‘In losing we have something to gain’: Examining the analogous movements of ‘mobilising’ absence in literary language, authorial impulse, and elegiac writing

Abstract

Just as absence mobilises the linguistic sign, so the felt experience of absence, through personal loss on the part of the writer, mobilises writing. While each of these ideas has been well-documented separately within their respective literatures, the fact of their correspondence, and its implications for the thinking of absence within creative writing studies, warrants further discussion. Engaging with the work of select thinkers within semiotics, literary philosophy, and psychology, this paper examines the operations of the analogous movement between the operations of the linguistic sign as a structure motivated by absence, and the phenomenon of generative loss in the experience of creative writers. Throughout, it draws from Roland Barthes's elegiac meditations on literature, loss and writing following the death of his mother, in Mourning Diary (2009). This paper suggests that just as writers are mobilised by absence to write, so do they in turn self-consciously mobilise the narrative and aesthetic powers of absence for their own literary ends. Interrogating the relations between these movements offers a means toward further understanding the particular aesthetic force of much elegiac literature, as it bears on our motivations, processes and felt experiences as writers and readers.