The World of the Dying:’ John Mcgahern’s Memoir and the Thingness in Anticipatory Grief

Abstract

My essay will aim to prove that John McGahern’s Memoir foregrounds the material dimension of anticipatory grief and its aftermath as a space in which different affective responses to the “Thing” can be explored. Firstly, I look at how the text edits together memories of anticipatory grief in order to dramatize the “apparatus of thinking” (Steven Connor) as an affective spatiality (Marta Figlerowicz) in relation to an irrupting thingness within the object world. Secondly, I look at how McGahern and his father are “timed by things” (Timothy Morton) in their effort to remember or objectify affect, and how mourning itself becomes a matter of accepting nonhuman temporality. As such, this textual engagement with memories and inscriptions enacts a writerly form of anticipatory-vicarious grief, a “moral emotion” arising from the “anticipated harm” (Somogy Varga and Shaun Gallagher) that the subject feels will affect those close to her after her death.