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Spaces of Remembrance and Modes of Accessing the Past

Chains of Consolation: Ghost-Writing Death’s Tales in Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death (2021)

Former une chaîne de consolation : écriture fantôme et élégie engagée dans Mrs Death Misses Death (Salena Godden, 2021)
Héloïse Lecomte

Résumés

Dans son roman Mrs Death Misses Death (2021), Salena Godden fait entrer le principe de l’écriture fantôme dans un nouvel ordre symbolique. Le protagoniste, Wolf Willeford, un jeune écrivain, rédige les souvenirs de la Mort. Entre fiction poétique et livre de chansons, l’œuvre associe des récits de mort et de deuil à des épisodes de l’existence de Wolf, mêlant ainsi des légendes à des récits d’événements réels (comme l’incendie de Grenfell en 2017). L’élégie et le réalisme magique se mêlent pour former un geste de transmission (entre Mrs Death et Wolf, mais aussi entre Godden et son lecteur et même entre les lecteurs), dans un livre hanté dont la dernière section se transforme en un « rituel privé » de deuil collectif pour les victimes de la pandémie de Covid-19 (302). Si l’écriture élégiaque de Godden remet en question la possibilité même de transmettre la mémoire personnelle et l’histoire collective d’événements traumatisants, elle promeut également la transmission des rituels de deuil dans une société britannique contemporaine apparemment « déritualisée » (Clavandier 2009, 91). Godden propose une « re-vision » (Rich 1979, 35) humanisante de la Mort en remplaçant la figure légendaire de la Grande Faucheuse par celle d’une vieille mendiante noire, une « éboueuse » qui « ramasse les esprits et emporte tous ces fardeaux » (Godden 2021, 152). Dans ce récit, le transmetteur s’apparente à « l’auditeur, [au] messager, [au] passager » (74) : le livre renoue avec la tradition des contes tout en transformant la transmission en un acte de care. Cet article s’attache à démontrer comment la transmission forme une chaîne de consolation pour les personnages et les lecteurs.

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1If one were to try and picture Death, it might resemble the skeletal figure, scythe and black hood of the Grim Reaper, which has haunted the European cultural imagination since the plague pandemic of the fourteenth century. The Black Death, which claimed the lives of approximately one third of Europe’s population (McKenna n.p.), fostered a need for the personification of a then-omnipresent death. The Grim Reaper can thus be defined as an allegory, a figure that ‘seeks to express imagistically what is otherwise abstract or invisible’ (Copeland and Struck 6). Indeed, since scythes are used to harvest crops when they are ready to be plucked, they figuratively cut short life when the time has come. As for the skeletal figure of Death itself, shrouded in black, it represents what happens to the body after the flesh has decayed. This piece of western cultural knowledge has been passed on for centuries, through the many iterations of (oral) tales and works of art.

  • 1 This evolution also builds upon other countries’ personification of death as a woman. In France, th (...)
  • 2 The character’s title does not, however, preclude her autonomy: ‘Mrs Death is not the wife of Death (...)
  • 3 In the original French : ‘Il est à tous et à personne, c’est une forme aux contours mouvants, un mo (...)

2However, in recent years, the defining skeletal outline of the Grim Reaper has been challenged by new representations of Death as a corporeal female character, for instance in the comic book series Sandman (1989–1996) by English author Neil Gaiman and its subsequent series adaptation.1 This shift towards embodiment reflects a humanisation of the death figure, which is developed by British poet and memoirist Salena Godden in her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death, published in 2021. The novel replaces the Grim Reaper with Mrs Death, a shape-shifting black woman, powerful and vulnerable in equal measure.2 By refashioning the allegory of Death, Godden taps into the function of the myth, which ‘belongs to everyone and no one: it is a form with shifting contours, a means of confronting a canvas known to all and taken up by many’ (Dekens 97).3 If one takes transmission to mean ‘allowing something to spread’ (according to the Merriam Webster definition of the verb) both temporally, spatially and interpersonally, or ‘to cause a thing to pass, go, or be conveyed to another person, place or thing’ (OED), myth exemplifies a form of passive transmission (both ‘known to all and taken up by many’, in Dekens’s words). Julie Dekens’s use of passive forms in her definition of myth puts more emphasis on the action of transmitting or the material that is being transmitted than on the identity of the transmitter.

  • 4 In an email exchange, Salena Godden explains ‘I have always felt Wolf is a they/them. . . . Looking (...)

3Godden’s rewriting, as it puts flesh on the skeleton of Death and fleshes out the character, also turns myth-sharing into an act of transformative transmission. Indeed, the novel represents Mrs Death not simply as a psychopomp but also as a storyteller and story-sharer. In this instance of transmission, the transmitter’s shifting identity matters as much as the contents of her tales. This article thus purports to study how Godden uses this transformation to write history in real time by mingling realism and myth. Indeed, Godden’s hybrid work engages with defining concerns and catastrophes of our times, in accordance with Emily Horton’s definition of contemporary ‘crisis fiction’ as ‘a mode of everyday social anxiety and unease emphasised in these novels in relation to a context of global neoliberalism’ (3). The book’s other protagonist, Wolf Willeford, a young writer who is tasked with ghost-writing the memoirs of Mrs Death and sharing her tales, is the survivor of a fire reminiscent of the Grenfell Tower fire that took place in June 2017.4 Also mentioned in the exchanges between Wolf and Mrs Death are the deaths of inspiring pop icons such as Prince or David Bowie, the loss of young black people at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ecological crisis. While the novel’s tone is suggestive of the elegy, defined as a text ‘of mortal loss and consolation’ by Peter Sacks (3), I would like to investigate the ways in which Godden foregrounds the transmission of death tales across time and space in order to invest her representation of mourning with socio-political weight.

  • 5 As Myriam Watthee-Delmotte argues in Littérature et ritualité, ‘literature and rite both belong to (...)
  • 6 I am extremely grateful to Salena Godden for the luminous exchanges that provided me with invaluabl (...)

4Like a nesting doll, Mrs Death Misses Death offers a multi-layered take on transmission, which shines through on multiple levels: in Godden’s adaptation of the Death allegory, in Wolf Willeford’s ghost-writing, or in their attempt to articulate their own traumatic life story. All these threads converge to question the very status of literature as a means of transmission, a ritual space of connection:5 what is the purpose of transmitting the life and death stories of the deceased to future generations? Is it desirable or even possible to share the stories of catastrophic events? Is there a literary way of carving out a space of recognition for the stories of invisibilised people? In order to explore the function of Godden’s piece of ‘crisis fiction’, I will focus on the transformative potential of her rewriting before delving into transmission as a way of enforcing an ethics of care and attention and the creation of a chain or (intergenerational) community of consolation in times of crisis.6

A Re-vision of Death

  • 7 A similar device is used in Australian writer Markus Zusak’s best-selling novel The Book Thief (200 (...)

5Godden builds her account of immediate history on the renewed perspective of her mythical protagonist. From the first chapter of the novel, Mrs Death takes on the role of narrator7 and addresses the reader directly as she engages in a defining act of self-description:

The greatest trick man played was making you believe I was a man. They erased me and made you all believe that Death was male in spirit—the Grim Reaper in a black hood with a scythe. Remarkable that nobody questioned it really, don’t you think? For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it. The one is she. And only she who is invisible can do the work of Death. And there is no human more invisible, more readily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past than a woman; than a poor black woman, a homeless black beggar-woman with knotty hair, broken back, walking ever so slow, slow, slow, pushing a shopping trolley full of plastic bottles. (Godden 2)

  • 8 In the original French: ‘La culture, en tant qu’univers de formes symboliques, n’est pas un patrimo (...)
  • 9 Her rewriting goes one step further than revisions of myths such as Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopia (...)

6Mrs Death’s portrait could be construed as an act of corrective transmission for the benefit of the reader. As philosophers Marie-Claude Blais, Marcel Gauchet and Dominique Ottavi argue in Transmettre, apprendre, ‘culture, as a universe of symbolic forms, is not a heritage that can be transmitted intact and received identically. There is always a reconstruction of the transmitted object’ (Blais et al. 55).8 In Godden’s reconstruction, which harks back to postmodernism’s distrust of metanarratives, the narrator challenges the traditional allegory of Death and argues that an anonymous crowd of men (‘they’) constructed a false narrative in order to claim narratorial and representational power. By exposing this faceless ‘man’ as a trickster (‘the greatest trick’) and an illusionist (‘making you believe’), Godden inscribes her ‘reconstruction of the transmitted object’ into the feminist tradition of revisionist works that replace history with ‘herstory’.9 A noticeable shift takes place in this excerpt: the character’s initial status as an object of (non-)representation (‘they erased me’) is reversed into narratorial agency to highlight the femaleness of the reshaped allegory (Mrs Death becomes ‘she who gave you life’, ‘she who has the power’). This paradoxical figure reclaims her agency by invoking her invisibility both as a mark of vulnerability and a superpower. While the accumulation of adjectives foregrounds disempowerment (‘talked over’, ‘ignored’, ‘betrayed’ and ‘easy to walk past’) and physical frailty (‘broken back’ and ‘ever so slow, slow, slow’), it also stages the embodiment of Mrs Death. The vivid and detailed portrait that ensues, rhythmically drawing on Godden’s background of live poetry reading, veers far away from representations of the featureless Grim Reaper and appears to cancel out Mrs Death’s previous erasure. Godden’s take on Death has the makings of a feminist ‘re-vision’, famously defined by Adrienne Rich as ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ (35)—a narrative choice which both felt ‘empowering’ and ‘humanizing’ to Godden:

It felt empowering, like I was reclaiming something there. . . . When you write death as a woman, you instantly come in from the female perspective, the vulnerable people in society, the invisible people in society, and so it made sense that Mrs Death would come in in the guise of someone who’s invisible and be able to do her work unseen. . . . But I think also as well, this idea of wanting to humanise death. (in Gregory)

7Both the vulnerability inherent in Mrs Death’s embodiment and the power conferred by her double status as narrator and protagonist play a crucial part in the novel’s gesture of transmission. Indeed, as the novel’s other main character Wolf Willeford argues, the narrator/protagonist of Mrs Death ‘changes the lens’ (Godden 50) in the writing of past and present history.

8As she was explaining her writing process in a podcast interview with Chris Gregory, Salena Godden highlighted its contextual dimension and her grappling with an intricate web of simultaneous crises:

[The book was] triggered by my own mourning, and then the bigger picture, deaths in the world, losing heroes. The bottom line is I couldn’t write a book about a pandemic I didn’t see coming, I could write a book about the pandemic that was already here, the pandemic of violence, stuff that has been escalating. Trump was coming into power, Brexit was happening, big things, big deaths happening, Black Lives Matter, Prince and Bowie, Grenfell, as things were coming in, very much in real time. (in Gregory)

9By enlarging the scale of her personal story (‘my own mourning’), Godden strives to transmit contemporary history as it is experienced by those living through it. Immediate history can be defined as ‘the time of lived experienced, characterized by the presence of witnesses and therefore living memory’ (Parisot and Pluvinet 2015, 7; my translation). The re-visionist creation of the Mrs Death character, which includes a mythical element in an otherwise realist novel, therefore appears as an attempt to find a literary expression of crisis as it bears witness to the present.

  • 10 Cf. Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, (...)

10The novel features passages in which Mrs Death changes appearances, from the ‘beggar-woman’ of the beginning to a cashier (36), or a ‘white china rabbit’ (107), but characters also morph into one another and desks are given a voice, borrowing a page from the book of magical realism as defined by Joan Mellen: ‘fiction in which the supernatural, the mythical, or the implausible are assimilated to the cognitive structure of reality without a perceptive break in the narrator’s or characters’ consciousness’ (1). Magical realism in contemporary fiction has often been deemed a literary language of crisis or unassimilated trauma.10 It runs through the writing of northern Irish writer Jan Carson, who declared in multiple interviews that magical realism enabled her to account for the senseless violence of the Troubles:

I like the way unusual or fantastical elements can be used as extended metaphors to explore complex or even problematic socio-political themes in a way which provides a kind of lens to see these themes through fresh eyes. (in Barros-del Río 200; emphasis added)

11Carson’s definition of her writing process strongly resonates with Godden’s work. Just as re-vision underscores the action of ‘seeing with fresh eyes’ and Godden’s protagonist advocates the necessity of ‘[changing] the lens’ (Godden 50), the inclusion of magical realist elements in the novel renews the storyteller’s perspective. Godden opts for the transformative transmission, reconstruction or re-vision of myth as a vehicle for spreading awareness and passing on the stories of contemporary events and catastrophes.

Transmission in Conversation: ‘the Listener, the Messenger, the Passenger’ (Godden 74)

12The transformation of the Death figure paves the way for Mrs Death to become an agent of transmission herself. Godden has remarked in interviews that Mrs Death is partly based on her ‘great-great-grandmother, who was this really amazing Jamaican kind of herbalist, spiritual medicine-maker . . . . I’ve just heard stories passed down over the years’ (in Gregory). Intergenerational transmission is thus built into the novel but also encapsulated in the very relationship between its two protagonists:

In the most simplistic way, Wolf asks all the questions and Mrs Death is the wisdom. Even simplistic-er, to boil the book down, I could say that Wolf is me age 19 and then Mrs Death is me age 50, which is where I’m approaching now. So this kind of conversation with my younger self, perhaps. Conversations that I have with younger poets who are struggling with questions of identity and race and queerness and life and death and climate and chaos and the future and the present and the now and history and everything. (in Gregory)

13The ’vertical chain’ put in motion by transmission (Louis in Jongy and Keilhauer 157), the act of ‘passing the torch from one generation to the next’ (Blais et al. 54) are embedded in Godden’s very choice of characterisation. The conversations between Mrs Death and Wolf are also built into the novel’s structure and alternating chapters headlined by the name of their narrator (‘Wolf’ or ‘Mrs Death’), so that transmission mostly takes place in conversation, interaction or exchange.

  • 11 In the original French: ‘ce n’est pas l’invisibilité qui crée l’absence de récit mais bien le trou (...)
  • 12 Wolf emphasises the oratory powers of Mrs Death in the chapter entitled ‘Wolf: Here Are All Your Fe (...)

14Instead of just carrying souls from the world of the living to that of the dead, Mrs Death remembers their stories and passes on her knowledge to Wolf. Indeed, a connective sense of immemorial remembrance runs through the work, from ‘the first morning of the first mourning’ in prehistoric caves (Godden 1) to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading Wolf Willeford to claim ‘as she sings to me, I may glimpse the ghosts of London through Mrs Death’s murder ballads, stories and poems’ (51). Transmission occurs in the space between Mrs Death’s story-sharing (‘she sings’) and Wolf’s imagining (‘I may glimpse’). This sweeping historical gesture leaves no voice unheard and no story untold, revealing Mrs Death’s role as an empathetic listener, a caring collector of stories who admits that ‘a huge part of the work of being Mrs Death is all the listening that I do. Since this world began, I have heard it all’ (152). In so doing, transmission, which ‘transports information in time’ (Blais et al. 52; translation mine) becomes a way of retrieving inaudible voices from historical anonymity. As Guillaume Le Blanc argues in L’Invisibilité sociale, ‘it is not invisibility that creates the absence of narrative but the lacunar hole in narratives that is produced by the structure of relegation or the erasure of narratives through the closing of all auditory structures, which engenders the true invisibility of the subaltern, the precarious or the excluded’ (Le Blanc 44; translation mine).11 The ‘fresh lens’ provided by Godden’s re-vision thus combines acts of listening and seeing that stretch back in time.12

  • 13 The young victim of Jack the Ripper (a disguised woman in Godden’s rewriting) is grieved over by he (...)
  • 14 Sarah Reed was a mixed-race black woman who was imprisoned under charges of grievous bodily harm (w (...)

15In this caring gesture of transmission, the narrative fights against erasure, which is why the book gives as much importance to the anonymous victims of the fire as the likes of David Bowie, Prince or Princess Diana. The re-vision of death as woman entails a re-visibilisation of certain deaths, particularly women’s, with entire chapters revolving around the death of a fictional young prostitute named Tilly Tuppence13 or the unsolved murder of a German hitchhiker in Northern Ireland in 1988. One of the novel’s most striking chapters is dedicated to the story of Sarah Reed’s death in 2016 (121), which fueled the development of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK.14 Godden chose to write it as a poem, entitled ‘Mrs Death in Holloway Prison’, which begins with the dedication ‘Say Her Name: For Sarah Reed, Black Lives Matter’ (121). The poem puts in crude light the suffering endured by Sarah Reed, with short, factual lines that pile on the atrocities endured by the young woman (‘the policeman was seen on CCTV/ dragging Sarah by her hair/ while punching her/ repeatedly in the face’ [121]). The poem’s alliterative chorus—‘Sarah suffered’—elides Reed’s last name in its attempt to create a space of remembrance for the young woman and to underline the iconic dimension of her tragedy. Salena Godden documented the evolution of her writing process for this chapter:

The story started as a newspaper article, factual. . . . I made it into a poem because I wanted Sarah Reed to have that breath. When you read a poem, you might just slow down and you might just take a breath. You just go slower and you just take it in differently than you would if it were prose and just block-writing. (Dead Darlings podcast, in Anon.)

16The repeated mention of breath is strikingly reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘I can’t breathe’ in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and Eric Gardner’s in 2014. Stretching the limits of the novel form in order to accommodate other genres becomes a means for Salena Godden to restore the sensorial presence and audibility of dead people and their stories.

  • 15 In the original French: ‘chaque individu est récepteur avant de devenir émetteur, copiste avant d’ê (...)

17Other sections of the book contribute to its multi-generic scope and borrow features from drama in order to stage the dialogue between Mrs Death and Wolf, the nested gesture of transmission: ‘each individual is a receiver before becoming a sender, a copyist before being a creator’ (Blais et al. 53).15 In a crucial chapter that foregrounds the perspective of Mrs Death’s desk (‘Oh to Be a Piano!’), Wolf is thus encouraged to write Mrs Death’s memoirs by using the sensorial memory of the desk:

. . . Now, just put your ear here, Wolf, rest your head on my surface, you’ll hear all the ghosts of scribbling pens of dreams from before. Stroke your fingertips gently across my red skin, as though it is braille, you’ll be able to trace the hard-pressed writing from before. . . . Lay your head here, Wolf Willeford, rest your curly head. Lay your ear to the desk, play me like a piano, play me, drum your fingers on me and play me, Wolf, and I’ll share with you all I know. (Godden 85–87; emphases added)

  • 16 In the original French: ‘transmettre aux générations suivantes le souvenir du défunt. D’où son nom (...)

18Acknowledging the materiality of transmission, the desk turns written stories into audible ones, musical scores, while restoring the sensorial and connective importance of touch (‘play’, ‘drum’, ‘trace’, ‘stroke’). Both desk and text become a figurative tombstone, playing the role of the French tombeau, which, according to Philippe Ariès, is meant to ‘pass on the memory of the deceased to subsequent generations. Hence its name monumentum, from memoria: the tomb is a memorial’ (Ariès 201; translation mine).16 This memorial is meant to restore the deceased’s sensorial presence for the living to remember them. The novel features a diegetic motif of transmission, since Wolf begins imitating Mrs Death’s process of memorialisation in his own narrative: ‘I am walking with Mrs Death and she shows me a London of layered worlds, the many worlds of before, and I hear the cries of far away and long ago’ (52; emphasis added). Mrs Death’s transmission thus creates a circle of hearing that transcends her own storytelling impulse.

Wolf: from Listener to Ghost-Writer

19The novel’s structure and the numerous thematic echoes between the chapters seen from the perspective of Mrs Death and the ones narrated by Wolf underline the chain of transmission that is put in place by Salena Godden. For instance, the chapter ‘Mrs Death: Here Are All your Fears’ is made up of a song whose chorus reverberates through the following chapter ‘Wolf: Here Are All Your Fears’. But more than simply receiving Mrs Death’s tales, poems and songs and putting them on the page, Wolf Willeford also shares their own personal nightmares and stories of heartbreak and loss so as to highlight the resonances between the two.

20Godden has included an appendix at the end of the book in order to give the reader a full view of her protagonist’s life story: the reader is thus presented with Wolf’s unusual family tree, which takes the shape of a rootless branch slithering on the page. The dates of each family member’s existence and their birthplace are mentioned, as well as their generational link with the protagonist (from mother/father at the bottom of the page to ‘10th Great-Grandparent’ at the top of the page). The one striking addition to the information displayed is the manner in which each person died, which seemingly turns the tree into a mortiferous rootless family branch that keeps passing on violent death as inheritance (‘death by torture and execution’, ‘death by fire’, ‘killed at sea’ being three recurrent occurrences of family deaths). This curious death tree reads like an unbroken chain of desolation, a history of family transmission tainted with violence. Some of these stories are fleshed out in the novel, such as that of Ma(rtha) Willeford (‘4th Great-Grandparent’) and her daughter Tilly Tuppence (Jack the Ripper’s first, unclaimed victim). Since the desire to find an adequate form of expression is prominent in Wolf’s life story, the gaps in the articulation of intergenerational family trauma might thus be complemented by this pictorial representation.

21Wolf really starts taking on the crucial role of the storyteller by sharing their own memories as a child and using their own heartbreak in order to shed light on public, shared injustices. When they evoke the fire which claimed the life of their mother and whose catastrophic spread was due to inadequate housing conditions, the young writer endeavours to give a political platform to the socially invisible and the unheard:

  • 17 Strikingly, some stories are told both from the perspective of Mrs Death and Wolf. The episode of t (...)

We still don’t even know how many lives were lost and how many lives were affected because of that one fire, that one night. There was no warning. There are no answers. People took to the streets in mournful, peaceful protest. The people of the community spilling with anger and grief. We all said our building was a death trap. Mum said so. We are the invisible, the ignored, and we are the poor. Cheap housing, cheap politicians, cheap lives lost. (Godden 25)17

22As they are ‘ghost-writing a book for Mrs Death’ (94), Wolf takes on the suffering of the people who died by ventriloquising the dead and thus becoming a literal ghost-writer, making sure that the stories of people who died preventable deaths get passed on and remembered. In this testimony, the first person of the plural is more combative than despondent, chanting its protest and spreading it from the street to the memoirs. The community itself is defined as a ‘spilling’ that cannot be contained. Salena Godden’s elegy pursues the double task of remembering the dead and fueling the action of the living, thus enhancing its political potential. The evocation of ‘cheap lives’ by Wolf is reminiscent of Butler’s notion of ‘ungrievability’. Indeed, while a grievable life is a ‘life that matters’, that ‘would be grieved if it were lost’ (Butler 14–15), an ungrievable life falls prey to a hierarchic system that deems it less worthy of mourning. By representing a textual ritual of remembrance and resistance, Godden (using Wolf as her mouthpiece) restores the grievability of previously invisibilised lives. The book foregrounds figures of transmission (the family tree branch and Mrs Death’s role as messenger) in order to imbue the narrative with a sense of shared responsibility in the passing on of stories and making sure that the dead are not forgotten and descendants can learn from the past.

Chains of Consolation: Forming a Community

  • 18 Godden has not commented on the choice of animal alter-egos for the protagonists, but the nature of (...)

23As she strives to acknowledge the value of all lives and restore the audibility of every voice through her writing, Salena Godden emphasises the connective powers of the mourning ritual (and the elegy as its literary form). The novel’s re-vision of Death puts in motion a relational ethics of care and attention, thus defined by Jean-Michel Ganteau: ‘Attention is intrinsically compatible with a praxis that finds its ground and expression in relational exchanges—be they inter-individual or more collective, even social in orientation and scale’ (Ganteau 16). The creation of a space of resonance and remembrance for lost stories and voices also extends beyond the range of humanity, as the protagonists also take animal appearances (Death as a rabbit and the young writer as a wolf, as shown on the book cover18), thus breaking down the limits between the human and the non-human. This choice opens up a space to acknowledge the need ‘[t]o consider—in the sense developed by French philosopher Corine Pelluchon—not only others but also all living beings’ (Ganteau 17). This crucial sense of consideration finds an outlet in a vividly dramatised therapy session (‘Mrs Death and The Doctor’) where Mrs Death simultaneously expresses concern and weariness:

I am ploughing through a flood of untimely and unnecessary and sudden and violent deaths, genocide, natural disasters, all caused by greed and destruction. And that’s just the human souls. Do you know how many miles and miles of ocean life are being killed by plastic and pollution every second? The ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. The depleting ozone. The climate crisis. Flood and fire! I mean, I am Death but this isn’t what I signed up for! I am not here for this . . . (Godden 155)

  • 19 Another evocation of the ecological crisis features in a chapter told from Wolf’s perspective, whic (...)

24The excerpt mingles the human and non-human in an apocalyptic lexical field of catastrophes: ‘a flood of deaths’. The acknowledgement of ‘ocean life’ and the detrimental direct effects of human action on it (in the passive ‘being killed’) foregrounds ethical consciousness and attention. The rhythm accelerates, reproducing Mrs Death’s mounting panic, finally bursting into short nominal and exclamatory sentences. The urgency of the situation is denoted by the use of the present continuous (including the slightly redundant ‘are being killed’, or ‘are rising’). However, Mrs Death turns despondency into a spur for action, a transmission of ‘ecological grief’, whose regenerative potential is thus defined by Jessica Marion Barr: ‘the empathetic space opened by ecological grief can remind viewers and participants that we are all part of earth’s ecological community, with a responsibility to care for and preserve all of the beings who share this biosphere’ (in Cunsolo and Landman 218). Mrs Death’s warning resonates through her interpellation of the reader (‘do you know . . . ?’). This illustrates María Puig de la Bellacasa’s theory of environmental care: ‘If we really do care about global climate change and the harm it will bring to future generations, we imagine a connection between ourselves and those future people who will judge our irresponsibility, and we change our consumption practices or political activities to decrease the likely harm’ (31; emphasis added). Care is thus intricately woven with transmission, with the consciousness of the inheritance we are leaving to future generations and the creation of an inter (or trans) generational bond.19 More than forming a link between past and present, the narrative creates bridges between present and future.

  • 20 In the original French : ‘les rites [sont] garants d’un lien social, c’est-à-dire du sentiment d’ap (...)

25Finally, the space of transmission is further enlarged within the novel thanks to Mrs Death’s intra-diegetic gesture of passing on her stories to Wolf, ensuring that the chain of memory remains unbroken. When she asserts: ‘I know a lot of dead people now. You know a lot of dead people now. We know a lot of dead people now; we all know a lot of dead people’ (Godden 67), her use of the verb ‘know’ is akin to recognising or properly seeing, being passed on from ‘I’ to ‘you’ and finally ‘we’. A sense of community emerges, which is exemplified by the friendship between Mrs Death and Wolf, but also the bookending sections of the ‘Disclaimer’ (vii-xi) and the ‘Last Words’ (301–302). The book form itself contributes to this sense of companionship by asserting its power as a material object that can be passed from hand to hand. The opening disclaimer addresses an unnamed ‘you’ (defined as ‘the relating pronoun par excellence’ by Sandrine Sorlin [24]), which one takes to be the reader: ‘this book sends you all its love. This book says it’s alright to cry on its shoulder’ (Godden x). The personification and humanisation of the book calls on a spiritual community to perform a ritual of mourning: ‘this work calls the righteous spirits of all of our mighty ancestors now and in the hour of our need’ (ix), borrowing the religious vocabulary of prayer to perform its soothing and relational function. As Myriam Watthee-Delmotte reminds us, rituals play a crucial role in forming communities: ‘rites [are] the guarantee of a social bond, i.e. the sense of belonging of individuals to a symbolic entity constituted by shared values’ (11).20 From reader to reader, the transmission of the book creates a community of mourning. Godden attributes the forming of this community to the worldwide ripple effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the creation of socially-distanced online networks of communication:

  • 21 Private email correspondence with the author, 13 December 2023.

When the book was published it was the height of the pandemic and lockdowns and so everything was shared online, I noticed many of the people sharing it were using the tag #positivedeathmovement and this seemed to be a global tribe, a wide range of death workers, grief counsellors, coffin makers, death doulas, undertakers and alternative funeral directors, therapists and the death cafe community.21

26The gesture of transmission thus had very concrete effects on the reading community which formed around it, as people around the world were struggling with the sanitary rules that drastically limited the social gatherings at the heart of many mourning rituals.

27Indeed, by leaving blank pages at the end ‘as a silent memorial for all the names we do not know and cannot say’ (Godden 301), the book also reaches out to the reader and urges him/her to inscribe the names of his/her own dead:

Now this book contains not just the dead Wolf may know of and that Mrs Death may mention, but the names each of you may want to remember here today. And in the future anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud. One day they may read your own name. One day they may read mine. In this we are connected. (Godden 302)

28The interlacing of transmission and community of care leads to a gesture of reaching out to the reader. As such, the book’s ability to reach people through time and space anticipates transgenerational transmission as the ultimate form of connection, forming a chain of potential consolation.

29In Godden’s work, sharing stories is akin to resisting erasure, invisibility and amnesia but also forming connections, foregrounding care and the interdependence of all living beings. While the book teaches us that the content of transmission and the way of transmitting matter, it mostly underlines the passing on of wisdom or emotion, but also the bonds established between the one who transmits and the one who is at the receiving end of transmission. The result of this experimental piece of crisis fiction is not a lament but a life-affirming ritual of mourning which does not heal the open wounds of loss but attaches political significance to them and forms communities around them, thus both reviving and questioning the consolatory value of the elegy. While the book’s very materiality is put forward in the opening and closing sections, acknowledging its memorial role, one should remember that Salena Godden is first and foremost a spoken word poetry performer who brings chapters of her novel on the stage. In its very circulation, the narrative project of Mrs Death Misses Death thus harks back to the very tradition of oral tales, as the act of listening that Mrs Death engages in resonates in the extra-textual world. Some of the chapters and poems in the book have even been set to music whose potential release might one day add to the multifaceted and polygeneric gesture of transmission initiated by the novel.

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Notes

1 This evolution also builds upon other countries’ personification of death as a woman. In France, the Grim Reaper is called ‘La Grande Faucheuse’, even though its skeletal nature overshadows its femaleness. In Poland, death was represented as an elderly woman in white robes.

2 The character’s title does not, however, preclude her autonomy: ‘Mrs Death is not the wife of Death. No. And she is not the mother of Death. No.’ (Godden 37).

3 In the original French : ‘Il est à tous et à personne, c’est une forme aux contours mouvants, un moyen de se confronter à un canevas connu de tous et repris par beaucoup’.

4 In an email exchange, Salena Godden explains ‘I have always felt Wolf is a they/them. . . . Looking back I think I wanted Wolf to be alone and isolated, to belong to no tribe, to be nowhere and everywhere, to be on the edge of everything and nothing, to be black and white, alive and dead, male and female, dream and reality, awake and asleep, real and surreal.’

5 As Myriam Watthee-Delmotte argues in Littérature et ritualité, ‘literature and rite both belong to the order of representation; the structuring of a fictional text is always the trace of a rite, which is itself the manifestation of a process of symbolization’ (33; translation mine). In the original French: ‘littérature et rite sont tous deux de l’ordre de la représentation, la structuration d’un texte romanesque est toujours la trace d’un rite, lui-même manifestation d’un processus de symbolisation’.

6 I am extremely grateful to Salena Godden for the luminous exchanges that provided me with invaluable insight into her work, both in person in Lyon (April 2023) and via email or Instagram.

7 A similar device is used in Australian writer Markus Zusak’s best-selling novel The Book Thief (2005), in which Death is a (male) narrator.

8 In the original French: ‘La culture, en tant qu’univers de formes symboliques, n’est pas un patrimoine qui pourrait être transmis intact et reçu à l’identique. Il y a toujours reconstruction de l’objet transmis.’

9 Her rewriting goes one step further than revisions of myths such as Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad or Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, whose female characters ‘[demand] to be heard and [assert their] right to give [their] side of the story’ (Tolan 115), since she transforms a traditionally male (or genderless) character into a woman so as to give voice to her.

10 Cf. Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Jo Langdon, ‘Magical Realism and Experiences of Extremity’, Current Narratives 3 (2011): 14–24; Eugene L. Arva, The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist Fiction, Cambria Press, 2011; Jenni Adams, Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real, Springer, 2011.

11 In the original French: ‘ce n’est pas l’invisibilité qui crée l’absence de récit mais bien le trou lacunaire dans les récits, produit par la structure de relégation ou l’effacement des récits par la fermeture de toutes les structures auditives, qui engendre la véritable invisibilité du subalterne, du précaire ou de l’exclu’ (44).

12 Wolf emphasises the oratory powers of Mrs Death in the chapter entitled ‘Wolf: Here Are All Your Fears’: ‘When I try to mimic Mrs Death’s voice out loud, I am she, she is strong. She is Oprah Winfrey or Viola Davis. She is a powerful woman, a great, powerful orator like Maya Angelou’ (Godden 29).

13 The young victim of Jack the Ripper (a disguised woman in Godden’s rewriting) is grieved over by her desperate mother: if you listen, you can still hear poor Ma Willeford, Martha Willeford, wailing for her youngest daughter, a jangle of coins, singing her song: Tilly Tuppence, Tilly Tuppence, tuppence a week’ (Godden 61, emphasis mine). Godden foregrounds the action of listening for and thus recovering previously-silenced stories by reaching out to the reader.

14 Sarah Reed was a mixed-race black woman who was imprisoned under charges of grievous bodily harm (which she claimed was a case of self-defence for attempted rape) with little medical care despite suffering from severe mental health issues. She committed suicide at Holloway prison in January 2016.

15 In the original French: ‘chaque individu est récepteur avant de devenir émetteur, copiste avant d’être créateur’.

16 In the original French: ‘transmettre aux générations suivantes le souvenir du défunt. D’où son nom de monumentum, de memoria : le tombeau est un mémorial’.

17 Strikingly, some stories are told both from the perspective of Mrs Death and Wolf. The episode of the Grenfell-like fire is also evoked by Mrs Death in a later chapter: ‘Lots of people died in that fire, it was a catastrophe, cheap housing, no fire alarms or sprinklers. Of all deaths, I don’t know why but I never forgot that night or Wolf’ (158). Those narrative choices emphasise the importance of remembrance and its shared dimension.

18 Godden has not commented on the choice of animal alter-egos for the protagonists, but the nature of the wolf as a pack animal might play a role in this choice. As for the rabbit, it is a trickster figure in African folklore and was popularised in the United States by the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, in which the rabbit’s adventures symbolise the possibility for a small but clever creature to outsmart stronger and bigger forces. The symbolism might add to Godden’s revisibilisation of marginalised people and forgotten stories.

19 Another evocation of the ecological crisis features in a chapter told from Wolf’s perspective, which represents Mrs Death as a grieving mother, a Pietà-like figure: ‘Mrs Death is the first mother of all mothers. She is calling to us all now. She is weeping. She is cradling her crumbling world. She is holding this toxic and wounded planet to her cold breast’ (Godden 37).

20 In the original French : ‘les rites [sont] garants d’un lien social, c’est-à-dire du sentiment d’appartenance d’individus à une entité symbolique constituée par des valeurs partagées’.

21 Private email correspondence with the author, 13 December 2023.

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Référence électronique

Héloïse Lecomte, « Chains of Consolation: Ghost-Writing Death’s Tales in Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death (2021) »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 66 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 mars 2024, consulté le 16 février 2025. URL : http://0-journals-openedition-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/ebc/14509 ; DOI : https://0-doi-org.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/10.4000/11r4p

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Auteur

Héloïse Lecomte

Dr. Héloïse Lecomte has completed a PhD on contemporary British and Irish fiction and currently teaches English at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. Her research themes are the narrative and fictional representations of mourning and their dialogue with poetic, musical and visual elegies and she is now working on the representation of consolation in contemporary anglophone literature. Together with Alice Borrego, Dr Gero Guttzeit and Prof. Esther Peeren, she is the co-organiser of the international interdisciplinary seminar ‘Invisible Lives, Silent Voices’ and she co-edited with Alice Borrego the issue of the journal Études britanniques contemporaines entitled ‘Invisible Lives, Silent Voices’.

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