Madeleine Watts takes an elegiac road trip through the American southwest
- Written by Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
In December 1817, the Romantic poet John Keats sent a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, in which he celebrated a quality in Shakespeare’s work he termed “negative capability”. He defined this as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
Review: Elegy, Southwest – Madeleine Watts (Ultimo Press)
A commitment to the artistic notion of negative capability shapes and guides Madeleine Watts’ new novel Elegy, Southwest. The narrator, Eloise, meditates on the nature of uncertainty as she tells a story with “no real beginning, and no real ending”.
The novel is one long act of detailed and sustained attention to a road trip Eloise has recently taken through the southwest of the United States with her now-missing husband, Lewis. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the November 2018 wildfires, which spread through California indiscriminately burning people’s homes. “Schools were closed,” observes Eloise:
The cable cars shuttered. Sports called off. It was dangerous to be outdoors, and soon the city would sell out of N95 respirator masks.
The themes of imminent personal and environmental collapse are woven together throughout, as Eloise mourns the lack of certainty around her personal future and the fate of the environment.
Much of the tension in Elegy, Southwest derives from the mystery of Lewis’ absence. From the beginning, it is made clear that the impetus for Eloise to recount the road trip is her desire to make sense of his departure. As she memorialises their journey, she is searching for clues that might solve the mystery.
However, on a deeper level, the process of mourning is – as Freud reminds us in his essay On Transience – invariably bound up with a refusal to renounce the lost object. The sustained act of recollection in Elegy, Southwest highlights how textually cataloguing memories can resuscitate the past into an eternal present.
The novel’s epigraph alludes to the conundrum at its heart. It is a line from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: “You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you)”.
Layers of grief
Alongside Eloise’s grief for the loss of her husband, the novel depicts Lewis’ grief for the loss of his mother to cancer. The loss becomes so heavy, his physical and psychological health buckle under its weight. Eloise watches (or rather rewatches) as his marijuana dependency increases and his night tremors intensify. She does what she can to console him, but nothing seems to work.
On their road trip, Eloise and Lewis visit Kenneth, who is also grieving. Kenneth is the surviving partner of a conceptual land-artist named Lawrence Greco. Prior to his death, Greco was being bankrolled by the land-art foundation where Lewis works. Kenneth has been shackled with the task of completing Greco’s final work in the desert: a piece titled Negative Capability, which has the form of “an enormous absence, a mathematically perfect spherical hollow in the earth, intersected with tunnels, mazes and mirrors”.
The title doubles as a clever pun, in that the artwork involves more excavating than building. As Kenneth digs a crater of grief in the earth, Eloise, through the act of narrating, undertakes an analogous process of digging and mining towards her own negative and ambiguous experience of loss.
These kinds of doublings occur throughout Elegy, Southwest. One of its great accomplishments is the parallel it draws between the experience of mourning a personal loss and mourning the loss of the environment. The novel is an elegy for Lewis, for Lewis’ mother, and for Greco. It is no less an elegy for the landscape the story inhabits.
In this way, Watts tackles the pressing contemporary challenges of not just the climate crisis, but the broader crisis of climate change denial and the apparent impotence of government solutions. At the centre of this concern is the deeper existential question of how one might live with the knowledge that not enough is being done to fend off our own extinction.
This line of exploration is where Elegy, Southwest resonates with The Inland Sea, Watts’ Miles Franklin shortlisted debut. The Inland Sea similarly explored the threats of climate crisis and water scarcity, alongside the ongoing horrors of colonial dispossession, while offering a critique of Western notions of human exceptionalism.
The Inland Sea was the story of a twentysomething literature graduate adrift between the completion of her undergraduate studies and what might come next in an unstable world. She works at an emergency call centre. As she grows increasingly desensitised to the horrors leaping down the telephone line, she begins an affair with a Patrick White-obsessed postgraduate student, who soon leaves her for an impossibly measured poet.
The Inland Sea is the kind of novel where personal dramas, like having an abortion and contracting chlamydia, are relative non-events, as there are always larger and more consuming forces and questions looming – the most pressing being the quandary of how to live under the shadow of imminent environmental collapse. Both Elegy, Southwest and the Inland Sea are studies of millennial Weltschmertz – a German concept that loosely translates as world-weariness, or world pain.
The power of Elegy, Southwest resides in its unflinching consideration of the question of how we should make sense of our lives now.
Authors: Georgia Phillips, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
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