On Grief and Reason, On Poetry and Film: Elena Shvarts, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Tarkovsky

The title "On Grief and Reason" comes from a lecture Joseph Brodsky delivered on the American poet Robert Frost, whom he described as terrifying, as distinct from tragic. The terror Brodsky had in mind and the terror all people confront is that of loss. Many theorists of the psyche tell us that a sense of loss is a precondition to language and to selfhood: only where there is loss can there be this gain, and a mighty compensation it is. Without separation there is no self, they insist, and without these two there is no access to language. A child must separate from the mother in order to grow. This view has been particularly advanced by object relations psychoanalysts.1 ALacanian approach to loss would agree on this point, translating it into entrance into the symbolic order which comes with the advent of language. This development is marked by what Jacques Lacan calls lost access to the real.2 Both of these approaches are helpful when we consider self-representation in literary texts: the dependence on language brings the adventures of insight that Lacan would celebrate but also fresh deprivations, and the objects that create a text's metaphors or anchor its implicit narrative are similarly vehicles for identification and difference. Theorists of mental process and of identity formation, then, bind loss to psychic development and in artistic texts dependent on language, the loss can never be only a source of lament. Artistic accounts of grief may exude a productive uncertainty about