Words Are Not Enough: Loss, Grief and Incommunicability in Jennifer Down’s Short Stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’

Abstract

This essay argues that Jennifer Down’s two stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ point to the limits of referential language in conveying grief, loss and related emotional experiences. Referencing Denise Riley’s theories from The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion, I use Down’s stories as demonstrative of the concept that word choices do in fact contain emotion and affect and can transmit emotional experiences between the characters, and via characters from author to reader. Nonetheless, very often the referential properties of language are troubled in this process, and Down demonstrates the way in which the writer might convey affect and emotion through the techniques of silence, withholding, miscommunications and also through the unfolding of the narrative itself. Down avoids simplistic notions of closure and mourning by suggesting that the difficulty her characters experience is identifying the appropriate linguistic conventions to describe their emotional states, perhaps because there are none that can fully contain them. However, in the unfolding of these stories, difficult emotions and affects can be gestured towards, even outlined. Through this paradox, emotion and affect can indeed be ‘held’ not just in language, but in story, and this is particularly so when it moves away from signifying emotions in symbolic terms and represents them in a narrative sequence through an embodied narrator.