Postmodern Grief: Witnessing Illness in Amy Hempel’s “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” and Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”

Abstract

This article analyses two short stories, Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” (1983) and Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” (1997), where two female narrators portray their grief for the illness of a loved one as pathographies (Hawkins 1999). “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” recounts the stay of a mother in the pediatric oncology ward while her monthsold baby undergoes cancer treatment. In “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried”, the unnamed first-person narrator explores her guilt at the coming death of a terminally ill close friend. Through a postmodern use of irony, both stories posit the impossibility of sharing grief in a world without room for illness or care for precarious bodies. By looking at how the narrators grapple with encountering the dying Other and caregiver’s guilt, I argue that these two stories posit the impossibility of articulating pain and grief in current neoliberal society through the construction of an explicitly postmodern, artificial and ironic narrative, which is undermined by the stories’ resistance to narrative closure and certainty, demanding a form of “ethical witnessing” (Gilmore and Marshall 2019) from the reader.