• 1 Such experiences range from parental abuse to rape, abandonment, stays in psychiatric facilities, e (...)
• 2 In the words of Emmanuelle Poulain-Gautret, consolation is “a topic that critics held in deliberate (...)

1Jenny Diski’s comment on what prompts (or does not prompt) her consistently singular work, in the quotation above, reads as an open call for closer examination of the seemingly fraught relationship between fiction and comfort in her writing. In light of Diski’s very direct and daring explorations of a wide range of deeply devastating human states and situations (informed by her own extensive experience of trauma),1 her stories may legitimately be perceived not as incidentally uncomfortable, but as intentionally discomforting. If defined as fictions of discomfort—thus presenting, initially, as polar opposites to the “fictions of comfort” described by Jürgen Pieters in the recent study whose subtitle coins this new category—Diski’s works seem to challenge the central premise that “the power to bring comfort is increasingly seen as one of the prime effects (and, indeed, tasks) of good literature” (Pieters 7). While, as underlined by an early reminder in Literature and Consolation, “the idea that literary texts can be a source of consolation for those reading them is a founding topic in the history of Western literature” (Pieters 13), such a notion has been consistently challenged up to the latest chapters in literary history. Waning trust and/or investment in the consolatory power(s) and purpose of fictional works has often proceeded from, and paralleled, an increasing critical mistrust (if not outright dismissal) of the very concept of consolation, as stressed by recent theoretical attempts at rehabilitation.2

• 3 Philosopher Michaël Fœssel’s 2015 appeal for consolation to be reconsidered or re-instrumentalised (...)
• 4 As Fœssel reminds us, “there is no consolation without desolation” (our translation, 9).

2As is well exemplified by Diski’s writings, contemporary literature seems to read as “the story of solace in works where it doesn’t comfortably belong” (James 5), cementing the gradual shift from consolatio to what David James calls “discrepant solace” in his seminal eponymous study (2019)—in other words, from remedial to critical stories. In Diski’s fictions of discomfort, distrust does not necessarily lead to dismissal: her work seems to seal the move from a purely affective to a potently analytical perception, and use, of a concept whose quintessentially controversial nature is now being reassessed.3 Thus, as “counterintuitive” as it may seem, in James’s phrase, to go “foraging for consolation’s ingredients in textual habitats renowned for its scarcity” (6), the process may well lead to fruitful redefinitions of the notion as an operative tool for unearthing the subversive dynamics at play in stories of desolation,4 and more generally, (re)mapping literary depictions of crisis, whether individual or collective.

• 5 Any grammar of loss, understood as both depiction and discussion of the idea of consolation, might (...)

5Monkey’s Uncle opens in early 1990 with “Charlotte FitzRoy’s descent into madness, at the age of forty-nine” (Diski 1), just a few weeks after two cataclysmic events, one public and the other private: the fall of the Berlin wall in November, and the sudden death of her daughter Miranda on Boxing Day. In spite of such dramatic catalysts, however, the narrative’s “grammar of loss” (James 7)—a phrase intended to refer not merely to the depiction of emotional devastation in literary language, but to the ways in which writing debates solace—seems deeply subversive of what is staged as conventional expressions of grief 5. First of all, the novel consistently depicts mourning as either misplaced or displaced; and, secondly, the most heartfelt forms of grieving are reserved not to personal or intimate loss, but to that of political or public ideas.

• 6 All quotations from the novel are referenced with the name of the author followed by page numbers.

6As established as grief rituals are in any society, the equation of Miranda’s funeral to “a cocktail party” (Diski 71),6 devoid of any serious considerations or meaningful exchanges, immediately countervails its expected consolatory effects. As chronicled by the narrative voice (with an internal focus on Charlotte’s consciousness), the event is treated in a more derisive or defiant way than might seem conventionally called for, far from any form of deference. Furthermore, Charlotte and her son, Julian, can only be described as deeply reluctant to mourn the daughter and sister they have just buried; the moment therefore comes to be defined and dominated by a feeling of embarrassment instead of a quest for support or solace. The possibility of communion and consolation usually afforded by this rite of passage, however exacting, is thus openly rejected rather than embraced by the departed’s brother: “[d]eath and its ceremonies was altogether too mournful for Julian’s taste” (Diski 71). Some of the most commonly established institutions and rituals of grief in Western society are doubly dismissed: the term “ceremonies” underlines the contrived nature of such events, and its addition to the main subject, “death,” does not affect the singular form of the verb—a clear discursive inscription of inconsequentiality. As for the choice of adjective, the combination of the suffix in mournful and the intensive (“too”) foregrounds the undesirability and distastefulness of emotional excess, highlighting the character’s utter refusal to brim with feelings at a time when he would be allowed, even expected to.

• 7 Discussing the immediate aftermath of her cancer diagnosis, Diski writes: “Now I was faced with the (...)

7This echoes Diski’s non-fictional comments on “the difficulty of ritual” (In Gratitude 16),7 and exposes the foundational paradox of consolation—an unsatisfiable yet unabatable need, simultaneously yearned for and deeply undesirable. As James rightfully reminds us, “solace only brings into greater focus the wound it targets, more often exposing than dispelling the desolation it promises to offset” (1). Thus, if perceived as forced exposure or contrived mourning, as is the case for Julian, a funeral enhances rather than defuses trauma in its etymological sense (“the wound”); and rejecting any heartfelt emotion might feel much more comfortable (or comforting) than embracing grief and the overwhelming experience of loss. “Discrepant solace” as enacted here may not be a mere manifestation of the subversive dynamics at play in contemporary literary attempts to de- and/or re-construct the concept and language of consolation, but an articulation of the principle that, since consolation inherently defies and consistently deviates all forms of expectation, solace itself is, and can only be, discrepant.

• 8 The reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, more specifically to its one and only female character (...)

8In the case of Charlotte, whose experience of motherhood and relationship to family are deeply fraught and marked by disaffection rather than affection, her disappointment with who her daughter turned out to be—far from “the child of the magician” (Diski 69) she was named after8—keeps her from grieving the actual person, whose death frees up an interstice for imagination:

• 9 The reference to Carroll’s heroine is also found in Kristeva’s study of melancholy and depression a (...)

10Significantly, the narrative introduces its protagonist first and foremost as “Charlotte FitzRoy, genetic researcher and former political activist” (Diski 15), exclusively stressing her involvement in the public (and overall male-dominated) spheres of professional science and politics. Of all her “other selves,” as she herself spells them out later in what thus appears to be an order of growing importance—“mother, scientist and active believer in the betterment of humankind” (Diski 106)—her role as a mother and commitment to private family life seem significantly minor. Only in Chapter 4 is she finally, and only once, referred to as “the bereaved mother” (Diski 71), in a passage so replete with the platitudes of contrived consolation that the text makes it clear this is merely a label briefly slapped on her. The “real tears” announced in the title of this fourth chapter (which, like all others in the book, is an open reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and begins with an epigraph from the hypotext9), are therefore shed not for Miranda’s demise, but the fall of the Berlin wall—and the collapse of the political and social model Charlotte considered it to hold up. As the latter explains to her therapist once she finds herself hospitalised for depression: “[a]s it turned out, I had tears for the death of socialism, but none for the death of my daughter. Of the two fatalities, it was the loss of my ideals which turned out to be the most personal” (Diski 58).

• 10 As stated by Fœssel, there is a significant difference between the inconsolable and the unconsoled, (...)
• 11 The tears she sheds every night in hospital are thus poignantly described as springing from “a plac (...)
• 12 This passage reads like a reference to Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell: “A monkey’ (...)

14Monkey’s Uncle is undeniably a tale of the unconsoled,10 not merely as a chronicle of depression but more generally, in the words of the text, as the literary staging of “the opposing struggle between the agents of hope and despair” (Diski 61-62). And hope, which is the essential element of consolation (Ignatieff 9), is scarce in the novel—while despair generally prevails. This core feeling which takes hold of Charlotte11 is mirrored in several other characters, including an orang-utang she observes at the zoo only minutes before she first slips into madness, identifying with the animal to an unexpected degree: “the look she had seen in Suka’s eyes—of resigned despair—was tantalisingly close to her own feelings” (Diski 12, our emphasis).12 However, both this sense of connection and communion in despair reach a new apex in Charlotte’s relationship to the man she is immediately convinced is her ancestor once she picks up his biography: Robert FitzRoy.

• 13 “Cette tristesse inconsolable cache souvent une véritable prédisposition au désespoir” (Kristeva 45 (...)
• 14 “[S]olitary despair,” “he had embraced despair,” “[a] crime of mind, of recurrent despair,” “the ve (...)

15A fervent believer in God and his powers, the captain of the Beagle is faced with major challenges to both his faith and overall belief system while mapping the coastline of South America with, as his passenger and companion, the young Charles Darwin, whose observations of the landscape and fauna are laying the foundations for his future theory of the evolution of species. As a result, FitzRoy is the character most consistently associated with despair throughout the novel. The recurrence and regularity of references to such emotional abysses13 create a systematic equation between character and feeling, turning the captain into an embodiment of inconsolability or, as Kristeva characterizes it, a “predisposition to despair” (45)14 which Charlotte comes to consider as her legacy: “So his blood runs through my veins. And the despair I’m feeling up there is inevitable and reasonable. […] Nothing to be done about it, and never was” (Diski 87). The finality of the binary closing statement cements the close association previously established between despair and resignation, which is all the more significant as, according to Ignatieff, “[c]onsolation is the opposite of resignation” (8)—both FitzRoy and Charlotte thus seem identified as truly and utterly un-consolable. However, the novel does not simply or straightforwardly pair resignation with passive acceptance or apathetic deterioration; in their common renouncement or refusal of conventional forms of solace, both characters seem to become (each in their own way) figures not of mere inconsolability, but of dis-consolation understood, in their specific case, as a disruptive relationship to the loss of foundational conceptual paradigms—with literature as mediation.

• 15 “L’inconsolé est l’homme moderne conscient de la rupture (il n’existe plus de point de vue de surpl (...)

16Beyond the issue of bloodline, after all, the roots of their desolation are similar: a crumbling of all previous certainties, a belief system shaken to the core or as FitzRoy experiences it, “the horror of skepticism” (Diski 77)—something for which, according to Charlotte herself, “no consolation of hers would have helped him” (Diski 79). Her ancestor becomes the literary embodiment of the unconsoled as described by Fœssel, a modern man coming to terms with the loss of totalising theories to explain the world.15 Being unconsoled, however, does not seem to preclude connection: equally as relevant as the nature of Charlotte and FitzRoy’s kinship is the means through which it is established in the novel: a book within the book, the biography that Charlotte virtually never lets go of once she has stumbled upon it. The book she reads cover to cover after her daughter’s funeral, and keeps re-reading once hospitalised—a rather literal interpretation and extremely assiduous practice of bibliotherapy, in that sense. According to Natalia Tukhareli’s definition,

• 16 This has led reviewers such as Joan Smith to state that “Diski has produced a genuine novel of idea (...)
• 17 This (occasionally quite literal) plunge into her ancestor’s world through the words of his biograp (...)
• 18 Or “heterotopias,” as coined by Foucault to refer to “counter-places” (15, our translation) which m (...)

17As Charlotte’s sole occupation while being treated for depression, reading is in fact “systematic” (and ambivalently therapeutic) in Monkey’s Uncle: “her only activity was to read and reread the FitzRoy book, the one which told her so much about herself and her prospects, and which, without her knowing it, had even begun to inhabit her dreams” (Diski 53). From the very first read, this book—which she treasures to the point of obsession—becomes a cypher; the key to Charlotte’s past, present and even future; a highly hermeneutic instrument, which can be interpreted as confirmation that the novel’s dis-consolatory poetics and politics primarily target crises in the (un)framing of knowledge.16 The book functions both as a path through internal and external epistemological conundrums, and as a gateway into FitzRoy’s world,17 where she takes the reader with her in one of the three alternating sets of chapters structuring the novel—one set between Charlotte’s home and the hospital, one aboard the Beagle on its mission of exploration, and one in Diski’s underground version of Wonderland. These two “other spaces”18 as Foucault would call them (12), accessed through a book (whether meta- or intertextually), seem to stage the suggested transition, in the novel, from inconsolability to (dis)consolation—taken to mean “literary consolation […] not as a calmative but as an agent of contestation” (James 7).

• 19 This excerpt seems to fit particularly well in the category of “inner-space fiction” coined by Dori (...)

19This description of depression as less of a state than a space,19 together with an unexpected switch to the lexical field of consolation—whether as process (“relieving,” “healing”), effect (“comforting”) or result (“peace”)—foregrounds the powers of literary language and fiction to foster (dis)consolation or, to paraphrase the text, to explore “other meaning(s)” to the very notion of solace. The word “exploration” is more than appropriate here since, once again, such reconfigurations unfold in strictly spatial terms—depression becomes a “trench,” therefore a sheltered, in-between space, burrowing through a former wasteland where new paths and circulation are now being created by “irrigation channels” and “rivulets”. The passage becomes the very epitome of Diski’s art of literary (dis)consolation—intertwining opposite ideas to allow for the emergence of alternative interpretations, depicting depression not as the utter absence, but only source of relief, however fleeting and paradoxical, and demonstrating that however distressing the experience described, literary solace can also spring from style, image and rhythm, and is by no means conditioned to content. This highly symbolic “watering of her desert” merges together Diski’s poetics and politics of disconsolation: extending the metaphor qualifies its expected meanings and highlights others, which offer experiential insight into depression and defy conventional representations; these subversive dynamics also extend to all “other spaces” in the novel, where (dis)consolation operates on a wider theoretical and epistemological level.

• 20 “History and Life (the world’s history, her life; her history, the world’s life, and so on and so f (...)

20As hinted at before, Monkey’s Uncle mainly relates inconsolability to the loss of stable bearings for the establishment of knowledge, and the failures of science and theory to fully withstand and accommodate the turbulence of experience. Genetics is thus unable to account for the full complexity of identity, just as common geometry cannot capture all the meanderings of coastlines. Charlotte’s initial realisation that “she could no longer keep the categories straight in her head”20 and “seemed to lose her footing among the treacherous minutiae of her thoughts” (Diski 13, 16), and FitzRoy’s horror at having to substitute the precision and clarity of a single line to map the South American coast, for “an infinity of individual grains of sand, tumbled meaninglessly, one atop the other” (Diski 23), demonstrate that the solace formerly found in the powers of science and rationality is fully compromised as such powers are challenged to the core. The mapping of human knowledge and experience is exposed as fundamentally inadequate if striving for simplification and rigid, impermeable boundaries. Literary (dis)consolation as practiced and promoted by Diski exposes the cracks in commonly accepted categories, and traces and probes the fault lines of rationality and theory.

• 21 This is both the name of the author herself, and that of the first orang-utang who joined the Londo (...)

21The “trench” opened up by Charlotte’s depression thus becomes a fully-fledged “place of madness” (Diski 37) led by a talking orang-utang significantly named Jenny,21 and largely dedicated to the humorously serious expression of discontent or dissatisfaction with several major epistemological ventures in recent scientific history. These are embodied by three highly caricatured characters on a perpetual, and deeply conflictual picnic in Diski’s version of Wonderland: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud—“the three greatest reductionists of the nineteenth century,” in Jenny’s abrasive reassessment of them (Diski 86). Each of their attempts at an all-encompassing explanation for human behaviour—one social, one biological and one psychological—is ultimately disqualified by Charlotte, whose conclusion once she has spent sufficient time with them is as follows: “the only theory that hasn’t been tried yet is the theory that there’s no theory at all, and we’ve all just got to get on with it as best we can” (Diski 185).

• 22 “[L]es potentialités consolatoires de la forme” (our translation). As Poulain-Gautret further speci (...)

23Where her ancestor only sank further into despair when faced with the world’s tantalizing elusiveness and irregularity, Charlotte has come to see such chaos as a source of comfort—as highlighted by the strongly superlative return of hope, central to this excerpt. Through masterful rhythmic architecture and soundscape, Diski also offers yet another powerful demonstration of what Poulain-Gautret calls the “consolatory potential of form” (10)22 and the solace which style itself can bring. The persistence of “a great dichotomy” and “single contradiction,” reinforced in the passage by the predominance of binary rhythms—also designed, perhaps, as a textual inscription of the ebb and flow of “all things striving to become one thing, and all things infinitely separate”—leads not to resignation but to the revaluation of “spaces in between,” where the art of (dis)consolation or “discrepant solace” may prosper.