A language of space and ruin: The elegiac lyric essay and the image of the corpse

The image of the corpse has long occupied a status of taboo in literature, unless presented as beautiful and intact – akin to the Victorian ideal of the ‘exquisite corpse’ – and yet the dead body in its many states of abjection is inextricably entwined with grief and elegy. David Kennedy (2007, p. 110) writes that “Death reduces the subject of an elegy to a finite, readable system. The body can no longer give birth to any new meanings of itself”. The object of the corpse is – as Julia Kristeva (1982) asserts – in opposition to the notion of “I”, it is a subject become object and abject. In my book, Vessel: The shape of absent bodies, an elegiac lyric essay, I examine the image of the corpse as I attempt to ‘translate’ my own understanding of how to assimilate these images into mourning over a long period of time. I argue here that the forms of the elegiac lyric essay allow for an aggregation of such images and thus create a space for representation of the image of the corpse. To do so, one must also examine the ethics of transforming the bodies of the dead into bodies of text.