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Peter Homans' Symbolic Loss is an exemplary introduction to the complexities of the question of mourning in contemporary culture. In his introduction to this wide-ranging 10-essay collection, Homans distinguishes between grief (the emotional pain triggered by the loss of a love object) and mourning (the cultural and symbolic containment of grief by community-wide solidarity), and traces the decline of mourning practices back to, among other factors, the modernization of social life, the rise of psychoanalysis, as well as the breakup and dispersal of community into the carefully discriminated spheres of the private and the public. With no visible community to fall upon, the burden of mourning has fallen on the individual and therefore given rise to what Homans calls, in a very suggestive phrase, “mourning without mourning practices” (p 9). The bulk of Symbolic Loss is a sustained examination of the shaping forces of mourning in four representative fields (literature, history, architecture, psychology) of this new cultural paradigm of mourning practices.
The first part of Symbolic Loss brings together a cluster of three essays on American and African-American literature and music. Mitchell Breitwiser's “Fitzgerald, Kerouac, and the Puzzle of Inherited Mourning” is a compelling foray into the transgenerational commerce of losses from parent to child. Drawing on Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's book The Shell and the Kernel, Breitwiser pieces together the phantomatic demarcations of other people's experiences of loss that ripple through Fitzgerald's and Kerouac's works. As demonstrated in his 1937 sketch entitled “Author's House,” Fitzgerald's work, in particular, is set into motion by his mother's loss of her