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Dossier Université Invitée : Prague

Time Between Then and Now: Temporality in Pathographies and Thanatographies

Le temps entre hier et aujourd’hui : la temporalité dans les pathographies et les thanatographies
Il tempo tra ieri e oggi: la temporalità nelle patografie e nelle tanatografie
Jan Musil

Résumés

Les thanatographies et les pathographies s’intéressent toutes deux à une situation du corps et à une phase de la vie spécifiques. La maladie, le décès et la mort, qui se chevauchent souvent, ne sont pas un thème périphérique dans ces deux modes différents d’écriture de soi, mais une situation extratextuelle qui dirige le processus d’écriture et affecte leur structure narrative. Cependant, la clé qui permet de distinguer les thanatographies des pathographies ne réside pas seulement dans leur sujet, mais surtout dans leur temporalité et leur perspective. En s’appuyant sur les réinterprétations des concepts grecs anciens de chronos et de kairos, qui soulignent les différentes dimensions du temps, nous pouvons constater que, tandis que le mode pathographique s’intéresse principalement au temps présent de la guérison, aux aspects pratiques de la vie quotidienne et à l’expérience chronique de la souffrance, dans le mode thanatographique, les auteurs considèrent la mort comme une rupture qui divise le temps en avant et en après, en se tournant vers l’avenir pour anticiper le deuil et vers le passé pour évaluer la vie telle qu’elle a été vécue. Les mémoires (d’hôpital) de maladie intitulés Čas mezi tehdy a teď (Le temps entre hier et aujourd’hui) de la poétesse tchèque Bohumila Grögerová, écrits au sujet de et pour son compagnon, le poète Josef Hiršal, montrent comment ces modes peuvent s’intervertir tout en restant toutefois mutuellement exclusifs.

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Texte intégral

1Pathographies and thanatographies, two narrative modes about one’s own or someone else’s life, share a connection to the grave and difficult circumstances of illness or dying which often overlap in various ways. Determining how best to distinguish these terms, with the aim of defining more rigorous categories should not be based solely on the topic of a given text. The literary works that we may designate as pathographies and thanatographies tend to operate in different temporalities that affect their narrative structure. Analysing them can help us understand different ways we conceptualise time-limit situations. While pathographies, concerned with illness, ground the writers in the present, thanatographies, written mostly after the death of a close person, split up the time into before and after. Some literary works, such as the mixed prose work Čas mezi tehdy a teď (The Time Between Then and Now) by Czech poet Bohumila Grögerová, written during and after the hospitalisation of her partner and poet Josef Hiršal, show us how these two temporalities can interact and how they are reflected in the narrative structure of the texts in a single volume.

Pathographies and Thanatographies as Modes of Life/Death Writing

  • 1 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” MLN, vol. 94, n° 5, 1979, p. 921.
  • 2 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 2005, p. 7-8.
  • 3 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, “Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines”, in Martina W (...)

2There is a methodological issue that must be put aside before getting to the central issue raised in this essay, namely in relation to the debate on whether thanatographies and pathographies constitute a genre. On the one hand, it may be more productive, as Paul de Man suggests, to speak about biography as a mode of reading rather than writing,1 the key reason being that we can hardly verify all the statements in an auto/biography, and, phenomenologically, there is no way of telling whether a text is an auto/biography without it being indicated to us in the paratexts. On the other hand, even Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, one of the leading theoreticians of auto/biography, concedes that it is useful and acceptable to use the term genre when speaking about auto/biographies.2 Yet, she warns, we should handle this compromise with care – this, in any case, is how she begins her introduction to the Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (which she also edited): “Autobiography is more than just a literary genre – if it is a genre at all.”3 In any case, we cannot make any abstractions without having a certain architext in mind, at least heuristically.

3I suggest that we distinguish between thanatographies and pathographies based on their temporal structure, which we will proceed to examine here. Before doing so, however, we will need to consider how the terms have been defined so far. We must pay attention to the generic label that encompasses not only pathographies and thanatographies, but also biographies and autobiographies. The term life writing has proven useful because it abolishes the distinction between biography and autobiography, which, with its emphasis on who is writing about whom, becomes problematic in the case of pathographies and especially thanatographies, where it is not quite clear who the protagonist is. Furthermore, if we take into account all the possible terminological modifications made by adding the auto- prefix (autobiographies, autothanatographies, autopathographies, or even autofictions), we end up with a range of terms that can be useful and easy to understand in individual cases but tell us little about the truly important contextual dimension of the texts in question.

  • 4 Mita Banerjee, “Life Writing”, in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofict (...)

4There might seem to be something odd in applying the term life writing to pathographies and thanatographies, as we so often act as if illness, disability, dying, and simply getting old were not part of life. Many historians and sociologists (Geoffrey Gorer [1955], Phillipe Ariès [1981], Norbert Ohler [1990], Tony Walter [1994]) have agreed that death, together with serious illnesses such as AIDS, became taboo in Euro-American societies in the 20th century. But death and illness are part of life, and the term life writing is useful because it carries strong associations with giving voice, empowering, and emancipation. As Mita Banerjee summarizes “life writing is immensely productive especially for the reconstruction of the subjectivity and the agency of marginalized communities and individuals.”4 Life writing highlights the work of those muted by history and historiographers, or generally by the global majority. Those silenced are typically ethnic minorities, but this could apply as well to a specific condition of the body (such as illness) or life phase (old age). Different minority statuses can, of course, intersect as in, say, The Cancer Journals, in which Audre Lorde, recounting her experience of cancer treatment in the United States during the late 1970s, identifies herself not only as a poet, but as Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, and warrior. Pathographies and thanatographies give voice to those who have ended up on the very margin of capitalist society’s attention, people with bodies that are unproductive and therefore (from the perspective of the mainstream) unprofitable. They are also in need of care and treatment, yet of a kind that is often only palliative or symptomatic, with no prospect of curing the illness (i.e. in the case of those dying or suffering from chronic illnesses). The narrative we are concerned with can be empowering, giving voice and a sense of agency to their writers as well as readers, involving a sense of sharing that is not to be underestimated. More importantly, they create a safe space in which to experience and understand the suffering, to dwell in pain, to fight it, to laugh at it, to make sense of it.

Pathographies, or Illness Writing

  • 5 Diego León-Villagrá, “Der Krebs des Autors. Autopathographie und Autoethnographie als autobiographi (...)
  • 6 Ibid.

5Let us first turn to pathographies, the better researched and more down-to-earth of the two life writing modes. In the last thirty years, literary scholarship has begun to pay more attention to the concept of pathography, which shares many of the theoretical and methodological pitfalls of other genres that we may group under the loose umbrella term life writing. The term pathography emerged in the early 20th century and was defined by Karl Birnbaum in 1933 as “biography written with regard to illness,”5 reflecting not only the life of the person but also the creation of the work itself in the context of illness. The word is a neologism derived from the ancient Greek word πάθος, meaning suffering in general, or even death, so that it would seem to refer to a wider range of conditions than physical illness. Drawing on Birnbaum’s definition and following G. Thomas Couser’s research on writing about experiences of illness and disability, Diego León-Villagrá defines autopathography as an autobiographical form “that places special emphasis on the individual, linear course of illness and its semiotics. Importantly, the topos of autonomy encourages the assumption that autopathography is a text with a specific purpose [Gebrauchstext] that calls for a corresponding reception.”6 León-Villagrá also avoids the theoretical problem of using a genre label, referring to autopathography as an autobiographical form. Moreover, as evident from his terminology, he is concerned primarily with the writing of the self, hence the prefixes auto-. It might not come as a surprise that autopathographies are more common than pathographies, and that, conversely, thanatographies, are more common than autothanatographies: whereas stories of personal illness are typically written in the autobiographical mode, about one’s own illness, we can hardly imagine an autothanatography that is not a piece of speculative fiction, and the only “realistic” autothanatography would be the account of a near death experience – a topic that is not uncommon, and that has developed its own tropes and imagery.

6In view of this methodological difficulty, we should add that León-Villagrá further specifies that the term ‘autopathography’ cannot be applied to every autobiographical narrative on the topic of illness, only those that meet the condition of perspective: that is, the illness must be viewed from the subjective position of the patient, and must focus on the course of the illness and its semiotics, which the author understands as a defiance of the standardising and normalising tendencies of medicine. However, because patients also wish to understand the medical side of their condition, medical terminology is used extensively in pathographies and is often juxtaposed to the author’s subjective perception of his or her own body. Because they focus on the course of illness, pathographies are often organised according to an express linear chronology, like a diary or internet blog. In the tradition of diary literature, pathographies then become sites of self-determination and autonomy. Significantly for us, the kind of cancer-focused autopathographies that León-Villagrá focuses on were booming in the 1980s, which to some extent corresponds with the development of thanatographies. The author further refines his definition of autopathography by distinguishing it from that of autoethnography: while autopathography focuses on the subjective course of the disease, autoethnography focuses on the state of the disease, its causes and sociocultural context. The notion of authenticity plays an important role in pathographies, in particular as a category of reception that involves the enhancement of testimonial value by the author’s personal experience of illness.

7León-Villagrá shows the difference between autopathography and autoethnography on the example, respectively, of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Arbeit und Struktur (2010–2013) and Fritz Zorn’s Mars (1977). I will briefly comment on the temporal structure of these two works, in this way reframing León-Villagrá’s genre distinction based instead on content and themes.

8Herrndorf began his Arbeit und Struktur as diary entries in a paper notebook, which he then transposed to a private online blog for close friends to read. The text was published as a book after Herrndorf’s suicide. Similarly to Grögerová, as we will soon see, Herrndorf is writing his “[life-]saving notebook” (rettende Notizbuch) as self-therapy and an instrument for the hermeneutics of the self, yet one that ultimately fails him.7 While his diary entries do occasionally reflect on the past, they are mostly concerned with the present, becoming shorter, more laconic and fragmentary towards the end. Some three weeks before ending his life, Herrndorf writes of his exhaustion: “I can’t write, I can’t read, not a single word.”8 Someone else must read for him. In those weeks, the entries are scarce and rarely longer than one or two sentences, reflecting his withering away. Let us call this (auto-)pathographical temporality.

  • 9 Fritz Zorn, Mars, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, New York, Knopf, 1982, p. 4.
  • 10 Ibid., p. 3.

9Fritz Zorn’s Mars reads much more like a traditional first-person autobiography, recapitulating the author’s life against the backdrop of his struggle with cancer, in this case malignant lymphoma. In the text, which is divided into three parts dated 4 April 1976, 7 June 1976, and 17 July 1976 – and in this way much less chronological than Herrndorf’s text – the author takes stock of his life with regard to the disease: “I will try to recall from my childhood everything that strikes me as typical of my illness and pertinent to it.”9 More importantly, however, from the very first page, Zorn writes of his imminent death – “it is a physical disease from which I will most likely die in the near future”10 – which indeed comes only a couple of months after writing these lines. Let us call this retrospective temporality, driven by the explicit imminence of death and anticipatory mourning, (auto-)thanatographical.

10Both Herrndorf and Zorn write of their struggle with cancer, treatment, and related psychological difficulties. Their writing, however, differs not only in what it highlights, but, more importantly, in how it treats time and what means it employs to render the experience in the literary medium. This fundamentally affects the possible perspectives and narrative arcs of their texts. While Herrndorf concerns himself with the here and now, Zorn reacts to his diagnosis as to a breaking point – an impulse that compels him first to face his approaching death and then to look back at his life from a future perspective, as if to say: “I will have died.”

Thanatographies, or Death Writing

  • 11 “Thanatography, N.”, Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Oxford University Press, September 2024. UR (...)
  • 12 Meliz Ergin, “Derrida’s Otobiographies”, Biography, vol. 40, n° 2, 2017, p. 363.

11The etymology of the term thanatography is transparent and instructive, placing the phenomenon in close proximity to biography, i.e. writing about life (Greek: βίος), with the difference that its main subject is death (Greek: θάνατος) or, more specifically, the death of a close person. Indeed, this aspect of closeness serves not as a secondary motif of the text but as its central theme, which also fundamentally influences the choice of formal and compositional devices. Its meaning is quite commonly understood as “the narration of a person’s death”, as some dictionaries attest. It is not without interest that, according to the OED, the word “thanatography” was first used (coupled with “biography”) by the writer William Makepeace Thackeray in an 1839 review of the infamous collection of morality tales The Newgate Calendar: the Malefactors’ Bloody Register, which had been in print since the mid-18th century: “The excellent ‘Newgate Calendar’ […] contains the biographies and thanatographies of Hayes and his wife.”11 Meliz Ergin neatly summarizes other uses of the term autothanatography as follows: “The notion of autothanatography has also been widely discussed by Nancy K. Miller and Susanna Egan. Whereas Miller remarks that every autobiography can also be considered an autothanatography, for we live with an awareness of imminent death and prospective nonexistence, Egan utilizes the term in exploring narratives that focus on the process of dying, paying particular attention to narratives of terminal illness in Mirror Talk.”12 To complicate things yet further, we could add that every thanatography is also an autothanatography insofar as the death of the other prompts us ponder our own death. It is also clear that Egan’s use of the term “autothanatography” overlaps with León-Villagrá’s “autopathography”. The difference here is one of perspective, similar to the distinction that I see between pathography and thanatography. We should remind ourselves, however, that – notwithstanding these terminological considerations – we will be dealing here rather with the interactions between temporality and perspective.

Chronos, Kairos, and the Transition from Quantity to Quality

  • 13 John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time”, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 40, n° 1, 1986, p. 6.

12We can further elaborate on our distinction by turning back to the subtle dichotomy in Ancient Greek between two different concepts of time: chronos and kairos. Aristotle gives a detailed definition of the first in his Physics, 219b (IV. xi). Suffice to say that chronos denotes time that is measurable. As John E. Smith writes, time is characterised here, not unlike a calendar, as a grid or framework into which we place individual events,13 or as a chronicle that logs events without elaborating on them.

  • 14 James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, Written Communication, (...)

13In contrast, kairos designates an opportune time, the right moment, an intersection of circumstances especially fit for action. In short, chronos designates quantitative time, whereas kairos involves qualitative time. As Catherine Eskin and James Kinneavy show, the term kairos is important for Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric, although it does not stand out as clearly as the triad of terms logos, pathos, and ethos. Time and situational context in general play a particularly important role in Aristotle’s typology of public speeches in the third part of the first book of the Rhetoric: judicial speeches focus on what has happened, i.e. on the past; political speeches are concerned with the future; ceremonial speeches (crucially for us) tell of current events.14

14The concepts of kairos and chronos, as Smith suggests, are two sides of the same coin. For the kinds of writing in question here, however, they are mutually exclusive. A certain sense of timeliness and situational context are important for both modes of writing, yet there is a categorical difference between the pathographic and thanatographic principle, just as there is a difference between, on the one hand, illness, getting old, and dying, and, on the other, death. A fundamental rupture exists between these two states, life and death, on the order of the underlying difference between a person in a long-term coma and a corpse, a difference that involves not only a wide range of related emotions but also legal repercussions. Although we often work with a scale of liminal states, we cannot be just a little dead or very dead. A person in a coma may not be fully living but is not for that matter dead, and is not treated as such. Although a person can be revived from ‘clinical death’, death in the straightforward sense is irreversible, a state with an excluded middle.

15Hegel, in his Science of Logic, has written on the transition from quantity to quality in the most instructive manner:

  • 15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and transl. George Di Giovanni, Cambridge, (...)

Natura non facit saltum, as the saying goes; and ordinary thinking, when confronted by a coming-to-be or a passing-away, believes that it has comprehended it conceptually by representing it, as we said, as a gradual emerging or vanishing. But we have seen that the alterations of being in general are not only the passing over of a magnitude into another magnitude, but the transition from the qualitative into the quantitative and contrariwise, a becoming-other that interrupts gradualness and stands over against the preceding existence as something qualitatively other. Water, in cooling, does not become hard a bit at a time, as if it became first like a porridge and would then gradually harden to the consistency of ice, but is hard all at once.15

  • 16 The sudden transition described by Hegel occurs only when water is supercooled, ie. its temperature (...)

16Though his explanation of the process is oversimplified,16 Hegel’s example of transition from one state to another is directly applicable to the shift of perspectives between the two modes of writing we are concerned with. Hegel rightly challenges the notion that Natura non facit saltum, because Nature does indeed somersault and leaps. After a period of languishing, death arrives suddenly (all the more so, of course, in the case of violent death that is untimely and unannounced). We are, however, less concerned with death per se, and more with its understanding: that is, with death in the eyes of the witnesses and the dying, and the way it affects their perception of time. We can describe this abrupt change as a transition from measurable time to time beyond measure, from the flow of everyday time to the rupture, or else – with Hegel – as a transition from quantity to quality. With death, actual or imminent, with death accepted as a possibility, chronos shifts into kairos. But as we have seen on the example of Herrndorf’s and Zorn’s writing, this change is dependent on the subjective perspective. If the writer is focused on the process of their illness, they take the perspective of chronos – the chronic point of view – typical of the pathographic mode of writing. If they are concerned with death as a real possibility, as an imminent or recently experienced rupture in time, which forces them to transcend the present moment, the thanatographic mode is more pertinent.

Between Pathography and Thanatography

17In 2004 Bohumila Grögerová (1921–2014) published her book Čas mezi tehdy a teď (The Time Between Then and Now) dedicated to her partner Josef Hiršal, a Czech poet and translator born in 1920 and key figure of Czech experimental poetry, on which he also wrote theoretical studies. Grögerová and Hiršal formed a long-standing partnership and writer duo. They had met during the first half of the 1940s, when they were both living in different marriages. Grögerová had two daughters with her first husband Jan Gröger, who died shortly before his thirtieth birthday of cardiac arrest due to advanced diabetes. Hiršal’s wife Anita died in 1996, and Hiršal himself died on 15 September 2003. In her book The Time Between Then and Now, Grögerová captures the last years of Hiršal’s life. However, her text ends a few months before Hiršal’s actual death. Later, in her poetry collection Rukopis (2008, Manuscript), she comes to terms not only with the death of her partner but also her loss of sight. She does not depict Hiršal’s death and its aftermath in more detail until her book Můj labyrint (2014, My Labyrinth). I will be looking at the first text to show how the narrative slowly shifts from the format of a diary to that of a memoir, only to end abruptly when Hiršal’s death became a real possibility.

  • 17 Bohumila Grögerová, Čas mezi tehdy a teď, Příbram, Knihovna Jana Drdy, 2004, p. 47.
  • 18 Ibid., p. 51.
  • 19 Ibid.
  • 20 Ibid., p. 107.
  • 21 Ibid., p. 109.

18The title of the first book is the key to understanding how Grögerová conceptualizes time. The text is not about Hiršal’s death, but about his tram accident, suffering, delirium, and only partial healing process, followed by another tram accident. The varied text covering a period of almost four years is framed by the poet’s two accidents with trams, on 10 March 1999 and in May 2003. Grögerová does not begin the text with her partner’s death in mind – quite the opposite. She writes a diary, which gradually becomes a memoir, as a defiance of loneliness and forgetting: “Instead of conversations with you, I write for myself, I write against memory loss, against sadness.”17 Above all, however, she writes the diary for her partner, trying to capture a period from which she cannot remember much: “This hospital diary, at first a shock, then a maintenance of sanity, I write for you so that you can read something of the world from which you have been roughly ejected, when you recover.”18 Her project is filled, however, with doubt about the identity of her partner throughout time. She is worried that Hiršal will be ignorant to her efforts: “But over time, perspectives and intentions change. I fear that just as you have no interest in books or newspapers, you will have no interest in reading what I live without you.”19 As she writes, Hiršal’s health is unpredictable, yet it gradually improves. In April 2003, Hiršal’s condition and mood noticeably improve: “But in the evening my friends come, it’s the old Joska [a familiar way of addressing Josef in Czech] again. He has to get the word out at all costs and not stop, he has to assert himself, to say what is on his mind, what is pressing him and what makes him feel sorry, pleased and liberated.”20 The news that her partner has been hit again by a tram in the Palmovka neighbourhood of Prague and taken to the intensive care unit at Na Bulovce Hospital catches Grögerová off guard: “I put down the receiver and the brightness of the past happiness dazzled me like death…”21

19The title of Grögerová’s book would thus seem to describe – as is typical in thanatographic writing – the author’s loss after it has occurred: the book is written now, at a point in time when the loved one is already dead, and it relates to a then before this death occurred. In this case, however, the perspective of death influences the temporal sequence. Grögerová writes each entry with the underlying aim of reviving her partner’s memory. Hiršal dies soon after the book is finished, or, rather, it is finished because he is going to die soon, and is published not long after his death. The text was written during the time between then and now, between the two accidents that mark a period of struggle and sorrow. It is not a response to loss, but an unintended preparation for it. For these reasons The Time Between Then and Now eludes one of the most important and seemingly defining principles of thanatographic writing, namely its orphism, which understands loss only when it is too late and derives its aesthetic and emotional impact from the irreversibility of the situation.

20We could, however, read the title from the thanatographic perspective – and somewhat less obviously – as a reference to the time between the second accident and Hiršal’s death, followed by the publication of the book. Following from this, we might see how the absence of narration after the second accident corroborates the idea that the thanatographic and pathographic perspectives are mutually exclusive: the way death arrives in full force to change the intensity of time is something that pathographic narration cannot capture. We will return to this idea later.

A Not So Sudden Death

  • 22 Tony Walter, The Revival of Death, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 47-50.

21In his sociology of attitudes to death, Tony Walter traces how these attitudes changed from one historical period to the next, distinguishing three periods: traditional, modern, and neo-modern. He proceeds to show how, in traditional societies, the death of an old person was regarded as a significant event, whereas the death of a newborn or infant (with whom parents did not have time to form strong attachments) was unremarkable by comparison.22 Today, in te neo-modern era, on the other hand, we are likely to regard the death of an elderly person as “expected” and “natural”, without distinguishing between natural causes: i.e. between general failure of the organism and serious illness (regarded only as a contingency that has “hastened” death). Hiršal’s death was also more or less related to his health and fading cognitive abilities: he had difficulty orienting himself in space, and it was due to hearing loss that he did not hear the tram coming, or else was not quick enough to avoid it.

  • 23 Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over t (...)
  • 24 Ibid.

22Contrary to Walter’s distinction, however, we note that the beginning and end of Grögerová’s “unintended thanatography” The Time Between Then and Now are both marked by suddenness. (This is a widespread motif within mourning writing, as even an expected death is often felt to be sudden.) Although Hiršal did not die immediately after his second accident, the construction of the narrative emphasises both events as pivotal, the first by an excited writing style (there was no telling whether Hiršal would recover from his first accident), the second by silence, thus fulfilling the notion of unannounced, sudden death (mors repentina), which, at least since the Middle Ages, “disturbed the order of the world in which everyone believed, a senseless instrument of chance that sometimes took the form of God’s wrath.”23 While in the Middle Ages such death was considered “shameful and humiliating”24 and it meant that the dead person had fallen into disgrace, today we might instead be moved by a feeling of the injustice of pure chance, and by the powerlessness of the elderly person. These two sudden events, however, differ in their affective structure. The first tram accident, as we have seen, is followed by Grögerová’s hopeful attitude as she begins writing the book (her shock changes to a state of agitation that is, in fact, full of hope). In contrast, the second accident brings unbearable anxiety to which Grögerová gives expression by the abrupt end of the book.

The Intensity of Time

  • 25 Grögerová, Čas mezi tehdy a teď, op. cit., p. 8.
  • 26 Ibid., p. 10.

23The construction of the text corresponds to the intensity of events. In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Grögerová keeps her records daily and carefully dates them. Her approach is typically chronic. She is indeed logging the key moments of her partner’s hospitalisation. She describes the first moments with all the suddenness of quick flashes that one tries to piece together after waking up: “Wednesday night, 10 March 1999 – Mum, Mum, wake up – Míša’s head above me – the traffic inspectorate called – Joska was taken by ambulance to the military hospital – wake up, Mum.”25 The diary entries are set on the left half of the page, with the italicized column on the right consisting in entries from Hiršal’s perspective: “piercing lights, voices of the operation, the operation, on the trolley through the broken corridors, darkness, ceilings, darkness…”26

  • 27 Ibid., p. 89.

24After three weeks, however, the entries are no longer dated, and the unusual layout is replaced by common prose. Grögerová talks about the events of a particular day, but she no longer gives the exact date, and the timeline implicitly begins to “loosen”. The only exceptions are the morning of 8 April 1999, when she learns that the writer Ivan Diviš has died after falling down the stairs, and the dates of the death and funeral of Jiří Kolář, events associated with loss and mourning. The last year plays out mostly in months and seasons, and is captured from much greater distance. There are practical reasons for this. When Hiršal was in hospital, Grögerová had plenty of time and energy to write. Due to the care of her partner, who was subject to fluctuating moods, she was gradually losing both: “My strength is now sufficient to take care of Joska and the household. On the rare occasions when I sit down to write, it is a feast of hope and, at the same time, a certainty of failure.”27

Society of the Infirm

25What begins as a hospital log, covering in detail Hiršal’s hospitalisation and interactions between the partners, changes into a memoir of an aging generation. The themes of general exhaustion, illness, and dying concern not only the main couple, but also their friends. Grögerová’s diary entries capture aging and death in the intellectual milieu they are part of, a milieu that consists mainly of writers, artists, and Czech intellectuals, and the book becomes a de facto health record and obituary for many peers of her generation. The sudden death of Ivan Diviš has already been mentioned. There are constant phone calls regarding eye surgery and death from cancer. An even more significant role in the narrative is played by Jiří Kolář, who, concurrently with Hiršal’s first hospital stay, is hospitalised in a rehabilitation facility in Paris and later has to postpone a visit to Prague with his wife Běla because he slips and falls in their bathroom. Jiří Žantovský and Karel Milota die. Grögerová undergoes cataract surgery. H. C. Artmann dies after a severe lung disease. Hiršal repeatedly returns to the hospital and other health facilities. Jan Vladislav cares for his seriously ill wife in Paris. Grögerová’s hip joint hurts. In the summer of 2002, Jiří Kolář dies and only a fraction of the survivors can make it to the funeral due to the severe floods. Grögerová’s daughter and well-known translator Michaela Jacobsen (the Míša mentioned above) breaks her arm. When it seems that a period without injuries, illnesses, and losses is about to begin, Hiršal is hit by a tram for the second time.

  • 28 Ibid., p. 73.
  • 29 Ibid., p. 81.

26Aging is accompanied by generational change, which, encoded in the myths of the changing seasons and cycle of nature, has traditionally carried with it the hope of renewal and rebirth. Grögerová writes candidly of her relationships with the younger generation of poets, which bring no comfort: “I used to read the collections of young poets that Joska receives. I would like to understand the youngest generation, but I think it’s foolishness. I look for what I am used to from reading the classics or my contemporaries. I usually can’t get immersed in their texts at all and can’t tell one of the young ones from the other. There are few exceptions.”28 Yet she feels misunderstanding and disappointment not only with the younger generation of poets, but with society in general. Prague is losing its genius loci, the unregulated growth of new business in the post-revolutionary context is displacing traditional retailers, small shops are being replaced by hypermarkets, and noisy bars are appearing where cafés once stood. The poet styles herself as a witness to the general decay and decline, but she also reverses the roles, situating memory not in the subject but in the objects that surround her: “Streets and squares, bridges and embankments, orchards and gardens were to remain forever unchanged, as I had known them since my youth, were to remain witnesses to my life, my memories.”29 Potentially restorative generational renewal brings not solace but demise. With the approach of Hiršal’s death, Grögerová looks back at their lives, at what their generation will leave behind, but also at everything that she deems to be irretrievably gone.

From Chronos to Kairos

27The Time Between Then and Now was published after Hiršal’s death, so the narrative as well as the book as an artefact are closely connected to it. Yet the last day it records is 3 May 2003, the day the poet was hit by a tram for the second time, and it was several months later – 15 September 2003 – that Hiršal died. Grögerová depicts the moment when she learns about the second accident as a turning point in their lives. In her narrative, it is as if Hiršal’s death took place in this moment of violent, untimely, and random contingency, not months later. This may seem to contradict the assumption made earlier that we cannot be alive and dead at the same time. But in literary terms, the intensity of time in The Time Between Then and Now peaks on the last page, in a moment when Grögerová learns that her lifelong partner was hit by a tram again. On May 3 – a date that, it should be noted, is never mentioned in the book – time stops:

The next day, our time together, which had been stretching and shortening, crushing and strengthening us, began to count down in hours and minutes. In the late afternoon, when Joska went to Palmovka to buy his favourite cheese and cake, and I began to look impatiently out of the window, it suddenly stopped at the moment when an unknown voice spoke to me on the phone: “Mr. Josef Hiršal has had an accident, he was hit by a tram. He is in our intensive care unit at Bulovka Hospital.”

  • 30 Ibid., p. 109.

I put down the receiver and the brightness of the past happiness dazzled me like death…30

28Drifting from a hospital log, through a memoir, and finally to an abrupt end – from feverish entries to a calm recapitulation of life spent together in a community to a retrospective vision –, Grögerová’s Time Between Then and Now ends at the point when the quantity of everyday time transitions into the quality of a moment so overwhelming and intensive that it casts blinding, deadly light on all things past. This feature, so characteristic of the beginning of thanatographies, is rare in pathographical texts. The reasons are manifold. It is, for example, more common for pathographies to be written about oneself (autopathographies), and therefore impossible to involve similar high intensity moments in which the writer, logically, is incapacitated. Thanatographies, on the other hand, usually tell about the death of the other, which is experienced with anxiety. Moreover, Hiršal’s situation is a peculiar one, because it involves not just one but two violent accidents, as well as the difficult recovery of an elderly and generally weakened person. Grögerová’s text helps us to see the limits of abstract theoretical constructions, which often overlap. At the same time, however, it corroborates our hypothesis of two different intensities of time that are rendered in two distinct writing modes, using different temporal structures.

29This becomes even clearer if we briefly consider Grögerová’s book Můj Labyrint (My Labyrinth, 2014). Grögerová does not return to the events that followed the phone call in Time Between Then and Now until the chapter “Farewell”, more than ten years removed from the day Hiršal died on 15 September 2003. In many ways it is more detailed than the passages describing the last months before the second accident. It also carefully covers the period of its aftermath. We learn the exact dates of key events: “On 24 May, Joska stopped communicating with his eyes.” But they are reflected from a greater distance, recollected and evaluated. Hiršal lost his speech, the building material of his life and connective tissue of the relationship, three weeks after the second accident. Grögerová at first refuses to accept this situation:

  • 31 Ibid., p. 52.

At night, I wonder how we will get along, when his eyes are speechless. Relying on tenderness, love? On deep understanding? Poor Joska, you’ve lost the words you loved so much and on which you built your life, your work. It was the work with words that shaped our relationship. Do you miss them now that you’re speechless? I’ll write words of love on cards for you in case you see them, and I’ll whisper them to you in case you hear them.31

  • 32 Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19 (...)

30She is resolved to use language not only in the face of Hiršal’s supposed inability to perceive it, but also in spite of the rupture that was caused by the second accident and death. We can draw one more conclusion from this, corroborated by other literary works of the same genre, namely that an overpowering experience does not lead directly to writing but first induces silence. As Peter Handke writes in his Sorrow Beyond Dreams, one of the key German-language thanatographies : “My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.”32 Both works, just as many others, serve as proof that the production of thanatographies – or at least one of its key topoi – is governed by the dialectics of silence and speaking/writing.

31Although the autobiographical nature of her work might prompt us to ask such questions, I shall not embark on speculations about whether Grögerová was traumatized by Hiršal’s second accident and/or death. All we know is that in The Time Between Then and Now, there is no mention of the most difficult period of Grögerová’s life and Hiršal’s dying. It is articulated, in literary terms, only later in My Labyrinth, staging a hermeneutic rupture, in which understanding fails and language is muted – a situation not unlike trauma. In this case, qualitative time, a high intensity situation, can only be accessed retrospectively. This testifies to the difference between the pathographical mode of writing, which is typically protracted, dealing with the present time and practicalities of recovery, and the thanatographical mode of writing, dislocated and involving death, be it anticipated or recently experienced. As much as these two modes have in common, the categorical transition makes them as exclusive and separated as water from ice.

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Bibliographie

Ariès, Phillipe, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years, trans. Helen Weaver, New York, Knopf, 1981.

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Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, Autobiographie, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 2005.

Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina, “Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines”, in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019, p. 1-7.

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Notes

1 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” MLN, vol. 94, n° 5, 1979, p. 921.

2 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie, Stuttgart, J. B. Metzler, 2005, p. 7-8.

3 Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, “Introduction: Autobiography/Autofiction Across Disciplines”, in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019, p. 1.

4 Mita Banerjee, “Life Writing”, in Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019, p. 336.

5 Diego León-Villagrá, “Der Krebs des Autors. Autopathographie und Autoethnographie als autobiographische Schreibweisen der Krankheit in der Gegenwart”, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 32, n° 2, 2022, p. 307.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., p. 310.

8 See chapter 42 of Wolfgang Herrndorf, Arbeit und Struktur, online. URL: www.wolfgang-herrndorf.de.

9 Fritz Zorn, Mars, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, New York, Knopf, 1982, p. 4.

10 Ibid., p. 3.

11 “Thanatography, N.”, Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford, Oxford University Press, September 2024. URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2964155049.

12 Meliz Ergin, “Derrida’s Otobiographies”, Biography, vol. 40, n° 2, 2017, p. 363.

13 John E. Smith, “Time and Qualitative Time”, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 40, n° 1, 1986, p. 6.

14 James L. Kinneavy and Catherine R. Eskin, “Kairos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, Written Communication, vol. 17, n° 3, 2022, p. 432-444.

15 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, ed. and transl. George Di Giovanni, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 322.

16 The sudden transition described by Hegel occurs only when water is supercooled, ie. its temperature is below its freezing point, and a see crystal is provided, around which crystal structure can be formed.

17 Bohumila Grögerová, Čas mezi tehdy a teď, Příbram, Knihovna Jana Drdy, 2004, p. 47.

18 Ibid., p. 51.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 107.

21 Ibid., p. 109.

22 Tony Walter, The Revival of Death, London, Routledge, 1994, p. 47-50.

23 Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the Last One Thousand Years, trans. Helen Weaver, New York, Knopf, 1981, p. 25.

24 Ibid.

25 Grögerová, Čas mezi tehdy a teď, op. cit., p. 8.

26 Ibid., p. 10.

27 Ibid., p. 89.

28 Ibid., p. 73.

29 Ibid., p. 81.

30 Ibid., p. 109.

31 Ibid., p. 52.

32 Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, trans. Ralph Manheim, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, p. 3.

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Jan Musil, « Time Between Then and Now: Temporality in Pathographies and Thanatographies »TRANS- [En ligne], 31 | 2025, mis en ligne le 04 avril 2025, consulté le 15 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/trans/13181 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13k9p

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Auteur

Jan Musil

Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

Jan Musil is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Charles University in Prague, where he previously earned a bachelor’s degree in Czech Studies and English and American Studies and a master’s degree in Comparative Literature. His doctoral thesis Thanatographies: Modes of Literary Grief investigates the role of grief writing in the second half of the 20th century. He was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, University of Cambridge, and University College London. He is currently a research associate at the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. He is a translator from English and German and an editor of Plav, a Czech literary monthly. His other research topics include sports in literature, intermediality, and the cultural dynamics and ethics of death in genre literature and film.

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