many features in the landscape – trees, boulders, gateways, old buildings, the annual flowering of certain plants and flowers (see also note 64 on the Wordsworths) – that have particular connotations and conjure up particular moments in time. My local, habitual and in every way unremarkable walk through a familiar landscape is thus the occasion of what, for some, would constitute nostalgia – though it bears none of the obvious hallmarks of a ‘longing’ that is ‘insatiable’ (Boym’s characterisation of ‘reflective nostalgia’) or the complete reconstruction of the past associated with ‘restorative’ nostalgia. 46 Indeed, the spirit in which such encounters are undertaken has much more in common with the memorialist’s desire to explore and honour the past. For even as our visits to graves, and other official and unofficial memorials, may be seen to reproduce the recursive mobilities of childhood and courtship, so do our most banal rambles reunite us with people and events that have been important to us through a complex (and ongoing) process of projection and introjection. Placed in this longitudinal context, memorialisation thus becomes a practice that is as much to do with fixing – or at least slowing down – the ephemerality of everyday life as it is about mitigating the finite loss of significant others. And while such practices are certainly in line with many (pejorative) definitions of nostalgia (‘The nostalgic desires . . . to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition’ 47 ) I would propose, that they are part and parcel of the very workings of memory itself when allied to the everyday practice of perception.
While Henri Bergson’s theory of memory, as developed across his oeuvre, is far more complex than the vision contained in his short essay on déjà vu,
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I have nevertheless found that source to be especially evocative for understanding the signal role both embodiment and mobility play in the actualisation of memory and, indeed, the essentially mobile nature of memory itself. Particularly suggestive for the argument I have been pursuing here is his account of the way in which our perceptions in the present (i.e. all that presents itself to consciousness – abstract ideas as well as encounters with phenomena)
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are stored as perceptions and reactivated as memories as and when we have particular need of them.
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For Bergson, this process is demonstrated most vividly in the phenomenon of déjà-vu, or ‘false-recognition’, wherein we fleetingly glimpse those perceptions which have only just lodged themselves in our unconscious: Step by step, as perception is created, it is profiled in memory, which is beside it like a shadow is next to a body. But, in the normal conditions, there is no consciousness of it, just as we should be unconscious of our shadow were our eyes to shed light on it each time in turned in that direction.
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According to Bergson, then, the ‘uncanny’ sense of having been somewhere (‘some-when’) before, or of knowing what we are about to say next, depends upon the fact that we have, indeed, already thought these things – but only a few seconds previously. 52
The implications of this modelling of memory for a better understanding of the everyday processes of memorialisation, as outlined above are, I would suggest, considerable. First, the way that Bergson conceives of the relationship between perception and memory points to the availability of a potentially ‘vast repository’ of phenomena, 53 practices and events that may be activated at any time, hence allowing for their everyday and incidental nature; second, his insistence that perceptions are actualised as memories by dint of necessity (i.e. providing us with some information or knowledge crucial for our negotiation of our present circumstances) 54 rather than the mere prompt of association helps explain why embodied movement plays such a crucial role in the stimulation of memory. As I have discussed elsewhere in relation to car driving, 55 the decisions we make while spatially manoeuvring ourselves about the world often calls for this sort of assistance: we draw upon former perceptions to identify what, or where, something is located spatially and/or what to do next. Indeed, the urgency and relevance of such a memory appears to be directly related to its vividness; as when, for example, we lose our way in a place we have visited only once before, but then recover our sense of direction by accessing our previous experience of being there. So significant is such a moment of recall, meanwhile, that we are unlikely to mistake our way around that place in the future: the original perception, accessed as a memory, is now – as it were – memorialised. And if, by analogy, we replace route-finding with a rather more emotional set of circumstances – for example, a walk where we come across a bridge we recognise but with the sense of something missing (a person perhaps?) – it is not hard to see why certain memory acts can easily become memorial events. Once excavated from Bergson’s repository of ‘pure’ or ‘virtual’ memory 56 to perform this sort of task, the memory is likely to be seared upon our consciousness and (in my example) the bridge associated with the ‘lost’ person forever.
Furthermore, while this sort of embodied recall does not necessarily depend upon mobility per se, as geographers and/or mobilities scholars, we cannot fail to be interested in the fact that it often does. As I have explored elsewhere, 57 Bergson’s description of the way in which perception and memory are ‘laid down’ next to one another in consciousness (see previous extract) is strikingly reminiscent of Tim Ingold’s geo-spatial characterisation of the way in which we both make, and follow, pathways in the landscape, with our present footfall unconsciously – indeed, uncannily – ‘remembering’ where we trod before. 58 For both these thinkers, mind and body have the capacity to slip seamlessly into the present from the past, thus explaining how certain expressions of movement in the present – from the smallest bodily gesture to a drive along a once familiar road – can be so evocative. This dynamic – though with a focus on the bilateral interaction between memory and place, rather than memory and mobility – has also been be explored by Owain Jones with reference to his old childhood ‘haunts’ 59 and, of course, resonates with Avril Maddrell’s work on how the bereaved ensure ‘continuing bonds’ 60 with their loved ones through a creative variety of customised memorial practices in the material landscape. Furthermore, as I now proceed to demonstrate by means of textual example, the mobilities of love, loss and memorialisation can be expressed in both the most public (and spectacular) and the most private (and invisible) of ways even though, as already observed, it is arguable that all acts of reiterative mourning leave their mark upon the landscape to some degree.
From public highway to traceless track
The Christian/humanist tradition within Western culture has ensured that funeral ceremonies feature prominently in the history of its literature and I turn now to two very differently situated texts – Dorothy Wordsworth’s ‘Lakeland Journals’ 61 from the early 19th century and William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, 62 written during the American Depression, to reflect further on the mobility and memorial practices involved. In particular, I focus on the elaborate, protracted and arguably excessive nature of the mobilities deployed in the conveyancing of the body, as well as identifying moments where private and invisible micro-mobilities are enfolded into the public ceremony.
In her diary entry for 3 September 1800, Dorothy Wordsworth records her attendance at the funeral of a local woman, seemingly a pauper, without family – while her brothers William and John, along with Coleridge, climb Hellvellyn. Aside from the gendered politics of this, Dorothy Wordsworth’s account provides a fascinating insight into how – in a rural parish at the turn of 18th/19th century – the ‘staged’ mobilities discussed in the previous section are carried out to the letter: They set the corpse down at the door; and while we stood within the threshold, the men with their hats off sang with decent and solemn countenances a verse of a funeral psalm. The corpse was then borne down the hill, and they sang till they had passed the Town-End. I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me.
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Although the distance the (unnamed) woman’s coffin is borne is not huge by corpse-road standards, from Town-End to the church is over half a mile, and the woman’s residence a further distance from Town-End. Even before embarking upon this journey to the church, however, we note that the corpse is carried within the home to the threshold where psalms are read; the moment of rest marking the first of several intervals which serve to both lengthen the process and make the movement that follows more pronounced and significant. The conveyancing of the body to the church is, moreover, divided into geographically defined phases through the singing of the mourners: they continue to chant/sing until they reach Town-End, and begin again as they come to the bridge a few hundred yards before the church. The deceased woman’s last journey on earth is thus skilfully extended, both temporally and spatially, and the mourners’ respect seemingly encoded in the time they are prepared to afford her. In the absence of anything else, this last ‘long’ journey serves as the community’s final gift to the woman. Evidently moved by her (intellectual) observations on the darkness of the house and church in contrast to the brightness of the sunlit landscape (discussed later in the same entry), Dorothy Wordsworth was, I would suggest, also affected by her embodied participation in a walking-event that echoes so many others she pursued with her brother William on a regular basis and then ‘memorialised’ in her diaries. 64 Public, ceremonial and dignified as the funeral ceremony is, Dorothy Wordsworth’s complex, mixed emotions – wonder as well as sadness – owe their resonance to her everyday practice as a diarist intent on capturing, and making permanent, the ephemeral nature of the lifeworld.
The journey undertaken by Addie Bundren’s corpse in Faulker’s novel follows a remarkably similar route to that of the unnamed woman featured in Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries, but in circumstances so protracted, hyperbolic and grotesque that this is not immediately obvious. This radical de-familiarisation of what, after all, is one of life’s most everyday and unavoidable social practices was, presumably, the author’s intention: stretching the material, as well as the psychological, aspects of a ‘typical’ artisan funeral to the uttermost limits of possibility in the manner of the darkest of comedies. In contrast to the mile or two that the pauper in Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary entry is borne to her final resting place, Addie Burden and her cortege embark upon a journey of over 60 miles from their home in the ‘backwoods’ of Mississippi to the town of Jefferson by mule-cart. Not impossible in and of itself, the challenge becomes Herculean when continuous rain necessitates an ‘impossible’ river-crossing in which the (first set of) mules are drowned, and various other accidents and delays mean that Addie’s rapidly decomposing body has symbolically ‘run out of time’ by the time the cortege finally makes it to the outskirts of the city. 65 Fascinating on any number of levels, from a mobilities perspective, it is hard not to read this macabre and hyperbolic reworking of the funeral procession as a comment on the ‘excess’ inherent in the Christian ceremony and, in particular, the rituals surrounding the conveyancing of the body back to the place of the person’s birth. By exaggerating every stage of the journey, as he does (and Addie’s body is subject to the same psalm-singing on the threshold of her home as Dorothy Wordsworth’s pauper), 66 Faulkner holds a magnifying lens to his protagonists’ compulsive, superstitious and, above all, excessive memorial practices and, in the process, asks us to consider why they are necessary. In my discussion of Dorothy Wordsworth’s participation in her neighbour’s funeral, I have provided one possible answer to this question: the mile-long walk to the church gives the mourners the time they need for their sentiments to be both stirred, and relieved; and their embodied, mobile and communal participation in the event offers a very material expression of empathy with the bereaved. However, for Faulkner – as for many other fiction writers – the public enactment of mourning is never that simple and the text portrays the ceremony as one that serves the, admittedly complex, psychological needs of the various characters which are only obliquely related to loss of Addie herself.
Elsewhere, literature provides us with instances of private mourning rather more akin to the sorts of memorial practices featured in Maddrell’s case studies,
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and the concept of ‘trackless mourning’ that I introduced at the start of this article via the figure of the woman in the long black veil. Thomas Hardy’s, The Woodlanders, is an especially poignant example in this regard if we focus on the character of Marty South: a women set to mourn the death of fellow-labourer, Giles Winterborne, for the rest of her life through actions that symbolically unite the two while remaining invisible to the rest of the world. The denouement of the story centres on Winterborne’s sacrifice: he offers Grace Fitzpiers (a married women with whom he has long been in love) the shelter of his hut when she is then cast out of her father’s home on account of her husband’s infidelity and subsequent association with Winterborne. In order to avoid compromising her reputation still further, Winterborne refuses to share the hut with her, and, during a cold spell, becomes ill and dies. In the weeks and months immediately following this tragedy, Grace (a middle-class doctor’s wife) and Marty (a ‘woodlander’, like Giles) come together in their mourning of Giles: The church stood somewhat outside the village, and could be reached without passing though the street. In the dusk of the late September day, they went thither by secret ways, walking mostly in silence side by side, each busied with her own thoughts [ . . . ] They stood at the grave together, and though the sun had gone down they could get glimpses over the woodland for miles [ . . . ]
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In terms of the mobility practices discussed in this article, this scenario is both familiar and unusual; familiar, inasmuch as the deep mourning for the lost loved one is, in part, a private and invisible act (‘they went by secret ways’), but unusual inasmuch as the two women are sharing the grieving and the memorialisation. Once again, the distance of the churchyard from the village facilitates the ceremony and, of course, replicates the route taken by the funeral procession itself. Following Grace’s reconciliation with her erring husband, however, Marty is left to continue the weekly ritual on her own. The novel marks the occasion when Grace first ‘forgets’ to turn up by referring to Grace as Marty’s ‘fellow-pilgrim’ 69 and, in so doing, foregrounds the crucial role walking has played in the expression of their mourning. Our final image of Marty, however, connects her with Giles through the everyday mobility practices they shared together as skilled ‘woodlanders’ (see epigraph at head of article) and, I would suggest, demonstrates most evocatively Bergson’s theory of how (embodied) memory is activated by practical necessity. Marty will ‘remember’ Giles every time she re-enacts a skill that he was expert in and, in the process, find solace in fusing with, or ‘becoming’, the person she has loved and lost: a perfect example of how mobility is integral to both memory and mourning and (in its everyday ‘non-representationality’) 70 invisible to others.
Conclusion
This article has sought to contribute to debates in cultural geography on the practices of mourning and remembrance both through prioritising the role of mobility and by proposing that there is a connection between the ways we mark, and memorialise, events during the ‘life’ of an intimate relationship and those we pursue when the person concerned is lost to us. This proposition is made in the context of my wider research on the role of mobilities in the production and sustenance of relationships through the lifecourse and relates, in particular, the significance of mobilities within courtship. 71 Although this might present itself as a strange yoking, I have attempted to demonstrate the way in which the mobilities that come to ‘characterise’ a relationship remain part of its ‘DNA’ in perpetuity; in others words, and following Tim Ingold, 72 the lines, or tracks, we lay down during the different phases of life remain with us. And while such recursive wandering may well have specific geographical expression – that is, our mourning may literally take us back to ‘special places’ – my focus on the mobility-event has helped further explain why so much (private) mourning remains notionally invisible and ‘trackless’.
In theoretical terms, the reasoning that underpins this bid to link the mobilities of love with those of loss depends upon a model of memory that is, itself, inscribed by both mobility and embodiment. Bergson’s work on the way in which perception and memory shadow one another in his essay on déjà vu 73 has proven crucial to me in this regard, arguing – as it does – for perceptions to be (re)constituted (as memories) as and when needed, often in response to a kinetic prompt. This helps to explain why acts of mourning are inspired not only by visiting a place with powerful associations but also through embodied movements, ranging from physical activities and/or modes of transportation through to the smallest bodily gesture. Nostalgia, too (including ‘anticipatory retrospection’) 74 may also be seen to be dependent upon mobility if we observe the extent to which the (desired) transportation back in time is crucially dependent upon the material possibility of returning to particular locations in, and through, space. As I argue here, it is the latter that renders the fantasy of the former both credible and compelling. In the same way, then, that Bergson’s theory of memory helps us better understand how (everyday) memories are created and stored, so does a ‘mobilised’ concept of nostalgia illuminate how we explore, and store, our most precious experiences (sometimes in anticipation of their loss); taken together, moreover, they show how the practice of memorialisation often begins long before the material loss of a loved one occurs.
Meanwhile, a second strand of my argument has explored both the difference and the similarities between the macro-mobilities of death (notably funerals) and our personal (‘trackless’) mourning practices. With reference to a small selection of texts, I have used mobilities theory to posit some explanations for why (aside from tradition itself) funerals (in the Christian tradition) should continue to be so excessive (of distance) and protracted (of time). The shared embodiment of the mourners and the deceased presents itself as compelling explanation here, though both Wordsworth’s journals and Faulkner’s novel also question the extent to which ceremonies themselves (walking behind a coffin, riding on a waggon, driving in a hearse) constitute the meaningful ‘memory-work’ 75 that is integral to our most powerful acts of mourning and remembrance. This is why Marty South’s manner of honouring Giles Winterborne speaks volumes: not only are her actions invisible and trackless but they are also born of perceptions, and skills, 76 laid down years before. Leaving no obvious trace whatsoever on the landscape, Marty’s acts of mourning are translated into pure movement: ‘whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I’ll say none could do it like you’. 77 This said, and with reference back to my previous discussion, the notion that any repetitive act of mourning is wholly without trace in terms of the landscape in which it is practised is debatable. True, our tracks may imprint themselves upon the landscape in ways that are invisible to the naked eye but, following Ingold, 78 they nevertheless constitute a ‘reductive’ line of sorts, and – over time – have the same potential to transfigure the landscape as more material monuments. Therefore, while ‘nobody knows and nobody sees’ the nightly wanderings of the woman ‘in the long black veil’, we must conclude that the landscape will have felt the pressure of her tread, however ghostly.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
As someone new to the field, I would like to thank my anonymous readers and journal editor for their suggestions of further reading and positive engagement with my ideas.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Lynne Pearce is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University (UK) and Director for the Humanities in the Centre for Mobiltiies Research [CeMoRe]. Her most recent publications include Drivetime: Literary Excursions in Automotive Consciousness (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and the special issue Mobility and the Humanities (co-edited with Peter Merriman) (Mobilities, 12.4, 2017).