Consolationscapes in the Face of Loss

Grief and Consolation in Space and Time

Christoph Jedan, Avril Maddrell, Eric Venbrux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367584313
• eBook ISBN: 9780429792359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Human beings are grieving animals. 'Consolation', or an attempt to assuage grief, is an age-old response to loss which has various expressions in different cultural contexts. Over the past century, consolation has dropped off the West's cultural radar. The contributions to this volume highlight this neglect of consolation in popular and academic discourses and explore the usefulness of the concept of consolation for analysing spatio-temporal constellations.

Consolationscapes in the Face of Loss brings together scholars from geography, philosophy, history, anthropology and religious studies. The chapters use spatial and conceptual mappings of grief and consolation to analyse a range of spaces and phenomena around grief, bereavement and remembrance, comfort and resilience, including battlefield memorials, crematoria, graveyards and natural burial sites in Europe. Authors shift the discussion beyond the Global North by including responses to traumatic grief in post-conflict African societies, as well as Australian Aboriginal traditions of ritual consolation.

The book focuses on the relationship between space/place and consolation. In so doing, it offers a new lens for research on death, grief and bereavement. It offers new insights for students and researchers interrogating contemporary bereavement, as well as those interested in meaning-making, emerging socio-cultural practices and their role in personal and collective resilience.

Part I

Reviving consolation

1 What is consolation?

Towards a new conceptual framework

Christoph Jedan

Introduction

‘Consolation is grief’s traditional amelioration, but contemporary bereavement theory lacks a conceptual framework to include it’ (Klass unpublished). I would go even further and state that, over the past two centuries, Western culture as a whole has become increasingly suspicious of the concept of consolation. To many people, the word ‘consolation’ seems to suggest a questionable religious cultural baggage and a want of valued attributes such as activity and resilience. Little wonder that other concepts, such as ‘coping’, are now used far more often to prescribe ways of dealing with loss.¹

Yet we can ill afford to abandon the concept of consolation and closely related notions such as ‘comfort’ and ‘solace’. They denote experiences, attitudes and activities that no other words can adequately identify. We cannot, for instance, ‘find coping’ during a long forest walk. If, as Kant argued, perceptions are ‘blind without concepts’, we need the concept of consolation to adequately experience and analyse consolationscapes – the spatially situated phenomena and practices to do with loss and grief.

Owing to neglect of the concept of consolation, it is difficult to find convincing analyses of what consolation actually is. The extant conceptual frameworks are not only few and far between but they are derived from limited cultural-historical sources and thus offer narrow views of the richness of the concept. This is a danger inherent in death studies more generally: once longer-term trends disappear out of sight, recent phenomena acquire the reputation of being unprecedented and markers of a new era (whether late-modern, neo-modern, postmodern, or contemporary). What is needed, however, is the corrective provided by a ‘long view’. Without downplaying genuine cultural change, we must acknowledge that in respect of consolation there are both undeniable continuities and also reversals to older forms. For instance, how does the recent emphasis on biographies of the deceased (Walter 1996) relate to the emphasis on biography that we find since the late eighteenth century, and to even earlier emphases on biography in early modern eulogies or ancient Greco-Roman consolations? Is the emphasis on earthly life a recent phenomenon (Davies 2005, 2008), or has it been part and parcel of earlier consolatory efforts, too? Taking the long view is paramount for the analysis of the spatialities of consolation, not least because spatial arrangements themselves are often quite old: a war memorial or a cemetery might date from the nineteenth century, and we might want to know how the experience of consolation today relates to the consolatory purposes of their creators.

In the present chapter, I introduce the Four-Axis Model, a conceptual framework of consolation that aspires to that much-needed ‘long view’ and thus, I hope, to a higher degree of generality than previous attempts. It will be evident from the following pages that my own conceptual work has taken its cue from written sources, particularly from dedicated consolatory texts and treatises that, for better or worse, focus on death as the most significant form of loss (Jedan 2014b, 2017a, 2017b). It seems to me, however, that the framework can also be applied to other types of loss. All that is required is to replace ‘death’ with ‘loss’ in the definition of consolation offered below. In addition, I hope it will be evident that the present chapter attempts a careful triangulation with other sources and materials to offer a conceptual framework that is genuinely useful for the interpretation of specific phenomena.

The chapter first presents three notable models of consolation. The frameworks are limited in that they represent different aspects of consolation. Their value lies in pointing (perhaps unwittingly) towards three different ‘strands’ or types of consolation: ‘metaphysical and moral consolation’, ‘(auto)biographical memorialisation’, and ‘professionalised consolation’. These strands, I argue, can be distinguished in the historical material, and their origins can be traced to different historical eras. Identifying recurrent themes, the Four-Axis Model is then developed against the backdrop of the historical variation. Finally the chapter discusses the application of the framework to selected spatial phenomena and possible limitations of the framework.

Before we begin in earnest, a word on terminology is in order. The availability in the English language of two closely related concepts, ‘grief’ and ‘mourning’, has led numerous scholars down the garden path of trying to differentiate between the two, for instance by claiming that ‘grief’ is about something internal to the subject (affective), whereas ‘mourning’ designates the social expression and ritualisation of inner grief. Klass (2014) has noted the questionable nature of differentiation between allegedly pre-social affects and their social cultivation and expression; at any rate, other languages such as German (‘Trauer’) or Dutch (‘rouw’) offer no linguistic support for it. In this chapter, I use ‘grief’ and ‘mourning’ interchangeably.

Three notable models of consolation

The first model of consolation in this review was formulated by Weyhofen (1983: 249):

Consolation’s point of departure is a difference – more specifically, a contradiction – between the human and the world. On one side we find the interests, wishes and goals of the human being; on the other side there is the world, which does not comply with those interests, wishes and goals. Consolation is the answer to the suffering that is caused by that difference. The goal of consolation is to remove the difference and to produce a reconciling identity.²

According to Weyhofen, the difference can be removed in two ways: first, by altering one’s interests, wishes and goals – whether by aligning them with ‘the world’ as it is (the Stoic solution) or, more radically, by a mystical renunciation of all interests, wishes and goals – and, second, by hope for an eschatological transformation of the world when later, perhaps in an afterlife, the world will finally be congruent with one’s wishes (Weyhofen 1983: 249–252). The definition has a clear emphasis on metaphysics and religion: consolation is to address a metaphysical and religious suffering.

The second model of consolation to be discussed stems from a team at Umeå University’s Department of Nursing led by Astrid Norberg. Focusing on the concepts of ‘alienation’ and ‘communion’, it leans heavily on Gabriel Marcel’s work. Marcel postulates ‘that deep in human beings there is a universal brotherhood that is revealed through a global feeling of a “we” (communion)’ (Norberg et al. 2001: 550). In this model, suffering is an existential loneliness, an alienation of the suffering persons ‘from themselves, from other people, from the world, and from their transcendent source of meaning’ (2001: 544). Consolation involves the reconstitution of communion, ‘a changed perception of the world in suffering persons’ (2001: 544) in which the suffering Other is ‘acknowledged as a presence’ (2001: 551). This can happen in silence, but an important role is attributed to a dialogue in which the suffering person can express their suffering and share it with the other person.

The third model was proposed by Klass (2014) to address the apparent inability of contemporary bereavement theory to embrace the concept of consolation. The reason for this inability is the mistaken method of ‘psychological individualism’ (2014: 7), which ignores the inter-subjective social aspect of grief and consolation. In stressing the aspect of consolation as communion, Klass takes his cue from the use of existentialist philosophy by Norberg, Bergsten and Lundman (2001), as well as Walter’s (1996) insistence on the importance of ‘conversations between those who knew the deceased’ for contemporary practices of bereavement (2014: 5):

Grief is a social emotion and thus is inter-subjective, even at the level of biological response. Grief is an interaction between interior, interpersonal, communal, and cultural narratives that are charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased’s life and death. Consolation happens in the same inter-subjective space as grief. Consolation soothes and alleviates the burden of grief, but does not take away the pain. Consolation is trust in a reality outside the self.

Not fully integrated with his model of consolation but nonetheless important is Klass’s (2014: 2–3, 13) two-fold suggestion (1) that religions as important loci of consolation offer (a) an encounter or merger with transcendent reality, (b) a worldview in which our individual life narratives are nested and, finally, (c) a community in which the transcendent reality, our worldview, and our own experience are validated; and (2) that (non-religious) self-help groups recreate the aforementioned characteristics of religion to sustain and validate continuing bonds with the deceased that nevertheless lack acceptance in contemporary grief theory and culture.³

Clearly, the three models of consolation stress different points: Weyhofen emphasises a metaphysical or religious perspective; Norberg, Bergsten and Lundman highlight the need to overcome a sense of isolation on the part of the bereaved; Klass’s most characteristic addition to Norberg, Bergsten and Lundman is his insistence on the shortcomings of contemporary grief theory. I want to suggest that the three models with their characteristic emphases point to three different types or strands of consolation that rose to prominence in the specific cultural contexts of different eras. Whilst Weyhofen’s idea of consolation ties in with the metaphysical and moral consolation devised in the premodern era, Norberg, Bergsten and Lundman’s concept of consolation is predicated on the increasing importance of the individual and the concomitant sense of existential isolation in the modern era that was answered with the consolatory strategy of (auto)biographical memorialisation. Finally, Klass reactivates premodern and modern consolatory strategies in his opposition to a professionalised consolation that rose to prominence after WWI.

Three strands of consolation

In this section I shall describe the three important ‘strands’ or ‘types’ of consolation already mentioned: ‘metaphysical and moral consolation’, ‘(auto)biographical memorialisation’ and ‘professionalised consolation’. These strands have gained prominence in very different cultural and historical circumstances. In this sense they follow historically upon one another, but their use extends to the present day so that they now co-exist.

Inevitably, such ‘strands’ or ‘types’ are abstractions and simplifications. In this respect, they function in much the same way as sociology’s ‘ideal types’ (e.g. Walter 1994), and they are threatened by similar objections to those levelled against histories of mentalities (e.g. Ariès 1981). I have taken care to pre-empt such critiques as far as possible, first by identifying as much as I can the historical sources in which the new developments become visible, and second by explicitly recognising that consolation in itself is a regulatory and thus also adversarial or agonistic phenomenon: consolation is part of a cultural attempt to regulate or ‘police’ grief (Walter 1999). The interesting question is then: what is ‘the Other’ or who are ‘the Others’ of consolation? Consolation combats an excess of grief that is presented as unhelpful, dangerous and destructive, and presents as its opposite an ideal of acceptable grief. Little wonder, then, that the types of consolation are themselves vulnerable to specific cultural threats. Whilst the metaphysical and moral consolation that can be traced back to premodern cultures was (and still is) threatened by attacks on its metaphysical and religious underpinnings, and perhaps even more so by the perceived insufficiency of general prescription, modern (auto)biographical memorialisation has come under attack from detractors of individuality in the name of ideas as diverse as the nation or the scientific world-view. Lastly, the professionalised consolation of the past hundred years has been challenged primarily by reference to personal experience, repeating motifs established in the (auto)biographical, memorialising consolation of the modern era as well as in the metaphysical and moral consolation of the premodern era.

On the basis of a certain abstraction, however, we can also identify typical genres in which the strands of consolation are expressed. In addition to important early texts representing a consolatory strand, we can identify iconic texts that remain important points of reference. Finally, the strands of consolation also contain depictions of a fulfilled or intensified life, which function essentially as interpretative templates for rewriting the biography of the deceased to show that his or her life was worthwhile and need not cause (vicarious) regrets.

Table 1.1 provides an overview of the three strands. A more detailed analysis of the strands and the sources underpinning my interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: From deathscapes to consolationscapes: spaces, practices and experiences of consolation
• PART I: Reviving consolation
• PART II: European constellations
• PART III: Beyond the Global North
• Index