James Wilce’s new book is a stunning attempt to present lament as it currently exists cross-culturally. It is a passionate book, passionately written and passionately argued, even when the argument and its conclusions are debatable and, at times, unconvincing. It is a book framed by Wilce’s deep fascination with lament and his interest in thinking about and on lament from every possible analytical angle. In that respect Crying Shame is an analysis on lament as much as it is a metadiscourse on “lamentology” (to misquote James Boon’s “Baliology”).
There are three parts in the book, each one delineating a different portion of the historical trajectory of lament. In the first part Wilce gives a concise history of lament in different sociocultural contexts. The second part is an exploration of the various ways in which lament has been managed cross-culturally. The third part is a discussion of attempts to revive lament, most notably in Finland, where Wilce has spent some time and has participated (with his wife) in laments. Wilce defines lament, in various places in his book, as follows: “the combination of three elements—tuneful, texted weeping…[that] includes (but [is] not limited to) the funeral dirge…[and which] is often sung or chanted. It is…composed of words…thus [it] has a text…and it appears overwhelmingly emotional…a performance without sobbing would not be lament” (1).
The book rests on two arguments that are inextricable: that lament, even with all its tribulations over the centuries and cross-culturally is still both extant and returning; and that we cannot extract the existence of lament from its representations and the analytical frames that surround it. In this way Wilce makes the interesting, even if speculative, argument that lament exists on its own as much as it cannot exist outside of its metadiscourses. Lament initially was eclipsed, Wilce maintains, as a result of a sense of shame over its performance on the part of the modernizing forces in various societies (Bangladesh, Finland, or modern Greece, for instance) and as a result of a deep understanding, on the part of sovereign power, of its potentially dangerous role in society, one played by women, that threatened the law and order engendered by men (as was the case in ancient Greece).
Throughout the book Wilce never ceases to caution against the historicizing of lament which, he argues, inevitably leads to its objectification, and never ceases to regret the loss of lament as he simultaneously proposes that this loss is not much more than a construction of anthropologists and folklorists. The overarching argument that transcends all others, though, is that modernity is predicated upon a sense of shame for its past (which includes lament) and a nostalgia for what has been lost to modernity. Both the shame and the loss are constitutive of modernity which laments the loss of the ability to lament, Wilce argues. The shame that has been detected as being at the foundation of the modernist attempts to eradicate lament has been transposed—transferred, one could argue—as a postmodernist shame over that very loss. This is a very intriguing argument which, I fear, ultimately cannot be sustained for reasons that are as much epistemological as they are methodological.
The methodological problem is rather obvious (and Wilce knows it, even if he does not discuss it) and rests on the comparativism that resides at the heart of his project, namely: what kind of material can one bring together from disparate chronocultures that would produce a meaningful and helpful conclusion? In other words, what is the value of the information that Solon banished lament in sixth-century Athens, Phrynichus was heavily fined in 511 BC for causing the weeping of Athenians over the loss of Miletus, and that Athenian citizens had to take an oath against holding a murderous and revengeful grudge against their tyrants in 403 BC? This is a gesture towards entwining lament with memory which Wilce follows through other scholars who have studied lament (such as Margaret Alexiou and Gail Holst-Warhaft). But, as Victor Ehrenberg has noted, Athens of the fourth century was very different from that of the fifth and, I might add, decidedly more different than that of the sixth. Although these three moments in the history of Athens are of particular importance for the discussion of the role of memory and mourning in ancient Athens, they are not necessarily tied together by lament, especially as Wilce has defined it (as “tuneful, texted weeping”). In other words, there are many more sites connected to memory outside of lament. This methodological problem consequently underlines a deeper epistemological one—what sort of knowledge is produced by this broad cross-cultural examination of a particular practice? Wilce wants to argue that the move to modernity produces a shame about “tradition” (my quotes, not his). But this is an argument that has been made before by scholars who study modernity.
This is a very intriguing and demanding book. I read it cover-to-cover twice and each time I discovered more hidden gems of argument in it. I will use it when I teach graduate courses on lament, memory, and modernity, but I will steer clear of its neologisms. I will point out its brilliant overall argument, but I will be cautious about its heavily inflected theoretical positions (Wilce really does not need Greg Urban’s theory of “metaculture” or the argument of “entextualization”). It is a book that shows how its author has plunged in and fought with his own ideas. Sometimes he has won, other times he has not. But the end result is fascinating.
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[Review length: 918 words • Review posted on September 21, 2011]